Peter Kenyon shares the feedback approach he learned from sports

Athletes don’t have the luxury of waiting for an annual review to hear how they performed — and that may be a good thing. The suspense that comes with anticipating a laundry list of critiques can sometimes be worse than the feedback itself. Plus, the older the feedback, the less relevant it may be.

Peter Kenyon, the former CEO of Manchester United and Chelsea, told Business Insider that given the nature of sports schedules, when something goes wrong, it has to be fixed before the next event, which is often just days away. "It's not 'let's work for three months to solve the problem,'" Kenyon said. "No, let's solve the problem now because we go again tomorrow." Kenyon, who now serves as a board advisor for Atlassian Williams F1 team, has worked in the sports industry for nearly 30 years, leading major restructurings during that time.

He said the industry has taught him the importance of maintaining a continuous and instantaneous feedback loop. He said that as soon as drivers finish a session on track, they sit down with engineers to get feedback so they can better their chances of qualifying for a race later that day or the next day. Kenyon, who oversees the Atlassian Williams F1 team’s commercial and marketing functions, said feedback in high-performing sports environments doesn’t only flow from the top down.

Employees are also expected to tell one another when something isn’t working. That expectation shapes the culture across the industry, he said. It also shows up in the way athletes expect new teammates to meet the same high bar they set themselves.

It's an industry standard off the field too, though. At Manchester United, Kenyon said the receptionist would call out players who failed to greet her when they walked in — a directness that made her valuable. "The power of that is incredible," Kenyon said about the former employee.

Frequent and candid feedback doesn’t equate to a bullying culture, though, the sports executive said. Kenyon said managing people and delivering performance reviews is difficult, but the best coaches know when to push athletes — and when to build them up. "It's continual change," Kenyon said.

"It's continual strive-for-performance gains." Corporate workers may not compete in live-streamed competitions, but they face their own high-pressure sprints in a rapidly changing workplace. Some employers are even adapting traditional performance review processes to prioritize continuous feedback and reward top performers.