Sure, people open to feedback usually improve and work better. But my point is that if you offer feedback to some, but not others, the ones that won’t receive feedback would do worse. If it was reversed because “benign sexism” (that also exist) and a male manager thought that female employees need more help and the neglected employees were male, then the men would be the ones being discriminated here.

The thing is that many people think that systems are neutral when in fact it is the opposite. I’ll give you a real example that doesn’t involve gender.

At a big company, customers were billed by hour worked. Thinking in this, some executive designed this KPI: Employee productivity = hour billed to the customer — hour cost of the employee. Seems right? Well, in IT this is a huge mistake.

The reason is that senior programmers/consultat solve problems in less time than juniors. They can create full new programs in half the time or less. And with less errors. That is why they are seniors. So with the same incident, a senior would be billing 1 hour, while a junior maybe would bill 4 or even 8 hours. Customer is usually non the wiser since they focused on hourly price, not in the number of hours. And seniors usually have higher wages. So following that KPI, senior seemed way less productive than juniors. Since projects were also measured by productivity according this, senior consultants and programmers were pushed outside the projects. At that time, the company was doing layoffs. The “brilliant” plan of that executive was to let go the seniors but “offer support” to get a new job at another company they worked for, offering a lower wage. But seniors, working in IT, didn’t had problem finding jobs at other companies. The competition, to be more precise.

So at first the company was indeed more profitable. They billed customers the same for juniors than for seniors and they were billing lots of hours. The executive got a big bonus.

But juniors weren’t able to fix things as quickly as seniors and some things they didn’t even knew how to solve them. So customer complained and most seniors weren’t around anymore. Hiring new seniors was even more expensive than paying the old ones was. Not just that, but the companies remembered the programmers and consultants who used to solve their problems. So they moved to the competition and the company lost customers and income. The executive move to another company to do the same, but the company ended worse than it started.

So what seemed reasonable ended being a disaster. Now, in some companies they multiply the senior hours to reflect the work they have pull off. But that is still not a good KPI, since the most efficient seniors might achieve goals working half a day. And they have no incentive to do more.

My point is that sometimes there are unintended consequences to systems. With feedback is the same. If we are not careful, introverts would have a harder time than extroverts (more friendly).