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Kate Shaw is Airbnb's Director of Learning where she leads a team focused on delivering highly customized and innovative development programs to Airbnb employees around the world. As the former Talent Director at Apple, she consolidated and developed a strategy and operation for Apple's executive coaching practice worldwide. She was also the founder and host for the Lucasfilm Speaker Series which features some of the biggest names in technology and entertainment.
Hitendra, Intersections is a highlight of my week. Thank you so very much.Michael Rosenkrar
It is admirable to see the value system of Airbnb and that you stand by it. Thank you for sharing your insights into belonging.N. Tuan
This is the true hallmark of incredible leadership. It is rare to see such values like compassion in companies of today. Kudos!Ingrid Laar
In this episode of Intersections, Prof. Hitendra Wadhwa has a conversation with Kate Shaw on the topic “Pursuing Purpose, Compassion and Belonging in a Crisis”.
What does an organization do when all its hard work and thorough plans are radically upended?
The episode “Pursuing Purpose, Compassion and Belonging in a Crisis” offers key insights on:
Hello everyone, greetings! This is Hitendra Wadhwa and you are viewing Intersections. Welcome back. At Intersections, our aspiration is to create that moment, that opportunity in the middle of a week where we can have our lives, our thoughts, our spirit, come together to explore some of these questions, these aspirations, these hungers that we have about how to really advance to our full potential as individuals, as organizations, as communities and as the planet.
I also like to call it Intersections, because our aspiration here is to dissolve boundaries. To allow us to be open to fusing at times what seems in the world to be opposites. Today, that kind of fusion will come from studying the interface between business and life.
Let me introduce to you all a guest that I'm very excited about bringing to our show today, Kate Shaw. One thing that I really like to do at Intersections is to allow us to both think and talk about things in life, but also about how we can apply these ideas about human potential in the world of work, in the world of business. To that end, today, I'm going to shift the energy a little bit from where it has been for the last few weeks. If you might remember, a few weeks back, we had Raghu Krishnamurthy, and Raghu was actually really thoughtful in providing us a glimpse into how his principles about human nature, human potential are made practical in a workplace. He also shared his own really powerful journey in advancing his understanding of bringing humanity into work.
Today represents that next step, that next opportunity for us to hear from another practitioner and a leader in the world of business about that interface between humanity and work.
Kate is the Director of Learning at Airbnb. In addition to Airbnb, she's had a storied career in the field of human capital, going back to her time at Lucasfilms, where she has in the past been the head of creative services. Lucasfilms, is a big brand in the world of media and film owning the franchises of the Star Wars series and the Indiana Jones series. At Lucasfilms, among other things, she had the distinct opportunity to actually interview some of the big names in the field of film and performing arts.
Then she went on from there to Apple. At Apple, Kate was the head of coaching and development. She was really at the intersection of the university part of Apple, where they're training people into their culture and HR are a Talent Director. Then more recently, she moved from there to Airbnb. Airbnb is a powerful force in disrupting in many ways the travel industry by bringing a whole different vision and model to it, which today, of course, is facing its own form of challenge and disruption in the age of the pandemic. There is so much for us to study, learn and explore with Kate.
With great joy and pleasure, let me have this moment to welcome into our midst. Kate Shaw. Thank you for joining us.
So happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here. This is great. I'm really excited for the conversation.
Well, it's very much in the spirit of the kind of world that Airbnb has started to help us create, isn't it?
Let's hope. This is fantastic.
Kate, let's start from early in your career. What got you interested in the first place in wanting to pursue a career in the kind of fields that you have around talent and learning and development?
Yeah. I think that so many of us find that careers are oftentimes accidental and I would say that mine was somewhat accidental, if I'm 100 percent honest. As a younger person going into school, I thought I was going to travel the world. I thought I was going to be a diplomat, possibly go into jurisprudence as an academic. There were all sorts of ways in which I wanted to think about contributing to the world. As luck would have it, I found myself for a spell after living abroad for a while, living in San Francisco and being surrounded by a lot of friends who were artists and designers and filmmakers and suddenly wondering if these are the people who are in my community, why am I going to go and spend a bunch of time with people who are not generally speaking, in my community. Then I ended up falling into a role through a referral through some friends to an administrative job at Lucasfilm.
