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.
There's a lot of research on this, particularly from Robin Dunbar, who gave us "Dunbar's Number" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Assuming the feedback you need will just come to you might not scale.
Going and seeking out the feedback you want does not stop scaling.
First paragraph already assumes a lot. We're a team of 5, but no, I cannot tell anyone my concerns or problems.
I've read somewhere that company politics is necessary. Whether that's true, I'll probably never know.
When I worked at Netflix many years ago, they loved to boast about how they didn't have any "processes". My experience was that process ALWAYS exists, but at Netflix you just had to figure it out and hopefully not step on the wrong toes along the way.
Ah, the tyranny of structurelessness.
What do you feel you cannot share concerns with your peers?
> set the expectation that they have strong relationships with their own teams
Good luck with that.
In most cronytocracies (typical, at the top levels of most companies), you get who you get. They may be really good engineers and "first line" managers, but suck at anything else.
A big problem is that companies don't have career tracks that match people's skills. The Peter Principle[0] applies.
Bad managers hire and promote other bad managers. Highly skilled engineers can often be terrible managers, but want to be managers, because that is the position they equate with "success," at an organization.
A Principal Engineer should be just as valued and well-treated as a CTO. Most companies fail to do this, so everyone wants to be the CTO. Establish a career track, where technical people aspire to technical positions.
And hire good managers; not ones that don't make the CEO uncomfortable.
This approach can't inform you that someone in the feedback chain is causing a problem.
> Feedback doesn't scale because relationships don’t scale.
I would not say it this way; it is too simplistic. In fact, I generally caution against the dominant metaphor here of comparing feedback to scaling. It falls apart quickly.
Here’s a counter point. In many scenarios and settings, relationships provide transitive benefits. For example, if a leader builds trusted relationships with other leaders, a significant amount of trust can flow through that relationship.
To build a better understanding, I suggest building diverse models. Try to answer the question: What kind of qualities do relationships confer and why?
There’s also a generational aspect here. I started my career in the 2000 tech boom and bust. I’ve seen a lot of up-and-down cycles in the industry. I’ve seen lots of management styles and organizational cultures. People that had formative years during peak social media and/or COVID often have a different kind of socialization and this affects their default expectations. I won’t attach normative judgments without research, but there are significant differences.
When I think of the most impressive collaborations I’ve participated in with amazing results, relatively few of them involve tech organizations.
Building a scalable culture over various company sizes feels hard in the sense that generalizing prescriptive advice is tricky. A two person start up is cake because you only have to manage one internal relationship (a pair). People know great culture when they see it, but that is nothing like growing it.
just sent you a note Carter . . . this is something close to my heart :-)
> 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 trigger our most primal instincts: fight or flight.
It is really important to recognize that it is the perception of an attack that triggers certain responses. For a counter example, watch how puppies play. It can very rough at some level but at another the intent is clearly benign.
There are ways to shape and modify perceptions! Culture. Norms. Timing. Technology. Inclusion and exclusion criteria. Information architecture.
Never assume that the technology or protocols you use have been designed for your core values. Often you have to redesign it for your purposes. Please do.
Feedback *can* scale if one carefully defines protocols to suit particular goals. We are not helpless even if it seems we are hapless. Leaders and designers (often social scientists) must step up and show better ways.
Computer scientists and software engineers must show curiosity and intellectual humility here. Better to draw broadly from other fields: social work, negotiation, psychology, anthropology, public policy, and more.