Your team is avoiding conflict - even the good ones

I’ve been researching team coordination at AI labs. Stories:

Fake silence in meetings:

An executive at a well-known AI company used to ask his 20-person team “Any questions?” at the end of meetings. Maybe one question would be asked, then silence, end of meeting. Finally, a friend built an anonymous question tool and the team started asking 10x as many questions.

Quitting without communicating:

An AI company you know nearly lost one of their top engineers. He’d been planning to quit for six months and hadn’t told anyone.

He told me that he was “done… tired… ready to retire”. As we talked, he realized what he wanted was different responsibilities, and to share feedback he’d been holding back.

So he had one conversation with a director; they welcomed his feedback: responsibilities shifted around, at least one underperformer got unhired, and the company didn’t lose one of their best engineers.

But he almost quit because he didn’t know what he wanted, and wasn’t going to say it.

The ones who never push back:

A researcher at a frontier AI lab used to read Slack, see flaws in his coworkers’ approach, and say nothing. He thought his suggestions were “too basic to be worth saying”, that speaking up would be “condescending”. He said he didn’t want to ‘create conflict’ with people who themselves seemed conflict-averse.

We talked; a few weeks later he was voicing subtle and important disagreements with superiors he’d otherwise stay silent on. Today he runs a team of his own and sees similar coordination problems across the org.

The thoughts that get left unsaid.

If you’re interested in helping your team, DM me.