Eric also shared with me a story that reinforced what I observed so often when managers weren’t willing to give their people tough feedback: that it puts undue pressure on the boss to provide cover and cheats the employee of the chance to improve. He recalled having held back a badly needed critique from one of his staff at Yahoo! and then having to make up for that person’s shortfalls, which was exhausting—and unfair to the employee. “I was too kind,” he told me, “and that means you’re a bad manager in a lot of ways. You end up sugarcoating things, and that’s doing them a disservice.”
