| April 1, 2025
There’s a lot of advice out there for technology leaders about communication. We talk about storytelling, decision-making, alignment, and influence. But what often gets overlooked—especially as your org grows—is the ability to listen at scale.
When you’re leading a six-person engineering team, you hear everything. You’re in the code, in the stand-ups, in the one-on-ones. But once that team becomes fifty, or a hundred, or spread across time zones and functions? Things start to get quiet at the top—and that’s dangerous.
Here’s how to keep your ears open even when you can’t be everywhere at once.
🧭 1. Systematize Listening
Don’t rely on organic feedback. Set up structured channels to collect it. Think anonymous pulse surveys, regular retros, office hours, or AMAs. Give people different ways to raise flags depending on their comfort level.
Even more importantly: close the loop. If your team gives feedback and nothing changes—or they don’t hear what happened—it’s worse than not asking in the first place.
🧑💻 2. Read Between the Metrics
Engagement scores and sprint velocity are fine, but they won’t tell you what engineers are really struggling with. Instead:
- Look for declines in pull request quality.
- Watch for stand-up fatigue or meetings getting quieter.
- Track escalation patterns—what gets pushed up the chain and why?
Often, your team is talking to you. Just not in words.
👂 3. Listen to the Edges
Executives tend to get feedback from managers, who get it from leads, who get it from ICs. That means by the time a message reaches you, it’s been filtered four times.
Once a month, skip the chain. Sit in on team ceremonies. Invite a junior engineer to coffee. Join a Slack thread and just lurk. These small moves help you detect cultural drift and morale issues early.
🚨 4. Don’t Mistake Silence for Alignment
One of the biggest traps in fast-growing orgs is assuming that no complaints = all good. But high-performing teams can burn out just as fast as low-performing ones. If everyone seems too agreeable, ask yourself:
- Is it safe to dissent here?
- Do people believe their input will lead to change?
- Have we created space for honest feedback, not just status updates?
If the answer is no, you’ve got a listening problem.
🧠 Final Thought
Great leaders don’t just speak clearly—they listen deeply. And when you scale, you have to work a lot harder to hear what used to happen naturally.
So ask yourself: How do I know what my team is really thinking?
If you don’t have a clear answer, now’s the time to build one.
