Kim Scott’s Radical Candor was a bestseller in 2017. It gives a common failing of bosses a name: “ruinous empathy.” The manager cares about a person but does not challenge the person directly. The criticism comes sugar-coated and unclear.
Scott had run the AdSense program at Google and later built a management course at Apple. She tells of an employee whose poor work she never named clearly. In the end she fired him. He asked her: “Why didn’t you tell me?”