Recently I read something from a CEO connection wrestling with a big question.

Not about money, not about customers.

About people.

Someone on their frontline team had asked, more or less: why don’t we see you anymore?

The company has grown a ton, with more people, more locations. And the CEO was being completely upfront in sharing the version of them that knew everyone by name, that was always around, simply couldn’t exist at this size. Trying to be that person again would be performative. It would steal from the strategic work only they can do.

A lot of that is true. You cannot know hundreds of people the way you knew thirty. The energy you brought to a small room has to live in the leaders you hire. Culture has to grow bigger than any one person.

However……..

When companies scale, it’s tempting to file CEO face time under things I’ve graduated out of. A nice-to-have from the early days. Something others now handle for you.

I’d argue the opposite. Face time doesn’t become less important as you grow. It becomes more important. And also a lot harder to do well.

When you’re small, your presence is ambient. People absorb who you are just by being near you. You don’t have to be deliberate about it. It just happens.

At scale, that ambient presence is gone. So the question stops being how do I see everyone? (You can’t.) and becomes what does my presence mean now that it’s rare?

Rare presence can be a powerful presence. When the CEO actually shows up in a meaningful way (meaning to listen not to perform), it tells people that the work they do matters enough to pull leadership away from everything else competing for that time.

I’ve watched both versions of this play out.

Years ago, I was in a room during an acquisition. We’d traveled to the largest location of the company we’d just acquired for the first all-hands meeting. Their owner stood up to address their own people and said: “Some of you may know me. Most of you probably don’t.”

Their office was across the street. Across the street! And most of the people who showed up to work for them every day had no idea who this person was.

I watched the faces in that room. It wasn’t shock. It was recognition. The quiet, unsurprised look of people who’d known for a long time that they were invisible to the person at the top.

Then there was my CEO at the time, standing right next to me. A man who knew the name of nearly every person across dozens of locations. Who could walk into a branch he hadn’t visited in months and ask a warehouse associate about their kids by name. Six states. Hundreds and hundreds of people. And he made it his business to know them.

The contrast wasn’t subtle. It was vast.

When that acquisition closed, the prevailing feeling wasn’t grief or resistance. It was relief. People were going from invisible to seen. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because of years of deliberate investment. The kind that builds a reputation that walks into the room before you do.

So no, scale is not an excuse to disappear. Scale is the reason to get intentional. (And to be clear, my former CEO was a rare example. And now closing in on 100 locations, he can’t be present in the same way he was even with dozens of locations. But he can be present.)

A few things I’ve watched work:

Make it deliberate. Early on, presence happened on its own. At scale, it won’t. Put location visits on the calendar the way you’d put a board meeting there, and protect them just as fiercely.

Show up when things are fine, too. The leader who only appears when something’s wrong trains the whole workforce to associate leadership with bad news. Show up on a good Tuesday. It changes everything.

Do the homework before you walk in. Learn a few names ahead of time. Know what’s happening at that location. Nothing signals “you matter” faster than a CEO who remembers your name. And nothing signals the opposite faster than one who clearly doesn’t.

Listen more than you talk. These visits are not for delivering the strategy. They’re for hearing what’s actually happening on the floor. The stuff that never makes it up the chain in a report.

Pick the moments that matter. A new location opening. A hard season. A milestone. You can’t be everywhere, but you can be present where presence carries the most weight.

Tell your longest-tenured people the truth. The folks who knew the earlier version of you deserve to hear why this one looks different, and what hasn’t changed. Don’t let them fill that silence with their own story about why you stopped showing up.

Build leaders who carry it, then still show your face. Yes, the energy has to live in the leaders you hire. But “I delegated the culture” (this is an actual sentence I once heard from a CEO!!) is not the same as “I disappeared.” Both things are true at once.

The person who asked why don’t we see you anymore usually isn’t asking for more visits. They’re asking do I still matter to you? And that question deserves an answer, not a strategy.

The CEO in the post called out something else that was very important: The day no one feels comfortable asking them that question is the day they’d actually start to worry. (And that is the day they should worry!)

Face time at scale isn’t a logistics issue. It’s a question of whether your people still believe you’d want to hear from them. We block time for strategy sessions without a second thought. They’re sacred, they’re on the calendar, nothing bumps them. But somewhere along the way, we started treating time with our people as the thing we’d get to once the “real work” was done. That’s backwards. Walking your floor, learning a name, hearing what’s actually happening three layers down isn’t a break from the strategy. It is the strategy. The day you stop believing that is the day your people stop believing in you. And that belief, once it’s gone, is the hardest thing in the world to win back.