You’ve mastered the art of giving clear, actionable feedback to employees. Your team willingly accepts critique as an opportunity to improve.
But how often do you receive feedback on your skills as a manager? Honest, constructive feedback on your performance as a supervisor is integral to managerial growth. Plus, it gives deeper insights into a team’s performance and productivity — straight from the source.
The only trouble is, employees don’t always feel they can speak freely to superiors.
Luckily, these manager feedback examples show teams how to give positive reinforcement and constructive criticism with confidence. Make improvement is a two-way process with open lines of communication.
Why is Feedback Important?
In any industry, there’s always room for developing, whether that’s working to improve existing talents or learning a new skill set entirely. But without clear, constructive feedback, it’s impossible to know where to focus improvements. If employees are underperforming in one area, it’s particularly important that they’re aware of what’s not working and how they can improve.
As a manager, you might be an expert at doling out clear explanations of when employees exceed or fall short of expectations — but being a good manager requires growth, too. Creating an environment where your team is comfortable raising concerns is crucial to guarantee you’re receiving valuable feedback.
Plus, your employees are the first to know if anything slows them down. No one has better insights to productivity roadblocks than the people who work in the weeds all day, so you want them to be comfortable sounding the alarm. Then, you can intervene sooner to find solutions.
Implementing a 360-degree feedback culture can help with this. A 360-degree feedback collects inputs from every direction. You might receive notes from reports, superiors, teammates, and other colleagues to get a holistic understanding of how you’re performing.
And 360-degree feedback doesn’t just apply to performance. Collecting insights on how a project went, how new workflows are functioning, and any new initiatives helps you build a better work environment.
12 Manager Feedback Examples
Employees will be more comfortable providing feedback if they know how to deliver it. This starts with understanding the most important types of feedback:
Positive feedback
Constructive feedback
Feedforward (actionable feedback)
Here are some manager feedback examples for each type. Pay attention to the sentence structures in each set of examples and how they communicate difficult points.
Positive Feedback Examples
Positive feedback helps you understand what employees appreciate about your managerial style. People generally find it easier to give positive feedback than criticism, so get your team comfortable with this before moving on to constructive criticism, which can be a bit more negative.
Here are some examples of positive feedback for managers:
"I appreciate how you always take the time to listen to our concerns — it makes the team feel heard and respected."
"Your clear communication helps us understand our goals and expectations, which keeps everyone aligned and motivated."
"You’ve done a great job fostering a collaborative team environment. Everyone feels comfortable contributing."
"Your support during high-stress projects has made a big difference. It shows strong leadership and care."
Notice how each example clearly describes and praises a specific action before explaining the positive impact this action has on the team or individual. Use this formula when delivering positive feedback to be specific and complimentary: positive action + positive outcome.
Present these bullets to employees as “nice things to say about your boss examples” and provide variations for them to work with on forms, in meetings, or whenever else they might need to give some kudos.
Constructive Feedback Examples
Constructive criticism is usually where people feel most uncomfortable. Help team members overcome this by establishing frameworks for them to follow when providing manager feedback.
For example, advise them to praise people’s actions or intentions while focusing criticisms on processes or outcomes, rather than the individuals themselves. Start with something positive before explaining what the problem is. When possible, offering a solution to the problem being raised makes the conversation even more productive.
Here are some constructive feedback examples to help your team:
“Although recent meetings have been helpful, they’re running longer than usual and leaving us less time to complete tasks. Could we condense the agenda?”
“It’s great that productivity is improving, but some of us are concerned that increasing workloads further might compromise quality.”
“I notice it’s taking longer to get certain tasks approved by management, and this is holding up projects — is there anything we can do to address this?”
“I’m concerned that the latest processes implemented create unnecessary work. I seem to spend more time ticking off checklists and updating statuses than actually working on tasks. Perhaps we can find a way to automate some of these updates to limit strain on the team?”
In the first two examples, the employee starts by praising the manager’s impact, before raising a specific concern. This is a classic constructive feedback formula, but be careful not to overuse it. If you do, the positive feedback starts to come across as inauthentic.
The final two examples immediately specify a procedural issue (not manager action) and the resulting negative impact.
Feedforward Examples
While feedback focuses on past actions, feedforward looks to the future and offers constructive, actionable suggestions.
Employees can confidently raise areas for improvement with these manager feedback examples:
"It would be helpful to have more structured one-on-one check-ins to discuss progress and growth."
"More transparency around decision-making would help the team feel more included and invested."
"Sometimes I’d appreciate more timely feedback on my work — it would help me improve faster."
“I think clearer instructions and feedback could significantly reduce our turnaround times.”
These simple feedback examples each include the same two elements: an actionable step the employee would like implemented, and the improved outcome(s) they expect it to achieve.
How Rox Empowers Teams To Provide Effective Manager Feedback
Providing manager feedback is stressful, and the formal nature of forms and dedicated feedback meetings can make it extra intimidating for employees.
All you need to do is foster that culture of open discussion, and Rox can handle the rest.
With Rox’s Slack Wrap-Up feature, team members can speak freely about workloads and productivity. Rox automatically generates daily summaries so managers can identify valuable feedback from casual conversations.
You can also send feedback requests to teams or individuals in Slack, and Rox will analyze responses, identify patterns, and set out actionable next steps. Rox even records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings for another source of constructive notes with insights fully automated by Rox’s AI technology.
Manager feedback is just one area where Rox’s Agentic CRM transforms data collection and management for sales teams. Watch the demo video to see how else Rox is revolutionizing sales data, or sign up for free to try it for yourself.
