Don't forget your human coworkers

The machines are getting very good at telling us we're already great. Here's what that costs us.

I'll admit something that won't surprise anyone who's worked for me: I cry during performance reviews. Not big heaving sobs, just a few tears that shimmer in the corners of my eyes whether I want them there or not. I care about the people on my team, and it seems the caring leaks out through my face. I've stopped fighting it, because a manager who can hand out feedback and feel nothing about it probably isn't giving feedback worth much.

I've been thinking about feedback more than usual lately, and it's AI's fault. Everyone I know is busy working out where the tools fit, what to hand off, what to stop doing by hand, and which subscription to expense. All reasonable. But there's a question sitting underneath all of it that nobody seems to be asking out loud: how are we still supposed to help each other get better when so much of our attention has moved onto the machines?

I should say where I'm sitting, since you're reading this on the Wind Stream blog. I do some work with the team here, and I'm also just a marketer who's tried most of these tools and formed my own opinions about them. So I think about this question more than others, and I'm not neutral. There’s your fair warning.

Feedback is the engine, and most of us are running low

Let's start with the appetite for it, because, well, the appetite is enormous. Something like ninety-six percent of employees say regular feedback helps them improve, and roughly two-thirds say they want more than they're getting. The people are hungry.

I've always thought about feedback as a gift, not a verdict. When you do it well, the person gets better and so does the work, and the people who benefit most are the ones already leaning toward growth. Skip it, and no one gets better. Plus, there are uncomfortable surprises at review time. You also lose something quieter and more valuable, the kind of rapport that invites someone you manage to bring you a problem early, while it's still small, instead of sitting on it until it isn't.

This turns out to matter at the team level too, not just between two people. This year's DORA report (which is, btw, built on responses from close to five thousand technology professionals and more than a hundred hours of interviews) concluded that AI is a mirror and a multiplier. It doesn't fix a team, it amplifies whatever the team already has. Strong teams get stronger, struggling ones watch their problems get louder, and one of the things that separates the two is how fast their feedback loops run. So the tool everyone is rushing to adopt rewards the exact habit most of us are worst at. Hold onto that, because it's where this is all headed.

I used to preach a version of this about product launches. You can't make all your noise on one day and expect it to land; it's a drumbeat, a steady rhythm of showing up and adjusting based on what you hear back. Feedback works the same way. It's a habit, not an annual event that both people dread.

Good feedback, and the machine that gets it backwards*

Let me start with something Sara, who runs marketing here, did last week, because it makes the rest of this concrete. She gave Wind Stream and another well-known AI assistant the same prompt about her messaging strategy and a couple of videos she'd made. The other tool loved it all. Great work, no notes. Wind Stream told her it was close, then showed her exactly where it wasn't landing yet. One response felt nice. The other was useful. Keep that contrast close, because everything that made the second one better is something we've long known about good feedback, and roughly the opposite of what the average AI does.

Good feedback starts with a relationship. If someone knows you actually want them to do well, the hard thing arrives as help instead of an ambush. You earn that trust on the ordinary days, long before you ever need to spend it. The machine, by contrast, has no relationship with you at all. It is flattering a stranger, which is exactly why the flattery is worthless. There is no one behind it who wants you to be better next quarter.

Good feedback asks permission. I've learned to ask a small question before diving in: is this a good moment? Are you ready to hear some feedback? It respects that nobody can absorb criticism in every mood, and it quietly tells the other person's brain to file what's coming as feedback rather than an attack. The machine never asks. It pours out its assessment the instant you hit enter, in whatever state you happen to be in, coded as nothing in particular.

Good feedback is about the behavior and not the person, and it's specific enough to act on. Every decent parent works this out eventually: a kid who's acting up isn't a bad kid, they're a kid having a hard time. You point at the thing that happened and the effect it had, ideally a real moment or two, and you leave their character out of it. The machine does the reverse. It hands you shapeless, floppy praise and almost never the one concrete thing you could actually change tomorrow.

*Shout out to LifeLabs Learning, to whom I owe much of how I think about feedback. Also Miko Matsumura :)