So I parted ways with my academic path and pursued a career in entertainment. I had grown up as a really big Star Wars nerd. When I learned that Lucasfilm was in my own backyard and that I could actually contribute to the next wave of Star Wars films in some way, I was over the moon and then didn't look back. I was there for about 15 years total.
Wow! There are certain moments in our life history that just stick with us. Even though they might go back decades. My first exposure to the Star Wars franchise is one of those moments for me. I was growing up in India, and somebody who we had known who was from America was kind enough to send to me and my sisters this little gift package which arrived at home one day, which we opened with a lot of excitement because at that time, there wasn't a lot of commerce happening between India and other countries. India was a little more of a restricted economy. So, anything coming from abroad was like this magical opportunity for us to engage with the world. It was a couple of these magnetic tapes that preceded CDs. There was a couple of those tapes about Star Wars, the first film that ever came out. It took a long time for us to ever get to the point where we actually watched the film, because at that time, those films were not released globally around the same time. But through that, we were hearing the sights and sounds of the film. And that has stayed embedded in my mind, because it was transporting us into this fascinating world, especially as a young child. That's powerful.
What got you then to move from there to Apple?
Yeah, I was there for quite some time. I oversaw technical and artistic education first at Industrial Light & Magic, and then also at our Animation Studio as we set up a studio in Singapore and got into animated television. The role expanded over time. I had just the most amazing journey at Lucasfilm. It was really a family. There were ways in which George Lucas had set up an alternative to Hollywood in Northern California. There were ways in which it was somewhat insular and protected from the rest of the film industry.
Then, lo and behold, one day he decided to sell the organization to Disney, invited Kathy Kennedy in to lead it, which was an incredibly exciting development in the company's history for George to move on the company and the brand to land in the hands of another organization. But I also took it as a sign that this may be a good time to move on. I'd been there for a long time. I knew the company was going to change a lot. I was interested in seeing other things. With that, I made the decision to move on and ended up landing at Apple, working with Joel Podolny, who is the dean of Apple University, and didn't look back. It was an amazing move.
Apple is obviously a very storied name in the world of business with their inextricable link to its founder, who was a visionary in business. There are two questions that I have for you. How is the culture at Apple scaled from this one individual to something which is today a huge enterprise? It is actually sustaining itself even beyond them? There are all these folks who are prognosticating Apple's ultimate demise after their visionary founder was no more. But, it has grown from strength to strength. Can you talk a little bit about that culture?
Joel was really tasked with helping evolve Apple's culture. That was exactly why Steve Jobs had reached out to him and asked him to take on and create Apple University. It was not to ask people to continue to ask the question, what would Steve do? But what would Apple do? What is so ingrained in this company that everyone who joins this company really needs to know is they understand what makes Apple Apple. That was really Joel's job and continues to be Joel's job as I understand it, which is to deeply study Apple and what makes Apple Apple and then reflect that back to the organization in a way that people can continue to wrestle with what's amazing in Apple and continue to address the challenges that Apple faces.
It was an extraordinary opportunity. Joel is brilliant and he has assembled a really extraordinary faculty to tackle exactly that. I can't say too much about it because it's Apple. But it was an incredible place to learn what it means to deeply understand one's own culture, to better understand the water that you are swimming in, to identify what makes something uniquely that thing and then figure out how to hold the tension of holding on to the things that serve you and then letting go of the things that maybe don't.
It was a masterclass in understanding what it really means to understand a company's culture and contribute to it.
I had found that really powerful when you said that Steve asked him to come so that he could create a culture where people were not asking any more what would Steve do but what would Apple do? It reminds me of a quote that I once heard from him where he said, "When I hire somebody really senior at Apple, of course they need to be competent. But what I'm really looking for is, will they fall in love with Apple. Because if they're in love with Apple, then they'll do what's right for Apple, not what's right for me or for them or anybody else."
