HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strengthening Your Soft Skills (with bonus article "You Don't Need Just One Leadership Voice--You Need Many" by Amy Jen Su)

When Diversity Meets Feedback

by Erin Meyer

IF YOU’VE PICKED UP A BOOK ABOUT raising organizational performance in the past five years, you’ve almost certainly read about the benefits of developing a culture of candid feedback. Kim Scott, a former Google executive, popularized the term “radical candor” in her 2017 book by that name, arguing that even “obnoxiously aggressive” feedback was better than “ruinous empathy” (keeping feedback that could otherwise help colleagues to yourself).

The hedge fund billionaire and Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio went a step further in his book Principles, describing a culture of “radical transparency,” in which employees rate and give feedback about one another’s contributions to meetings on publicly shared ...