Senior leaders should directly engage with "boots on the ground" employees to get unfiltered information. This bypasses the "game of telephone" where middle management can dilute or distort the reality of what's working and what isn't, especially during high-intensity periods like M&A integration.

Alex Bouaziz eschews traditional management structures like weekly 1-on-1s and performance reviews for his 20+ direct reports. Instead, he relies on a continuous, high-frequency feedback loop through daily, informal communication. His role is to enable his leaders by constantly asking what's broken and how he can help, rather than following a rigid cadence.

To combat methodical slowness at Twitter, Costolo's first move as CEO was to end consensus-based decision-making. He pushed ownership down the org chart to individual leaders, holding them accountable and dramatically increasing the cadence of execution.

To get an unfiltered view of progress and maintain urgency, Musk runs highly detailed, weekly engineering reviews. He bypasses direct reports and has their team members provide updates directly, with no advance preparation allowed. This allows him to mentally plot progress and intervene only when success seems impossible.

Inspired by Jensen Huang, CEO Nikesh Arora expanded his staff meeting from 8 to 25 people. This bypasses a layer of management filtering, ensuring more leaders hear the strategic "why" directly, reducing confusion and improving alignment down the organization.

As leaders rise, direct reports are less likely to provide challenging feedback, creating an executive bubble. To get unfiltered information, leaders should schedule regular one-on-ones with employees several levels down the org chart with the express purpose of listening, not dictating.

As an organization scales, some leaders become skilled at managing up while being poor managers to their teams. Executives must conduct regular skip-level meetings with frontline employees to get direct, unfiltered feedback and catch these bad behaviors that would otherwise be hidden.

To maintain a flat, hands-on engineering culture without dedicated managers, Fal replaces traditional one-on-ones. They feel 1-on-1s can force negativity and instead use small group discussions with mixed tenure and roles. This format fosters more constructive, solution-oriented conversations rather than simple complaint sessions.

To elicit genuine opinions and avoid having junior employees simply agree with their superiors, leaders should structure meetings so that the lowest-ranking person shares their thoughts first. The discussion then works its way up the chain of seniority, empowering junior voices and generating more authentic feedback.