I remember hearing Tim Cook speak one day and he talked about exactly that, that he joins companies to fall in love with them. Tim Cook has been there for a long time now. He absolutely loves that company and I think it shows in the way that he leads it.
Wow! We'll come to Airbnb very soon, but now you've been part of these two storied cultures. You have been at Apple for a few years, how did these experiences shape you? What did you learn about human nature? Scaling, values in organizations, helping embed certain skills and qualities in people at that scale. What are some of the things that you have learned from these first couple of chapters of your professional life?
It's a really great question, there were ways in which those companies were very different, there were also ways in which they were very similar. When I look back upon the two of them, they were both started by founders who were frankly trying to do something totally different. George Lucas was attempting to create a studio well outside of the established film industry so he could go into making essentially independent films at the time. It's hard to think of Star Wars sometimes for some of us as independent filmmaking. But if you talk to independent filmmakers, their film history, and that's exactly how they see him.
Steve Jobs similarly was looking to really disrupt an industry and change the way that we think about computing. Those mindsets were both very much instilled into the cultures that they created. They were very much rebel cultures. They were places that were born out of thinking differently. They also sat at the intersection, both of them, of art and technology, where there was always a tension between what is great design and what is great technology in a way that you don't always see in other tech companies. I really appreciated that, because I feel like someone who has a strong orientation to design, but also has a strong need for technology in life, like so many of us do. I appreciated the fact that there was always that tension in place in both of them. The technology at Lucasfilm was used for the purposes of storytelling and technology at Apple was leveraged to create experiences for people to connect with one another and create things.
The third thing is that they were both incredibly exact in cultures. They required a tremendous amount of functional and technical expertise. They both also were just incredibly detail oriented. That, I think, instilled in me a real appreciation for what quality really means, which honestly in some respects became a challenge when I joined Airbnb, which was moving really quickly and was a startup. I started calling myself a recovering perfectionist when I got there. But those companies did instill in me a very clear focus on craft, a focus on quality that I still think serves me today.
It's beautiful. It's a valuable ethic. Sometimes one has to use a good judgment to figure out where one actually puts things more in balance and takes more of an expeditious approach to just getting something in the market and what happens, isn't it?
Yes, absolutely.
I like to sometimes think that leadership or good professional practices require us to fuse opposites, to be able to be both something and the complete opposite. I think this transition that you said you had to go in from the Apple and Lucasfilm's world to Airbnb world, and being a recovering perfectionist seems to suggest that. But on the other hand, I'm sure that there is an element of perfectionism in Airbnb's own aspirations and culture, isn't it? We have to talk a little bit about that when we talk about how it has been doing in today's time.
well, this was really how you and I met. It was when I heard you speak on this topic, I was really drawn to it. What really resonated with me is that, moving from Apple to Airbnb enabled me to do was go from a culture that was really well entrenched and had been around for a little while and had very senior executives who were very storied in their own craft to a very fast moving young organization that was going to be very different that I knew was going to challenge me in a whole different way. But to your point, one really has to adapt in order to make a move like that. It's that adaptation that's really the rub of it.
Let's move in to talk more about Airbnb next. Let's talk about where Airbnb is today. I have been deeply benefited by this major new force that Airbnb has created in the travel industry in allowing us so much access, so much possibilities of travel and meaningful engagements with communities worldwide. Yet, at the present moment, while on the one hand, being this darling of the startup world in the last several years, being a unicorn, that was rising to a really great place, we now have this perfect storm that has come and that is consuming the travel industry. How is Airbnb doing in the present moment?
Thanks for asking. I think this time has been just so challenging for so many of us worldwide. There's no escaping the fact for any of us that we're living in the middle of a global pandemic. I think for Airbnb, we were at the tip of the spear in many respects, because one of the very first things to happen was that the global travel just simply came to a screeching halt. There is no question that it had ramifications on the travel industry that was completely unprecedented. If there is one thing that Airbnb has excelled at over the years, it's navigating a crisis. Our founders have withstood a lot of challenges in standing up an organization like this one. But certainly, there was nothing that they had faced that was anything like this. What they essentially had to take on was figuring out how we were going to survive, how we were going to get through a really difficult storm and emerge on the other side.
