- Sam Altman says his researchers still push back in meetings — a positive for him.
- Altman previously wrote that he is against bureaucracy and supports fostering open communication.
- Experts emphasize the importance of polite disagreement to maintain a team’s trust and efficiency.
Sam Altman said that being a well-known CEO has created distance with some of his friends and colleagues — with one key exception.
“I spend most of my time with the researchers, and man, I promise you, come with me to the research meeting right after this, and you will see nothing but disrespect. Which is great,” Altman said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published on Sunday.
His comments echo how the startup’s CEO has previously talked about his leadership style.
In a 2023 blog post, he wrote: “Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too.” He added,”do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.”
In a 2019 post on his blog, months before he became OpenAI’s CEO, Altman wrote: “One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you.” He said leaders should push employees to “accomplish more than they thought they could” without burning out.
In the far-ranging Bloomberg interview, Altman also talked about government bureaucracy hindering AI development, returning after he was briefly fired by the board in 2023, and his work schedule.
He said his executive team meets for three hours on Mondays. During the week he spoke with Bloomberg, he said he also had six one-on-ones with engineers over two days, a research meeting, and several meetings to discuss “building up compute” and to brainstorm products.
He said he communicated far more internally than with people outside the company.
“I’m not a big inspirational email writer, but lots of one-on-one, small-group meetings and then a lot of stuff over Slack,” Altman said.
Power of polite disagreements
Workplace experts say polite disagreement with peers — and even top bosses — is essential to keep teams running smoothly.
CEOs across tech, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, have all highlighted the importance of fostering a culture of disagreement from the top.
In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote about how employees should embrace his “disagree and commit” strategy, which is a way to say: “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?”
“This isn’t one way,” Bezos added. “If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time.”
Joseph Grenny, a corporate trainer and the coauthor of the workplace strategy book “Crucial Conversations,” said staying silent can carry its own pitfalls.
In a 2016 interview with the Harvard Business Review, he suggested considering “the risks of not speaking up” — which could be the project falling apart or losing the team’s trust — and weighing those against the consequences of saying something.
One way to do it is to ask your manager for permission to disagree, Grenny said, by saying something like, “I know we seem to be moving toward a first-quarter commitment here. I have reasons to think that won’t work. I’d like to lay out my reasoning. Would that be OK?”
Sabina Nawaz, a CEO coach who was a senior director of human resources at Microsoft for 15 years, wrote in a 2023 LinkedIn post that avoiding disagreement is more damaging to relationships than speaking up. She recommended finding allies for meetings and asking what others think.
“When co-workers realize you let them proceed with a faulty plan, or waited until the last minute to raise objections, they’re likely to lose trust in you,” Nawaz wrote.
