Airbnb CEO says the best bosses pick favorite employees: If you can't spot them, 'that's not good leadership'

Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky isn't afraid to pick favorites.

Bosses need to do that to be effective leaders, Chesky told Fortune last month. Those people can be top performers who set the quality of work standards on their teams, or quickly find and solve problems, he said.

"The favorites have to be [picked] on fair criteria ... but if you can't say this is a high performer and this is what excellence looks like, then you're going to be in big, big trouble," said Chesky. "That is just not good leadership."

As the leader of Airbnb — a company worth $85 billion, as of Monday morning — Chesky invites 80 to 100 of his employees across job levels to biannual meetings where business-wide decisions are made, he said. Sometimes, the same people get invited repeatedly. But while other leaders would worry about making "unfair and not systematic" selections, Chesky said, identifying who can provide valuable insight isn't political.

Still, bosses who try to follow Chesky's strategy would be wise to be careful about the optics. Blatant workplace favoritism can make other employees feel like they're in an outgroup, Ginka Toegel, a professor of organizational behavior at the International Institute for Management Development said on Harvard Business Review's "IdeaCast" podcast in June.

The most common reason people left their jobs during the Great Resignation was uncaring leaders, a 2022 McKinsey survey found.

Good managers invest time into their employees and try to support them by identifying how their strengths can improve their work, 2021 research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior suggests. Figuring out how delegate between your favorites without ignoring other workers often makes for effective leadership, Chesky said.

"You can have people making sure there's not unconscious bias, people keeping you honest [and] looking for disparate impact inside the organization," said Chesky. "You can do a lot of surveys and you can use that to reinforce your assumptions, but the notion that a CEO should not have discretion in [deciding] who should be in a room [is wrong]."

Luckily for his team, Chesky has "so many favorites," he added.

"I don't even know if I have a single favorite," he said. "My favorites are the people that I'm constantly like texting. I will text a lot of employees ... or call employees if we want to talk."

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