"You become like their therapist." Why Brian Chesky of Airbnb avoids 1-on-1 meetings and when they can be useful
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky shared his thoughts on one-on-one meetings with employees.
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky shared his thoughts on one-on-one meetings with employees.
«You become like their therapist,» Brian Chesky told Fortune, explaining that he tries to avoid one-on-one meetings with subordinates. Chesky considers such a format with direct subordination to be fundamentally flawed. However, he notes that meetings are his main way of working.
Explaining his position, Airbnb’s CEO said that during face-to-face meetings with a supervisor, the worker «owns the agenda» and brings up topics that supervisors don’t want to discuss. In addition, he says, topics may come up during face-to-face meetings that would be useful for other people in the company to hear, but are instead focused on in private conversation.
The Airbnb executive added that almost no prominent CEO in history has ever held one-on-one meetings with employees.
Chesky, however, emphasized that a personal conversation can be helpful in cases where an employee needs to communicate personal and sensitive situations. If an employee is going through a difficult personal time and needs to confide in their boss in private, a private conversation is appropriate, the Airbnb executive said. But he noted that such conversations are simply not productive on a regular basis.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also doesn’t believe there’s any information he’s dealing with that only one or two people should hear about, Business Insider writes. The paper also quoted Aditya Agarwal, a former Facebook executive, who wrote in a post on X that after more than a decade of holding such meetings with his subordinates, he decided they did more harm than good.
«They make people do random happiness checks and constantly criticize things that aren’t perfect. In practice, 1:1 turns into nit-picking sessions,» Agarwal added. According to him, feedback every three to six months would be effective.
Psychologists advise to communicate alone. Stephen G. Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist who is also a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings, notes that the results of effective communication are amazing.
In addition, Rogelberg previously emphasized that such a conversation has a positive effect when the employee leads the conversation. According to him, managers need to spend about 25 minutes a week to understand the personal and work needs of employees.
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