Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of David Sacks (founder, chairman and C.E.O. of Yammer) which offers workplace communication tools. “We let employees voice their opinions about everything,” he says. “There’s no sense that, O.K., I am an engineer, therefore I can’t voice my opinion about what’s happening in customer service or sales.”

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

*     *     *

Bryant: What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Sacks: I’d say probably the most formative experiences came when I was at PayPal because it was this three-year experience going from zero to a $1.5 billion company. At the time we sold the company we had about at least 700 employees. I think about 500 were reporting to me.

One of the things that Peter Thiel, our C.E.O. at PayPal, did extremely well was just to focus on the few things that were the most important issues at that time, and make sure we got those right. And he was a very good delegator. So that was a great lesson. But at the same time, I saw that some very small product decisions had a disproportionate impact on the business. And you just can’t always delegate those things. You have to be willing to get involved and make sure that the work gets done properly.

And so I say that my own style would be like some sort of balance or synthesis of that, where I try to focus on the biggest-picture issues, but at the same time some aspects are so important that I have to get involved at a pretty detailed level.

Bryant: What else in terms of leadership?

Sacks: I have an open door policy. Anyone can walk into my office and start talking to me. I also walk around the office and just start talking to people about what they’re working on. I’m not trying to micromanage what they’re doing, but I am trying to find out what they’re working on and talk to them about it.

Anybody can ask me questions and debate me. You could be a new employee and you can start getting into a debate with me about something. The start-up culture is very democratic in general. I think you need that in order to attract good people. You’ve really got to create a company culture that people want to work at. And so you try to give them a voice, give them a sense that they influence the direction of the company, and try to avoid unnecessary process and hierarchy — things that might frustrate employees.

Bryant: A lot of people say they have an open-door policy, but they don’t really mean it.

Sacks: I think you’ve got to create a culture in which dissent is valued. And there’s probably a lot of ways to set that tone. Certainly you can tell if you’ve got a culture of dissent when you walk into a company. People can figure out very quickly whether dissent is encouraged or whether it’s actually something that’s not welcome.

Bryant: How?

Sacks: It’s a red flag to me if there’s just too much consensus and not enough dissent. I feel like in any human community there’s always dissent because people just disagree. Anytime there doesn’t appear to be dissent, it means that the corporate culture has just shifted way too much toward consensus. That means the leadership just doesn’t welcome dissent enough.

Bryant: So how do you create a culture of dissent?

Sacks: You’ve got to constantly ask your reports whether they think we’re on the right track, whether the strategy you’ve laid out is right, what they think about the strategy, where things aren’t going well. You’ve really got to dig into that.

We let employees voice their opinions about everything. There’s no sense that, O.K., I am an engineer, therefore I can’t voice my opinion about what’s happening in customer service or sales or vice versa. We try to create clear ownership so everyone owns an area. But that doesn’t mean that people from other parts of the company can’t voice their opinion about something that’s happening there. And it may not just be about a dissenting opinion. It may just be to provide more information. It doesn’t have to be, “I don’t like what you’re doing.” It’s more like, “Here’s a bunch of things I’m learning over here — are you guys taking this into account?”

Bryant: It’s very easy, though, for people to get their back up and say, in so many words, get out of my sandbox.

Sacks: And that’s why you have to have clear ownership. One of the ways political cultures develop is when it’s not clear enough who owns which areas, and so you need to get lots of people on board to do something. That’s not true at our company. One reason people can feel comfortable about dissent here is because their own responsibilities are clear.

And one thing we try to do is define everybody’s role in the company so that, in a sense, they have a territory. They have a sphere within which they can make decisions as opposed to a committee-based or team-based approach where there’s a bunch of people who kind of share the decision. So the first step is to have clearer lines of responsibility. One of the things I spend a lot of time doing, as we create new teams, is to look at the boundaries between these teams to make sure they are clear enough. Do they make sense? Do people have clear enough objectives?

Once you have that and each person knows their area, you have the vertical part. Then you can start working on the horizontal part. And the horizontal part is we want information in the organization to be as transparent as possible. We want everyone sharing as much as possible because it helps everyone else do their job. And I think people want to take this information into account. In a well-functioning company, they don’t go, “Oh, this information didn’t come through my channel so I’m not going to listen to it.” They really do want the information, so we try to encourage a culture of knowledge-sharing. The most valuable employees in the company are the ones who can share the most useful information.

Bryant: What else is unusual about your culture?

Sacks: We do a lot of things to try and pull the company together and make sure that we’re all on the same page. So about once a quarter, I give a company presentation that lays out our thinking at a high level about the strategy. And then once a month we have Yammer Time at the end of the day on Friday, and the executive team takes questions from anyone in the company. They can also submit them online. They can also submit them anonymously if they want. We’ll basically answer anything that people want. People can see the anonymous questions online, and people can vote on which questions they want us to answer.

*     *     *

Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.