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Dunbar's Number, or the Care and Feeding of Human Connection

July 2026 · Erin Randall

This was the weekend of the big drive, from Montana back down to Texas, of me returning to oven-hot weather, supersize grocery stores, and leashed dog walks. It has also been a week of hard news and even harder losses.

On my way south, I stopped to see some people who matter a great deal to me. One of them works with people who are in end-of-life, palliative care situations, and a client had passed away two days earlier. The news of that client's death hit this person particularly hard. You see, just that week, they had opted to pull in a bit, focusing on immediate family and what they needed rather than being on call for others. While this action, that of inward focus and surviving an immediate, personal crisis, was one so many of us would have taken, it haunted them. They blamed themselves for not returning that call, for not having that client in their inner circle of intimates even as the client included them in that first and closest ring.

It had been a hard week for me, too. My husband called last Monday with the impossible news that an old friend had passed away in April. Neither my husband nor I had seen him since our wedding twenty years ago. I'd last texted with that friend a couple of years earlier, sending him a photo of two grad school girlfriends and me, laughing as we caught up at a swanky Chicago cocktail bar, celebrating the survival of a particularly crap year. But knowing that he was gone, that I could never see the sparks of his genius or hear his crazy adventure stories, gutted me in ways I had not expected. I wound up sobbing during breaks between coaching sessions, ashamed that I had let this connection fade.

These two deaths leave me with these questions: how do we hold onto connection? How do we honor relationships without losing ourselves in the process?

Dunbar's Number

We all have circles. Family circles. Friend groups. Social media connections. Play circles for our children (or dogs). Work friends and gym friends and hobby friends and neighborhood friends and friends who defy labels. Some circles bump into one another and overlap, while others remain closed and impermeable.

Dunbar's number is the number of people with whom we can comfortably be in relationship. Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist whose research resulted in his namesake number, proposed that humans can hold stable social relationships with around 150 people at any one time. You can see evidence of this number as it is the approximate size of Neolithic farming villages, Roman armies, and Hutterite colonies in North America. Dunbar’s theory is that language developed in humans as a "cheap form of social grooming," a way to maintain bonds once our groups grew too large for the one on one grooming that other primates rely on.

That idea has legs well beyond anthropology. Organizational researchers and team coaches have picked up Dunbar's layered circles (the tight inner ring of about 5, the close friends layer of about 15, the meaningful-contacts layer of about 50, and the outer 150) and mapped them onto how teams and companies actually function. A recurring finding is that teams of roughly 4 to 8 people who work together daily tend to hold trust and coordination well, while departments and companies that swell past that 150 mark start to lose the thread of who actually knows whom. Once that happens, a familiar pattern shows up. Individual relationships thin out, subgroups form, and leaders have to build deliberate structure to replace what used to happen naturally when everyone simply knew everyone (Geraghty, 2024)..

For me, Dunbar's number brings to mind concentric rings, the ripples in a pond as raindrops splatter the surface. That inner ring, the tightest and most intimate circle, is people in our immediate family and those we hold closest to our hearts. As the circles widen, the strength of the connection weakens as the number of people in that circle increases. If we try to hold too many people too closely, relationships gets crowded out.

What the Research Is Telling Leaders

I keep circling back to Dunbar because the numbers behind connection are showing up everywhere in current leadership research, and the news isn't great. Nearly four in ten U.S. workers say they feel lonely on the job, and almost a quarter have considered leaving a role simply because they lacked connection there (Cigna, 2025). Gallup's ongoing workplace research keeps landing on the same theme: purpose and belonging are among the strongest drivers of whether people stay. At the same time, trust in leadership is faltering in many organizations, at real cost to engagement (Gallup, 2023 and 2026).

Here's the part that matters most to me. A 2025 scoping review of leadership behavior and workplace loneliness found that the leaders who actually reduce isolation on their teams do a few specific things: they see the person as a whole human being, they actively strengthen belonging, they foster real interpersonal relationships rather than transactional ones, and they pay attention to the working conditions that either support or erode connection (Kanste, Ylisirniö, Vuorivirta-Vuoti, and Kuha (2026). Separate research on loneliness and leadership adds a sobering note: lonely leaders are not only less effective themselves, their isolation can ripple outward and affect the well-being of the people they lead (Gilchrist and Schrager, 2025).

Put simply, connection is not a soft skill leaders get to when the real work is done. Connection is the real work. Dunbar told us we can only hold so many people close. Current research tells us that leaders who tend those relationships well, rather than just managing headcount, are the ones whose teams actually stay, trust, and thrive.

Back to the Questions

And this brings me back to questions. If we consider what questions are, the flippant, easy answer is that they're how we seek information. Yes, questions do that, but in truth they are so much more. A good question shows that someone is paying attention, that they're thinking about you, that they're honoring your space in their circle. A good question shows care, interest, and dedication to maintaining that relationship. Good questions are the care and feeding of human connection.

This is where I lean on something I use often in coaching: Clean Language. The premise is simple and, I think, kind. Clean Language uses a small set of open, non-leading questions, asked in the other person's own words, so the answer stays entirely theirs. Questions like "And what kind of connection is that?" or "Whereabouts is that connection?" or "And when that connection is there, what happens next?" don't hand someone your interpretation of their experience. They hold space for the person to find their own. That is exactly what a good question does for a relationship. It says, “I am curious about your world, not mine, and I am not going to crowd it with my assumptions.”

Let's return to those opening paragraphs. The person I stopped to see on my way back to Texas was there for their client in every way possible. They helped them navigate and resolve family estrangement, they helped them make peace with what was inevitably coming. Because of that work, the client was able to go a bit more gently into that good night. I'm still thrashing in grief of my own, grief with a side of shame. I had a friend, and the connection slipped. It broke, and I didn't ask the question that might have kept it alive.

As a coach, I try to be conscious about asking good, clean questions and then actually waiting and listening for how they're answered. The people you ask good, powerful questions of, those are the people in your circle. We cannot, and I'd argue should not, wedge everyone into that inner ring. But we can honor our connection with everyone we're in a relationship with, simply by asking a thoughtful question and making room for their answer.

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