Brian Chesky doesn’t think workers want autonomy as much as they say they do.
The Airbnb CEO recently spoke with Fortune about his thoughts on the “founder mode” model of leadership.
The term was popularized by Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham in September. Graham said Chesky inspired it and that founder mode refers to being hands-on in the day-to-day details of a business, as founders do, rather than simply delegating everything in “manager mode.”
“I don’t think employees want autonomy,” Chesky told Fortune. “I think that is a giant misnomer. Do they want to have some element of autonomy of how they do their jobs? Yes. But I do not think that the vast majority of people are actually happier in a truly autonomous environment.”
To make his case, Chesky imagined a scenario where an employee was fully autonomous.
“You’re allowed to have your own budget, hire your own team, do whatever you want except you need legal to sign off on everything, and you need the finance team to sign off on your budget, so you need to actually go through the planning process, you need to integrate with the technology,” he said.
Chesky, who cofounded Airbnb in 2007, went on to say autonomy is “such a fallacy in modern corporate America because companies are organizations.”
“Organization quite literally means we organize people to work together to do something, rowing in a boat,” he continued. “Now what people don’t want is a lack of empowerment, and they want to be able to make decisions on their own, but I don’t think people for the most part want to be disintegrated, they want to be integrated.”
He said he’s observed employee retention and engagement are highest when workers “really love the people they’re working with and they’re collaborating and they’re working well.”
For those who do want complete autonomy at work, Chesky said they’re better off becoming a startup founder.
“Now, there are some people like me that probably shouldn’t be in an organization — we should start companies,” he said. “If you want to be autonomous, start your own company.”
Chesky also talked about his experience starting Airbnb.
“When I started Airbnb I was a founder, I ran it the way a founder would run the company,” he said. “I was in the details, I knew everything going on, I was the chief product officer of the company.”
He explained that his operating in founder mode “flies in the face of everything we’re taught about leadership.”
“It’s not that you shouldn’t hire great people or empower them, but you have to be in the details, you have to be close with them,” he said. “You have to, as a CEO, set not only the vision but the rhythm. I review all the work now before it ships. I am the chief editor of the company.”
Chesky listed Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk as people he considers exemplars of the founder mode style of leadership.
He also cautioned that he’s not advising that people micromanage their employees.
“You can be in the details with people without telling them what to do, working through problems with them,” he said.
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