That's exactly what they set about to do, both through fundraising, to see us to give us some extra cash to weather a really difficult storm. We unfortunately had to lay off a good amount of our company, which was an incredibly difficult thing to do and really heartbreaking. Then lastly, we really had to simplify our business back to focus on helping people stay in one another's homes again, which we're seeing some rebound in now that things are beginning to open up in some parts of the world and then changing what was a new business experiences and in-person hosting experiences to online experiences which people gravitated to really very quickly.
All of that was born out of our experienced hosts wanting to still find an outlet for what it was they were offering the world and we've seen a lot of success there. While we have certainly had to scale back on our aspirations and things have absolutely changed, the company did make a very sharp and decisive pivot, which I think will hopefully help set us up for longer term success.
Yeah, I was struck with how quickly Airbnb moved to actually do some of this adaptation and restructuring for today's time. I think there are a lot of people at the time that Airbnb was making these moves that were probably still thinking that this is just a bad dream that they're living through to actually wrap up very quickly and somebody is going to find a cure for coronavirus. Look how much money the pharma companies are spending, etc. There was a period where those are the kind of conversations that were happening in Zoom rooms and dinner tables. Now, I think the world is getting more and more ready to accept that it's not clear when we will move into the post pandemic age.
Absolutely. They did have to project quite far out to just try and decide what are really the worst case scenarios here. If we imagine this is going to go on for quite some time, then we are really going to have to control our expenses and figure out how we pivot our business model to adapt. It is anyone's guess though, how long this is really going to last.
Yeah. When we had Raghu Krishnamurthy, who used to be the CHRO at GE a few weeks back here, one of the conversations that we deep dived into is how in moments like this, in moments of crisis, leadership has to, on the one hand, both offer a clear, firm, decisive form of leadership in order to be able to make the hard calls, make the hard decisions, because there is going to be a need to really think about how to survive and then ultimately in the long run, thrive. That would at times require the preservation of resources or certain trade-offs that have to be made. But on the other hand, people are also looking for understanding, reassurance, a sense of connection and empathy from the person on the other side who's making the hard calls. One thing I noticed in this move that Airbnb had to painfully go through with the amount of restructuring and laying off certain people was that it made the headlines in a very positive way at that time because of certain ways in which it actually approached that painful step.
Around the same time, there were understandably so, certain other organizations that were facing the same issue that actually made some very public missteps in a way that brought them a fair amount of grief from the recipients of that action on the other side as people got laid off and the media coverage that resulted from it. If I can just use this moment to have us learn from Airbnb as to, when in life we are facing these kinds of tough forks in the road and we have to walk down a path that none of the options are looking pretty and we happen to take a path where some hard calls have to be made, how can we make sure we do that with the heart, with compassion? Can you talk a little bit about what Airbnb did and what we can learn from it?
I think honestly, I'm still learning from it, having been a part of it and reflecting on it. I'm grateful to be in conversations like this one because it allows me to really still process what went on. Thank you for sharing all that. I have to say, that was very much my experience of it. I think that there are a few key ingredients that are in the mix here as oftentimes organizations really show their stripes in moments of crisis. It is where leadership emerges in an amplified way.
If there is one thing about our CEO that I have absolutely come to appreciate over the last several years working at Airbnb is, he has just a tremendous amount of heart. That showed itself loudly and clearly throughout this whole process. I would say that, leading up to layoffs, there was a constant drumbeat of communications. He had a weekly CEO Q&A where he started to lay out what's going on in the organization. This is the reality of the industry not pulling any punches, in terms of sharing the data about this is what's going on and this is how hard this crisis is really going to be. And at the same time, providing assurance that I am here to help make sure that this company survives and weathers the storm and I'm confident will do so. But I have to tell you now that no options are off the table.
