If your team is < 10 people, stop worrying about it and just talk to everyone regularly and openly. The two most important parts of talking though is listening

If your team is < 10 people, stop worrying about it and just talk to everyone regularly and openly. The two most important parts of talking though is listening and objective openness (don't be closed off). And when I say listening, don't just hear what someone says, act upon it or tell them why you aren't (even if you take a few days to research and get back to them). This solves 99% of issues when the company is small. And this should be encouraged across the team to happen, e.g. person to person, not just founder to team. BTW -- this works well with advisors and investors too, if they tell you something, research, act and respond so they know even if you went a different direction you did so informed. > 10 < 25 people and really anything over 15ish people gets harder to manage so you need some formality to it, e.g. schedule and documentation. But don't try to make some great review/feedback system initially. Just set aside more time, talk to people, listen, keep good notes and formalize the process with documentation and scheduled follow up. This is also the time that if you haven't already you should expand the loop where there isn't just one person doing most of the feedback cycle. > 25 < 50, you absolutely need some formalization and you need to delegate feedback cycles to team leads, or trusted individuals and the founders need to work closely with those leads to make sure they are staying in the loop. For every team < ~10 people have the team lead follow the first version, just with solid documentation and follow up that they are taking care of their teams. If you are a founder/director etc level start reducing your daily influence with team activities so that the team starts to depend more on the lead, this isn't because you are pulling away or inaccessible, but you need to give space for the team to form around the immediate leadership and not just you. If you don't do this, you will fail as a leader and you will cause all your direct reports to fail over time. > 50 you should by now have hired at least one (possibly a few) dedicated HR staff who can help formalize the process more and grow it sustainably. Usually, I'd recommend this around 35-40 people as you just can't deal with everyone's issues. But over 50 it is really mandatory as the laws generally change as to your employee responsibilities etc. This is different than some of the other answers, but hopefully gives some insight. Also if you follow this generally the culture revolves around solid constant, quality feedback so it will just be instilled from very early on. Which is really helpful as you grow. One last point, this works great with knowledge workers and most business types. If you are leading manufacturing, day labor or unions than things change as the personalities and needs are different. Doesn't make either better or worse, you just have to respect that they are different and have different needs.