How to Give Honest Feedback That Drives High Performance

Radical Truth

By the time I left Bridgewater in 2020, I had received 12,385 pieces of brutally honest feedback. The math comes in just above a dozen each day. When was the last time one colleague weighed in on your performance, let alone hundreds?

For most people, "feedback" conjures the image of an annual one-on-one performance review with their boss or a casual comment on the walk back to their desk. It's private. Whispered and forgotten.

Most of the feedback I received was far from private—a story.

I'm bellied up to a sturdy conference room table in Westport, CT. Across from me is the founder and chairman of the world's largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio. Flanking him are a dozen leaders who'd make up the board at most companies.

The conference room is stuffy because nearly 75 other people are ringing the room's perimeter. My team. My peers. And a video crew. We recorded every meeting, but large ones needed higher production value. Ray never wanted to miss the chance to capture a case study.

Unfortunately, I'm about to become a case study.

Some of the observers are in chairs. Some lean against the glass wall. Others sprawl out on small squares of the carpeted floor. But every single one of them has an iPad. And every iPad has an app custom-designed for Bridgewater called the Dot Collector.

Think of the Dot Collector as Twitter for feedback. Anyone in the company could give real-time feedback to anyone else, and it accumulated in their feed, which was publicly accessible to everyone. Every dot was on a scale of 1-10, mapped to 60 attributes, and required comments.

And it wasn't that you could give feedback. It was expected that you did.

So as I steeled myself to start the meeting, everyone else readied their calloused, little dot-collecting fingers.

With Ray present, everyone knew they would be judged through the feedback they gave. That he'd see what they saw through their dots. And he'd hold them directly accountable for being in the room and not being engaged.

What the topic was that day is of little consequence. What matters is that I took a big swing and missed. Badly.