He was very transparent from the very outset so that people could really understand how grave the circumstances were. At the time of the layoffs, it was incredibly important to him and for all of us who were involved in implementing them, that they be done with as much compassion as possible. I think the overriding sentiment was, with layoffs of that scale you are watching incredibly talented people walk out the door. These were really difficult decisions. So, we made a series of steps to ensure that went as well as possible. One was to be as generous as we possibly could, given the circumstances with the packages that we offered people who were leaving. Another was ensuring that absolutely every single person sat down in conversation with the leader to let them know that their job was going away. We did absolutely no group notifications. Every single person was given a face-to-face conversation.
We prepared all of those leaders for those conversations by pulling them into sessions where we really modeled for them what a good conversation in those circumstances might look like and ask them to lead with tremendous compassion in those conversations. I think one of the risks so often is that we know that there are certain things that legally one has to say in those conversations. But if you lead with that, the way that you impact someone gets really and truly lost. And the impression we really wanted to help people walk away with was that people will not remember what they said, they will remember how you made them feel in that moment. The most important thing was to show up with as much heart and compassion as possible and to use our own language to be a charitable host to someone in really difficult circumstances.
Then there was also a way in which just the community of Airbnb rose to this occasion in ways that I never, ever could have expected, but I found incredibly inspiring, which was that the day that Brian announced that we were going to have layoffs, we found ourselves in a group company call where some engineers had actually stood up the ability to not only see Brian and his webcasts, but also to see people taking seats in the room and respond with emojis and words that bellowed up through the screen. The day that he announced layoffs that screen just filled with hearts and tears. That was the emotion that was revealed in that communication from people within Airbnb. He told them that day that layoffs were unfortunately going to happen and they were going to start that afternoon, and that people would be sitting down for conversations with people to let them know that they were impacted if, in fact, they were.
The other piece that I think was really important was that we started those notifications on a Tuesday and asked people to stay through the following Monday. Oftentimes when you see a layoff, people's privileges are immediately revoked and they are walked out the door with a box. We knew we were going to be laying people off in extraordinary circumstances in the middle of a pandemic. These are good people who had done incredible work, who deserved a generous farewell. It also gave us the time to pivot our recruiters to help support them as they exited. So we stood up a whole page at Airbnb.com/talent and invited anyone who cared to make their resume available there for others to come and find them and attached recruiters to all of those people so that they could actually help them find a new opportunity somewhere else.
Just the amount of care and love and generosity that was shown within the company for one another as people went through that transition was nothing short of extraordinary. And the level to which our CEO made himself available to help usher people through that process was extraordinary. Before people left and after they'd been notified, he had another CEO Q&A to say his goodbyes and his thank you and to communicate how much they had meant to him. When you see your CEO on a screen in tears, you know it's real. He didn't try to hide it. I really appreciate that about him. I don't doubt it's one of the hardest things he'll ever have to do. But there is a story here to be told around how compassionate one can be and what the results look like when you do it well. I am still blown away by what I saw.
Wow! Thank you for sharing that Kate. It is such an inspiring lesson in making the hard calls and this is the right way. I was moved and also inspired to work with you a little bit towards really reinforcing some of the lessons from the story for myself and for our audience. I'm just going to offer up a couple of perspectives on what you just shared.
