Feedback doesn't scale

Summary

Feedback doesn't scale Listening is always hard, and it only gets harder at scale. When you're leading a team of five or 10 people, feedback is pretty easy. It's not even really "feedback”: you’re just talking. You may have hired everyone yourself. You might sit near them (or at least sit near them virtually). Maybe you have lunch with them regularly. You know their kids' names, their coffee preferences, and what they're reading. So when someone has a concern about the direction you're taking things, they just... tell you. You trust them. They trust you. It's just friends talking. You know where they're coming from. At twenty people, things begin to shift a little. You’re probably starting to build up a second layer of leadership and there are multiple teams under you, but you're still fairly close to everyone. The relationships are there, they just may be a bit weaker than before. When someone has a pointed question about your strategy, you probably mostly know their story, their perspective, and what motivates them. The context is fuzzy, but it’s still there. Then you hit 100# Somewhere around 100 people, the ground shifts underneath you, as you realize you don’t know everyone anymore. You just can't. There aren't enough hours in the day, and honestly, there aren't enough slots in your brain. Suddenly you have people whose names you don’t recognize offering very sharp commentary about your “leadership.” They’re talking about you but they don’t know you. There’s no shared history, no accumulated trust, no sense of “we’ve been in the trenches together.” Your brain has no context for processing all these voices. Who are these people? Why are they yelling at me? Are they generally reasonable, or do they complain about everything? Do they understand the constraints we're under? Do they have the full picture? Without an existing relationship, it feels like an attack, and your natural human response is to dismiss or deflect the attack. Or worse, to get defensive. Attacks...