Feedback doesn't scale | Another Rodeo

At five people, feedback isn't really feedback - it's just talking. You know everyone's coffee preferences and their kids' names. When someone has a concern, they tell you directly. You trust them, they trust you, and you have the context to understand where they're coming from. At twenty people, the relationships get weaker but the context is still there. Then you hit 100 and the ground shifts. Suddenly you have people whose names you don't recognize offering sharp commentary about your leadership. They're talking about you but don't know you. There's no shared history, no accumulated trust. Your brain has no context for processing all these voices, and without an existing relationship, it feels like an attack. Your natural response is to dismiss, deflect, or get defensive.

By 200 people, feedback isn't actionable signal anymore - it's noise. A big echoing amphitheater of opinions, each written in the tone of someone absolutely certain they understand the whole system (they don't), the whole context (they don't), and your motives (they definitely don't). The kudos you used to hear dry up because people just expect you to lead now. The people who are unhappy? They're loud. From where you sit, it feels like everybody's mad about everything all the time. You can't tell if this is a real crisis or just three loud people who found each other in a Slack channel. Your nervous system doesn't scale, and neither does the fundamental math of maintaining personal relationships with hundreds of people.

The solution isn't to try harder at personal connection - that's a recipe for burnout. You need to build systems that work with this reality. That means structured listening, actual intake processes, and ways to synthesize themes instead of reacting to every spike. Build proxy relationships through your leadership team - you can't know 200 people, but you can know 10 people who each know 10 people. When feedback comes up through this chain, it comes with context. Set up working groups to turn floods of complaints into actionable proposals. Close the feedback loop so people know you heard them. And accept that you're going to get it wrong sometimes - you'll ignore feedback that turns out to be important and overreact to noise.

The uncomfortable truth is that past a certain size, a lot of people in your org are going to be frustrated with you, and you may not be able to fix it. Not because you're a bad leader or don't care, but because the fundamental math doesn't work. That version of leadership where you knew everyone was real and it worked, but it doesn't work anymore. Pretending it does just makes things worse.