Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky isn't afraid to double check his employees' work.
Chesky started reviewing versions of every Airbnb project, from new website features to television ads, roughly five years ago, he told Fortune last month. Some might call his approach micromanagement, particularly at Airbnb's scale — the business has an $80.45 billion market cap, as of Tuesday afternoon — but Chesky sees himself as setting standards for his company, he said.
"This is about a mentality [that] great leadership is presence, not absence," said Chesky. "You have to be in the details ... You have to, as CEO, set not only the vision, but the rhythm for the company. I review all the work now before it ships."
"You can be in the details [with] people without telling them what to do, working through their problems with them," he added, noting that he now only gives most projects a single round of feedback.
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Chesky adopted the approach in an attempt to mimic some of the ways Apple ran under Steve Jobs, he said. At the time, Airbnb's growth had slowed, and its expenses — largely technology and administrative costs — were growing, Forbes reported. Chesky's employees felt like they were "working on a treadmill," putting in "70 hours of effort to get 10 hours of [productivity]," he told Fortune.
Months later, as Airbnb prepared to go public, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and wiped out about 80% of the company's global business, he said. Determined to survive, Chesky started personally training new and existing employees and managers, so the company would have a "shared consciousness," he said.
Money Report
Airbnb's free cash flow — typically viewed as an indicator of profitability and business health — grew to $3.4 billion by 2023, up from $97.3 million in 2019, according to SEC filings.
The nuances of micromanagement
Employees are often initially resistant to a manager's involvement, Chesky said, because the strategy "flies in the face of" the assumption that if you hire great workers, you should leave them alone to do their work.
Instead, Chesky compared the strategy to working on your golf swing with a coach: You learn from an expert, without inadvertently developing bad habits from teaching yourself. "Even if [the worker] knows more than you about their function, they don't know more than you about the company or your standards or your pace," he said.
Some successful entrepreneurs and CEOs directly endorse micromanaging. "There is probably no singular idea that has destroyed more business value on planet earth than the idea that micromanagement is bad," Shopify CEO and co-founder Tobi Lütke told the "20VC" podcast in an April 2023 episode.
Micromanaging is part of "being responsible for everyone," and can help supervisors mitigate mistakes before they happen, Lütke added.
But as Chesky suggested, there's room for nuance: The best bosses balance caring for their workers with keeping everyone accountable, workplace expert Tom Gimbel told CNBC Make It in 2022. Those leaders can give you honest feedback and push you to perform at your personal best, while understanding that effort may look different on rough days, said Gimbel, the founder of employment agency LaSalle Network.
The reward for Chesky's extra work is efficiency, he said: He initially worked up to 100 hours per week to rebuild Airbnb's processes, but now has more free time because the company has fewer meetings about things that went wrong.
"If you don't [go into the details], you end up with leaders that won't be successful," said Chesky. "They're afraid to come to you. You [get involved] later, and you undermine their confidence ... You end up having 10 different teams, or 100 different teams going in 100 different directions."
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