Intimidating, with no examples

What happened

Best delivery quarter of my career. Shipped the thing that had been stuck for a year. In my review, after the praise, came the line: "Some people find you intimidating. We'd love to see you work on that."

I asked who, and what I'd done. My manager couldn't say. It was "a vibe a couple of people mentioned." No meeting, no moment, no behavior. Just a temperature reading on me that I was now expected to lower, with no thermometer and no idea what counted as too hot.

The kicker: a male staff engineer on my team is famously blunt. Cuts people off, shoots down ideas in Slack. His reviews call it "high standards" and "candor." I ask a hard question in a design review and I'm intimidating. Same behavior. Different invoice.

What I did

I spent about three months trying to be smaller. Softened my emails into mush. Added the "just"s and the smiley faces. Hedged in meetings. Pre-edited every sentence for tone before it left my mouth, which is exhausting and also made me worse at my job, because I was spending the energy on packaging instead of on the actual problem.

It didn't even work. I was now both intimidating and, somehow, less effective, and I was tired all the time.

What I wish I'd done

I wish I'd refused to accept tone feedback with no examples, immediately and politely. "I want to take this seriously, so I need a specific instance and what you'd have wanted instead. Without that I can't act on it." If it can't be made concrete, it isn't actionable, and unactionable feedback in a formal review is a bias problem, not a me problem.

I also wish I'd asked the question that cuts to it: "Is this feedback you'd give a man on this team for the same behavior?" Out loud. To my manager. I was too worried about being, well, intimidating.

What I know now

Vague tone feedback is almost always about the discomfort of the person giving it, not a flaw in you. The bar moves to wherever you aren't. Direct is aggressive, soft is a pushover, warm is too much. You will never find the setting that satisfies the Tone Police, because the setting is "be a man," and you can't.

So I stopped trying. I'm direct and warm and I pick my softeners on purpose instead of pre-paying them on everything. When tone feedback shows up now, I ask for the example, in writing, every time. Most of the time the example never materializes, and that tells me everything I need to know about whether to carry it.