The first lesson that I'm learning from here is that, the leader here, Brian in this case, the founder, has to come into a moment like this already, perhaps with a certain base of trust, a certain sort of set of experiences that people have experienced with this leader that already make them recognize that, this leader has heart, this leader does care, this leader is making some harsh decisions, which might actually put me on the wrong side of the outcome, but I can trust, based on everything I've seen with this leader in the last several years, that it must be coming from a good place. So, I'm guessing that behind this particular moment, there must have been some lived history and experience and stories about how the culture has worked and how he has behaved perhaps in the past that brought people to that point where they started to use those emojis of hearts and tears.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. Every CEO has so many tensions to manage to the point of the lessons that you shared with the rest of us. There is no question that Brian has absolutely been a very hard driving leader at times. You don't create a company of this size, of this magnitude over such a short period of time without having just incredible dogged determination and an extraordinary vision. I think that to the point of the tensions that one manages, at that moment, he absolutely knew this was about heart. This was about humans. That this was about honoring what Airbnb is really all about, which is really trying to build more humanity into the world of travel. He knew that. This was the moment to build humanity into a process that normally isn't very human, frankly. I just was really impressed with how he showed up in those moments. It's not that he hasn't shown these parts of himself before. He absolutely has. I think he really believes in the mission of the company and what belongs anywhere is really meant to be about. But, his ability to turn his attention to belonging to Airbnb was really profound.
Beautiful! Now, you take that as a starting point. The next piece I'm hearing from you is to recognize that in moments like this one is actually needing to clearly inflict some amount of material pain on people, certain things are just not going to happen anymore, you're not going to be employed here anymore, that doesn't mean that one has to withdraw one's heart, that one has to pull back from compassion. You talk about the legal terms that have to be communicated and all of that, but there's no reason why the heart and the compassion cannot be there. That's the second lesson I'm learning from this, which is, is it possible to do both of those things at the same time?
Here's a thought that comes to my mind, what we have to recognize is that people are not merely optimizers and maximizers of some material outcome. They're also seeking to maximize the spiritual, the emotional, the psychological aspect of their experience at work or in a relationship or in a chapter of their lives. If I cannot have boundless material resources at a time when my company is dramatically shrinking in its business with a pandemic going on, I still have boundless access to the spiritual, the emotional, the psychological. Maybe that's a currency in which I can continue to honor and nurture the human spirit.
What I noticed in this case, for instance in some of the posts that Brian was putting out there on social media, some of the quotes that you were making here, is that he was really honoring these people who were leaving the organization. He was helping them feel good about themselves rather than feel like this was a failure for me. He was reminding them that they've done some incredible work that will always live on as they walk into the future as a very treasured part of what they contributed to the advancement of humanity. That is reaffirmation to say, yes, we are giving you the severance letter and all that. But actually, you're an incredible person. You've done incredible work here. We're going to broadcast how proud we are of all of you and encourage other great organizations to hire you if they can. That aspect of including and reaffirming the human spirit and inviting them to go on a hero's journey.
And to enable them to walk out the door with tremendous pride. In the days that people were notified and the day that people left, I was on a call with a group of people who were processing this news in a group scenario and one woman shared that she'd been laid off from her previous employer and the loss of pride that she experienced back then was still haunting her because of the ways in which she had been told that she was losing her job. These aren't losses of jobs. These are the losses of identities. These are losses of community. These are losses of contribution that people experience. If you can honor, to your point, the impact that they've had and the talents that they still hold and the gifts that they're going to bring to the world, then you enable them to walk out the door in a way that really keeps them whole as much as possible in the horrible circumstances and allows them to walk out feeling whole as opposed to deeply hurt.
There is also a question, were you scared that you also could be fired?
it is such a reasonable question. Sure. Yeah, I had had a conversation with my own manager leading up to this and I just said I just have to know. I don't know that you can answer. But I'm wondering if you can give me any early indication whether I will be impacted or whether anyone of my team will be impacted. And at the time, she said, "You know, that is not currently the plan. That's not my intention." Then weeks went by and we got caught up in just trying to figure out how we were going to execute on all this. The team was incredibly busy. I had to ask my talent partner the day before last, we're going to be notified. I said I just want to double check understanding is this in fact, the case, because I realized I hadn't double checked. In a world where all these parts are moving, I was so focused, I realized, "Oh, gosh, I could actually still be impacted." And he said, "Oh, my gosh, no, no, no, no. I am sorry that you carried that." I realized I had been provided with enough reassurance that saw me through. But I also became very tunnel visioned, focused on the task at hand, which was to help the company through a really tough time. But, absolutely. It was a little unclear how all this was going to go down.
