Comment by kdazzle
1 day ago
I dont think the solution to not knowing people in your company is to create bureaucracy. Ie - only hanging with 10 executives and a focus group. Get out there and talk to people for a few minutes - at the office or wherever.
Ultimately, it is. The post didn't touch on this, but it's exactly why the world looks like it does - it is, and has always been, recursively subdivided. It's why we have districts and towns and counties and states and countries. Hierarchical governance is a result of trying to cooperate in groups larger than the limit of how many direct relationships our brains can support.
Maybe, but a 200 person company isn’t really that big. The CEO should probably get over themselves if they think they couldnt possibly know everyone at least a little bit.
I think, putting what you're saying another way, just because your capacity might be limited to hearing from N people, that doesn't mean it has to be the same N people all the time. It should include a sampling across everyone so you have a lower chance of systematically missing entire points of view.
Teacher here. Best Principal I had would gatecrash your class once a year, then have a chat giving feedback. Kind of stressful (it could happen with little warning) but whatever.
They knew everyone in the school (ebery teacher and about 500+ student names), and what happened in every class. It took time and talent to do it, but it made them a lot less insulated.
Claiming you can't know 100-200 people - your high school teacher wrote 100 reports. Now obviously they aren't 100% on the ball, but they have some idea (I hope).
There's an old story about how Bill Gates once took a call in tech support. A far larger organisation, and he still was willing to dive deep and see what was going on at the least glamorous part of the coalface.
There's a difference between trying to micromanage everything, and micromanaging enough that you're not out of touch.
Feedback is a two way street. It both let's you know what is happening, and let's the people below know that you actually care. Even if you can't (and arguably shouldn't) be everywhere at once, it has its place.
Now yes, it's drive by management and isn't the main tool that a manager should use, but being overly scared that your trusted expert juniors will be destroyed by a senior checking up on them is maybe a bit silly, and if a senior manager is such a tool that they do cause havoc just by looking over someone's shoulder and giving them a bit of feedback you're already in trouble.
Inulation isn't the answer IMO, just accepting that yes you don't need to know everyone and everything to the same level as if it was a small team.
The same principle holds for quality management. You don't need to inspect every single product. However, if you inspect a small number of products at random, you'll detect a large percentage of the quality issues.
While leaders can't know everyone they should make it a priority to have those random connections outside their inner circle. If they don't, they become in danger of hearing only the info that their inner circle wants them to hear.
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> There's a difference between trying to micromanage everything, and micromanaging enough that you're not out of touch.
I think there's a good point to be made here that this isn't micromanaging, it's bypassing feedback layers that have a tendency to filter out critical or important information. That information may or may not be withheld intentionally, but being Bill Gates and seeing that a crucial tool to help a customer doesn't work very fast, or is missing information, or relies on "hacks" (tribal knowledge on how to bypass restrictions or flags) to keep the support process going would be something that wouldn't filter upwards easily.
Definitely a balance to be had though for sure.
Our CEO does this. She talks to a lot of people. Once you start talking business, she clearly doesn't care about your opinion, unless you're praising something. If it's remotely critical or a suggestion to change something, you can see in her eyes she's not even processing the words anymore.
I rather have her not talking to me, because it's much worse knowing she fakes her openness, than actually just not showing up.