Listening is always hard, and it only gets harder on a larger scale.
When you’re leading a team of five or 10 people, feedback comes in handy. It’s not even really a “reaction”: you’re just are talkingMaybe you hired everyone yourself, You can sit next to them (or at least sit virtually next to them), Maybe you have lunch with them regularly, You know their kids’ names, their coffee preferences, and what they’re reading, So when someone is concerned about the direction you’re taking things, they just,,,let you know,
You trust them. They trust you. This is just friends talking. You know where they’re coming from.
At twenty people things start to change a little. You’re probably starting to build another layer of leadership and have several teams under you, but you’re still quite close to everyone. Relationships are there, they may just be a little weaker than before. When someone has a pointed question about your strategy, you probably mostly Hear their story, their perspective and what inspires them. The reference is unclear, but it still exists.
Then you reached 100#
Among about 100 people, the ground beneath your feet collapses when 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 spaces in your brain.
Suddenly you have people coming up to you whose names you don’t recognize and offering very sharp comments about your “leadership.” They’re talking about you but they don’t Know You. There is no shared history, no accumulated trust, no sense of “we’ve been through hardships together.” Your brain has no context for processing all these sounds.
Who are these people? Why are they yelling at me? Are they generally reasonable, or do they complain about everything? Do they understand our constraints? Do they have the full picture?
Without an existing relationship, this feels like an attack, and your natural human reaction is to reject or avoid the attack. Or worse, become defensive. Attacks trigger our most primal instinct: fight or flight.
This is the point where many leaders begin to struggle. They still want to be open to feedback – they really do – but they’re also drowning. They start trusting their intuition about what they should pay attention to and what they should not pay attention to. Sometimes that intuition is right. Sometimes it’s just… self-selected, out of context, pattern matching against existing biases and relationships.
On top of that, each additional layer of management, each additional level from the top has separated you, and you are no longer like them. Their struggles are no longer your struggles.
At 200, it’s a flood#
By the time you reach 200 people or more, feedback is no longer an actionable signal. At that size, the feedback signal stops being noisy. A vast, echoing arena of thoughts, each louder than the last, each written in the voice of someone who absolutely Fixed They understand the entire system (they don’t), the entire context (they don’t), and your objectives (they definitely don’t).
And all those kudos you used to hear? Which dry up. When you have a close relationship with everyone, appreciation comes naturally. You were just talking. But now people just expect you to lead, and if they’re happy with your leadership they’re probably mostly quiet about it. They are doing their job, trusting you, assuming that things are generally okay.
People who are sad? They are loud. And there are lots of them.
From where you sit, it feels like everyone is crazy about everything all the time. And maybe they are! Or maybe it’s just selection bias combined with the natural amplification that occurs when people with similar complaints find each other. You don’t know if it’s a real crisis or just three loud people who found each other in a Slack channel. You can’t tell anymore.
Because there is no measurement for feedback. Man’s standards are bad. Your nervous system definitely doesn’t scale.
Why does this happen#
There is no scale for feedback because there is no scale for relationships. With five people, there’s some personal interaction with everyone on your team. At twenty, you interact with some people, but not everyone. Even at 100 you have personal relationships with 10 or 15 people, so there are a lot of gaps. At age 200, your personal relationships are a small piece of the overall pie.
To make matters worse, as the noise gets louder, the channels for processing all the feedback are getting smaller and smaller. Where once you had an open-door policy, you now have “office hours.” Sometimes. When we are not very busy.
Where there once were open-ended questions in all-hands meetings, you are now forced to take questions ahead of time. Or not at all.
Even your Slack usage goes down, because half the time you say something, someone is upset by it.
We tell ourselves we’re “living close to the land” and “preserving our culture,” but we’re not. We can’t. Because basic math doesn’t work. The feedback we’re getting is completely overwhelming our ability to process it.
So what do you do about it?#
First, you have to acknowledge that the problem exists. Stop pretending you can maintain personal relationships with 200 people. You can’t. nobody can. Once you accept this, you can begin to create systems and processes that work with this reality rather than clashing with it. You need to filter, sort, and collect the incoming feedback, and you need to do it at the best of your ability.
When you can’t rely on “just talking to people”, you need systems that differentiate between:
- valid issues
- Noise
- take off
- Misunderstanding
- and “This person is imposing a whole other problem on leadership.”
This means: structured listening, realistic intake processes, and ways to synthesize themes rather than reacting to every single spike.
Create proxy connections. You can’t know 200 people, but you can know 10 people, each of whom knows 10 people. You should already have strong, trusting relationships with your leadership team, and then expect that they have strong relationships with their own teams, and ask explicitly what’s on people’s minds. When feedback comes through this chain, it comes with context. pay attention.
On a smaller scale, trust is evident: I know you. You know me. On a larger scale, trust should be delegated: I trust leaders who are closer to the work than me. If you don’t intentionally empower those leaders to absorb and contextualize feedback, you will sink. They’re the ones who can say: “I know who said that, why they said that, and what’s really going on.”
Create structured channels for feedbackFor example, you might set up working groups to consider thorny problems, The people closest to the problem understand it better than you, and they can turn a flood of complaints into something you can actually act on, Or consider starting an “employee steering committee” for the sole purpose of gathering feedback and turning it into proposals, You are essentially deputizing people who care deeply to listen to you, and then managing the feedback noise,
Remember that each angry message is still an individual. When someone you know well responds to you, you may not like it, but chances are you’ll say “Oops. Okay. Let’s talk.” On a larger scale, you need to find ways to respond with humanity – even when the response you receive lacks it.
Close the feedback loop. Let people know when you’re taking action on their feedback, and if you’re not going to act on it, let them know that at least you heard it. No one wants to feel unheard.
In fact, you’ll probably think – if you haven’t already – that you should have an anonymous comment system to receive feedback. No. This is a trap. Anonymous feedback is the most decontextualized feedback you can get, making it the least actionable. And as it inevitably turns out to be contradictory or lacking important information, all those people feel even more unheard and unhappy than before.
Finally, accept that sometimes you may make mistakes, and own that. You’re going to ignore feedback that proves important. You’re going to overreact to feedback which becomes noise. When you make a misstep, be transparent about how you’re correcting it.
inconvenient truth#
After a certain size, you have to make peace with the fact that a lot of people in your organization are going to be frustrated with you, and you won’t know why, and you won’t be able to fix it.
Not because you are a bad leader. Not because you don’t care. But since there is no scale for feedback, there is no scale for relationships, and the alternative – trying to maintain authentic personal relationships with hundreds of people – is a recipe for burnout and failure.
It’s really hard to accept, especially if you come from the early days when you knew everyone. That version of leadership was real, and it worked, and it probably felt really good. But it doesn’t work anymore, and pretending it doesn’t makes things worse.
Note: This photo is of a large crowd gathered for a union meeting during the New York Dressmakers Strike of 1933. That’s scaling feedback.
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