Right. Thank you for sharing that very human moment about your own time. Just to close out this really powerful moment that is providing so many lessons and inspiration to us. We have spoken about the leader just leading from the heart, just as part of who they are, having the genuineness, which then translates in a moment of crisis into something very real, which is the aspiration to make the hard calls, but still do that with a lot of compassion that are in there. In the last part of what I've noticed in this story is to recognize that even if you're letting somebody go, it doesn't mean that you can't do something within whatever limited means you have to offer them practical support, not just good heart, but also practical support. In this case, you were talking about this creative exercise that Airbnb went through of corralling their recruiters to actually for a while really be there in support of the transition for these folks who were being asked to leave.
Yes. We stood up whole systems within the company through Slack which I'm still a part that allows people to help people find jobs. I'm still seeing Slacks from recruiters saying, "Hey, I've got a person looking for a job at this company. Does anyone have contacts there?" So there are still active, ongoing effort to help people find new places to land.
Wonderful! Let's move on from that powerful moment to where things are today. How is the organization doing now that the world is starting to gingerly open up a little bit?
There are so many factors going on, we still have some employees in Europe going through a consultation process where they still don't have clarity around the future of their work and whether they will still be with the company or not. We have pivoted our business. We've drastically simplified it, reorganized it to really drive forward the priorities we have in front of us. Then more recently, frankly, in the United States and now globally, we've been experiencing tremendous pain around the disparities with which black people in the United States are treated that has really hit a chord globally. I think we're seeing a tremendous amount of outpouring of effort and frustration and anger, frankly, about a challenge that has gone on for quite some time. For an organization that is all about belonging, that has really impacted us. It is very much part of the conversation. It is work that we have been working on driving within our platform and within our company. There are very active conversations around our role in creating belonging in a world where racism and brutality exist.
We have gone from suddenly shifting to work at home because of a global pandemic, our entire industry turning upside down to layoffs, to re-pivoting our business to now finding ourselves in the middle of a pretty extraordinary time and a painful time. So I would say, on the one hand, we are as laser focused on creating a world where people belong anywhere as we ever were.
Our CEO, Brian recently said, "I would hope that people in this company know and understand belonging, even though more than they understand travel." Which again, just raises the bar on our commitment and our focus there in a way that I find really inspiring. It has been exhausting. This time has been exhausting. I would not for a moment suggest that we are getting all this right all the time. We have our own very important conversations going on inside our company about whether we are living up to our own standard. But it has been a challenging time.
Thank you for bringing up the most latest episode and the continued state of unrest that we face as global society today, which is the issue of race that has been triggered in the United States and yet has taken so much more of a global complexion now. Then you linked that to Airbnb's own mission. Can you articulate that mission for us?
Yeah, of course. I think sometimes when you're outside of a company, sometimes a mission can just kind of sound like Kool-Aid or buzz words. I can appreciate why someone might wonder about that or have that question in their mind. The company is built on this idea that we're here to help foster a world where anyone can belong anywhere. The idea behind that is, oftentimes we go traveling around the world and we find ourselves in these places that are sterile, where we're really not part of the community, where we're held at a distance from the life that's really going on there. Airbnb's aspiration is to enable people to open their homes to other people, to really build human connections in the world offline when so much of our world is online. How do we create connections that are real world and offline, where people are connecting with total strangers and becoming friends and gaining true understanding and appreciation for people who are very different from them?
So if that's our mission to belong anywhere, then the question became, well, if we're going to do that, we better do that inside. Then the question became, how do we create belonging here? We have decided to go after that in earnest. We have become students of belonging. We have started measuring belonging within our company. We have ongoing research around belonging and what it really means and how you create it. We have really tried to build our entire employee experience around the notion of belonging so that we're able to deliver on the outside what we essentially aspire to deliver.
