Sam Altman said researchers are still pushing back at conferences, but this is a positive for him. Altman has previously written that he opposes bureaucracy and supports promoting open communication. Experts stress the importance of civilly disagreeing to maintain trust and effectiveness in teams.
Sam Altman said being a high-profile CEO has distanced him from some friends and colleagues, with one important exception.
“I spend most of my time with researchers,” Altman said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. You’ll see nothing but disrespect, which is great,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. Published on Sunday.
His comments echo what the startup’s CEO has previously said about his leadership style.
In a 2023 blog post, he wrote, “Fight the bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it, and encourage others to fight it too.” He added: “Don’t let the org chart get in the way of people working together productively.”
“One of the best ways to build a network is to build a reputation for truly caring about the people you work with,” Altman wrote in a 2019 blog post, months before becoming OpenAI’s CEO. Ta. He said leaders need to encourage employees to “achieve more than they thought they could” without burning out.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, Altman also spoke about government bureaucracy hindering AI development, his return from the board after being laid off in 2023, and his work schedule.
He said management will meet for three hours on Monday. The week he described in an interview with Bloomberg included six one-on-one meetings with engineers over two days, one research meeting, and more discussions about “building compute” and product brainstorming. He said several meetings were also held to conduct storming.
He said he was communicating much more internally than with people outside the company.
“I’m not great at writing inspirational emails, but I do a lot of one-on-one small group meetings, and then we communicate a lot on Slack,” Altman said.
The power of polite disagreement
Workplace experts say respectful dissent with colleagues and even top managers is essential to keeping teams running smoothly.
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Tech CEOs like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman all talk about the importance of fostering a culture of disagreement from the top. It emphasizes gender.
In a letter to shareholders in 2016, Bezos wrote about how employees should adopt his “disagree and commit” strategy. This is what it says: ? ”
“This is not a one-way street,” Bezos added. “If you’re the boss, so should you. I disagree and always commit.”
Joseph Glenny, a corporate trainer and co-author of the workplace strategy book Crucial Conversations, says there can be pitfalls to remaining silent.
In a 2016 Harvard Business Review interview, he said he considered the “risks of not speaking up” (which could cause a project to collapse or lose the trust of his team) and decided to do something with it. I proposed to compare and consider the results of the two cases.
Glenny said one way to do that is to ask your boss for permission to object by saying something like: I would like to state my reasoning, is that okay? ”
Sabina Nawaz, a CEO coach and senior director of human resources at Microsoft for 15 years, said in a 2023 LinkedIn post that avoiding disagreements is more detrimental to relationships than speaking up. I wrote it. She recommended finding collaborators for meetings and asking others what they think.
“Your colleagues are likely to lose trust in you if they realize that you pushed forward with the wrong plan or waited until the last minute to raise objections,” Nawaz wrote.
