Airbnb CEO says one-on-one meetings are often a missed opportunity for collaborative learning
Airbnb CEO and cofounder Brian Chesky doesn’t consider himself to be meeting-averse. But he abhors bad meetings, which he characterizes as too many people in the room with too few active participants.
It’s the primary reason why he rejects recurring one-on-one meetings with his team.
“The one-on-one model is flawed. It’s a recurring one-hour one-on-one meeting where the employee owns the agenda. And what happens is that they often don’t talk about the things you want to talk about, and you become like their therapist,” Chesky said in a recent interview with Fortune.
One of his biggest qualms with one-on-one meetings is that they’re limited to just himself and an employee, meaning the issues they raise aren’t heard by others, which is a missed opportunity for them to learn, brainstorm, share grievances, and hear from one another. Chesky instead prefers to simply call or text employees to get brief status updates. One-on-ones, Chesky said, are best reserved for when employees have a private problem or concern. However, if employees are too frequently complaining privately about workplace matters or something they don’t feel safe bringing up with the whole group, it is an ominous sign that there is a bigger problem within the organization.
Chesky prefers meetings with multiple participants, noting that most of his work actually gets done during meetings. Such meetings allow more employees to weigh in, but he warns that meetings should not include participants for participation’s sake. “Almost every company has too many people, and they are afraid in the name of being inclusive to uninvite people, but that’s not what inclusion is,” Chesky said. “That’s a slippery slope. You need as few people in a meeting, not as many people.” Often, these large meetings feature a few people who dominate the conversation and many spectators. In his mind, everyone in the meeting should contribute to the discussion; otherwise, the number of meeting attendees should shrink.
When the need arises for smaller, recurring meetings at Airbnb, Chesky said there’s a postmortem wherein what’s discussed is documented and disseminated in the spirit of transparency, allowing others to weigh in and voice their opposition. To get the most out of meetings, Chesky believes they must have an agenda, invitees must be well-prepared ahead of the meeting, and most importantly, there must be a final decision-maker. “A lot of times, there’s no clear decision-maker. There’s a bunch of peers trying to agree,” Chesky said. “Peers can’t agree quickly, so you end up with this committee vibe where people just talk endlessly without making a decision. There has to be a sense of urgency and action.”
Chesky is not the only Fortune 500 CEO who has cut one-on-one meetings from his schedule. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said he doesn’t hold one-on-one meetings with any of his 60 direct reports. “They never hear me say something to them that is only for them to know. There is not one piece of information that I somehow secretly tell them that I don’t tell the rest of the company,” Huang said at Stanford University in March. “Our company was designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible, and for people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know.” But similar to Chesky, Huang made a point to mention that if his employees absolutely must speak with him privately, he drops everything for them.
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