“No one’s born a good CEO. It is such a non-intuitive job.”
So says Airbnb CEO/founder Brian Chesky in a new interview with Fortune. Very true.
But the main theme of the interview is that Chesky has learned to disobey leadership orthodoxy around employee autonomy. “If you want to be autonomous, start your own company,” Chesky says.
How did he come to a belief so seemingly out of step with 2024 leadership?
In 2016 Airbnb’s business dropped like a rock, by 80%. It was in this crisis that Chesky abandoned the traditional approach to hiring great people and staying out of their way. Instead, he plunged back into the details and learned what was going on in every corner of the business to help right the ship.
Chesky has now emerged on the other side of a successful rebound (Airbnb hit the Fortune 500 for the first time in 2023 and is currently profitable) with a different perspective. Today, he wants to know what his executives are doing. He wants to ensure they are working on the right things with his own eyes.
There’s an interesting issue here in how the business press operates. Many of us want to immediately universalize a successful company or CEO’s experience and apply it right away. I can picture many CEOs reading the Fortune interview and taking it as their sign to start breathing down their executives’ necks. “If it’s good enough for Chesky, it’s good enough for me!” Which will of course in most cases not be a very welcome development for most of those executives you start hovering over.
What the interview actually says is more nuanced. Here’s what headline skimmers will miss:
Chesky readily agrees that giving his team more autonomy did help the company scale from startup to IPO. In other words, autonomy can work.
Chesky’s description of his process shows he actually isn’t extreme. He advocates working problems WITH people, not “telling them what to do.” Says Chesky: “This is about a mentality of belief that great leadership is presence, not absence.” Headline notwithstanding, he’s not advocating leadership by dictatorship.
Chesky’s pivot in approach was the result of a very real and organic challenge his business faced. It would have been foolish for him to stick to a leadership truism that stopped applying to Airbnb’s reality. It’s good to know the best practices for running a company, but you have to make them your own. You have to know when to adjust and go against the grain based on what your customers, employees, and shareholders need in that moment.
During Airbnb’s crisis years, the company required Chesky to dive back into the details and go into “founder mode.”
In my CEO courses, we talk a lot about this topic. I encourage CEOs to remember the mantra “trust, but verify.” What Chesky is sharing is not that we should throw out the benefits of employee autonomy. Rather it’s that sometimes you can trust more, and sometimes you need to verify more. It depends on the situation of the company, the culture of the team—and it can vary widely based on the specific employee you’re dealing with.
As I wrote in my first book:
For [some] CEOs, the lack of control, the high level of responsibility, and the fear of being labeled a micromanager cause them to totally disengage from the day-to-day activities and results of the organization. They figure, “If I can’t control everything, I shouldn’t worry about any of the details.” This type of CEO [believes] that coming up with a winning strategy is all that matters. After they have revealed the grand strategy, they can sit back and watch. They are so removed from the day-to-day flow of the organization that they don’t see a problem developing until it is too late. Then . . . they blame the employee for failing to do the simple things necessary to execute their brilliant strategy.
The art of being CEO is knowing what side to lean toward—involvement or autonomy—to maintain your balance.
And on a more meta level, beware of headlines that seem to tell you to do something that flies in the face of common sense. See also…
Behind every counterintuitive statement like this is usually a much more nuanced view of the world if you read what the person is really saying. It’s important to read fully and integrate the wisdom into your latticework of mental models rather than deciding to just do it because a successful CEO said it was good.
Finding a balance makes for worse headlines, but better CEOs.