Development or Discrimination: Black Women Leaders' Experience With Multisource Feedback

The lack of representation of Black women in leadership across levels and industries of U.S. organizations reflects not only a business failure to leverage critical human capital but also a moral one. To effectively develop more Black women into leadership roles, intersectional research is needed to better understand their developmental experiences. Applying an intersectional lens, we sought to understand the phenomenological experience of Black women participating in a common leader-development approach, multisource feedback (MSF). MSF includes reporting quantitative ratings and written feedback from members of the leader's work circle about their leadership. As a developmental and awareness-raising tool, MSF should provide aspiring leaders with task-specific information on their leadership strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to target their development activities to improve key leadership behaviors. Through semistructured interviews with 24 Black women leaders about their experience with MSF, we identified three major themes: the (a) enabling nature of anonymity and selection of multiple raters, (b) racialized and gendered content of feedback, and (c) beneficial use of feedback to navigate racial and gendered organizational politics. We discuss the juxtaposition between providing good feedback (i.e., task-specific, behavioral, accountable raters, absent of bias) that Black women can use and apply in their leadership versus racialized feedback (i.e., personal/trait-based, biased) that Black women can use to navigate the racialized, political context in their organization. Finally, we provide practical suggestions on how organizations can ensure Black women receive access to unbiased feedback without depriving them of the insight needed to navigate organizational politics.