There is a talk that you gave with your colleague, Andrea Robb, it probably must have been midstream in your research and practice around fostering a culture of belonging. It is such an important topic at a time like this. I think another thing that you and I really resonated on in our conversation is, how in a well-intentioned way, as corporations have sought to advance the cause of diversity and inclusion, that the approach that has been taken is not necessarily the most effective, because at times it really stirred the spirit and moved the hearts and get people authentically invested in. The approach of moving to a more inspirational, something that invites all of us to live up to our fullest potential. Belonging sounds a little bit more closer to that. I wanted to highlight that talk because that's a video that our community here can just watch on their own when they like.
One of the things I really liked in that video is that after presenting a thesis about the power and importance of belonging as part our culture should be about at work, you ended up crowdsourcing a little bit. You asked the audience to give you as to what belonging meant to them and what they might suggest to an organization to build more belonging. I was so touched by all of those people that ended up sort of going to the microphone and offering their ideas. I was touched certainly by the richness of the ideas themselves, but actually just by watching them, listening to them, I just felt like you had sparked something in the room that these individuals really felt so inspired by this idea that, "That's the kind of work place I want to be a part of." Kudos for doing that.
I think it's a lesson in co-creation and crowdsourcing that anyone will enjoy when they get a chance to watch it. But coming back to what work you've been doing at Airbnb on this front. How has the journey gone? What are one or two examples that we can take into our workplace that you have found to be really helpful to us?
Well, I think the first thing is to really understand what belonging actually means. I think I've heard some people describe what is that? It feels a little bit ineffable. The reality is, if you can't define it, then you can't really pursue it. What we have done within the company is we have defined belongingness, the emotional experience of feeling seen and valued and able to meaningfully contribute. This is where belonging in my mind goes beyond inclusion. Inclusion means that you're sitting at the table. Belonging means actually contributing, being able to see your impact. So many companies stopped short of just getting talent in the door and then not really unlocking the system in a way that allows people to meaningfully contribute. Inclusion is simply not enough. In my mind, belonging is so inextricably linked with the notion of psychological safety, the knowledge that I am seen and valued and I'm able to meaningfully contribute my point of view, my strengths, my aspirations. That's where you really start to tap into the potential that humans have to offer.
What it means is that, practically speaking, for us, belonging is not something we shoved to the side. Belonging is a thread through absolutely every learning experience that we offer. To your point of crowdsourcing, we don't necessarily want to pretend that we're expert in this all the time. While we have studied this deeply, our expectation is that we want to learn with our learners because we know what it feels like to feel like we belong and we know when we don't. To bring that emotional experience into the room and allow people to unpack that, allow them to understand this was my experience and this is how I can enable this experience for others, is really the thing that as an organization, I think we are trying really hard to learn.
To the point of the talk that you mentioned earlier. I think that oftentimes people get caught up in this notion of unconscious bias, which is important. It is important to understand that our brains don't necessarily always serve us so well. The struggle I have with that is that when we stop there. In fact, one of my one of my colleagues at Airbnb, Melissa Thomas-Hunt, was part of the research that demonstrated that when you introduce unconscious bias training, sometimes the outcomes are actually worse. You get permission. You normalize the fact that our brains don't work very well sometimes, that they make snap judgments about people and people sometimes walk out the door actually discriminating more, not less.
If I leave with the mindset or the notion that my job is to enable you to feel a sense of belonging, then that is a whole other bar for me and for our relationship and for the potential I might help realize in you. That I think is very different.
One of the challenges that we have seen in society. I don't know how openly it is the experience, for example, in everyday interactions at Airbnb, either within the full-time employee group or with your partners, who are a very expansive network, is that, when you think about inviting everybody to feel that sense of connection, belonging, respect, painfully so, there is a certain set of positions out there by certain communities and people that are a little bit more exclusionary rather than inclusive. How does one make sure that in really opening the culture up to receiving and welcoming everyone, that one is seeking to invite their best self, not their worst instincts? Not part of them that is more divisive, judgmental, or agitated, which could end up disrupting the energy. That part of it is giving an active voice. That's one of the things that I've been really playing with in our own work with our clients on these themes of creating inclusive cultures. But I'm curious if you have encountered that challenge a little bit when you open things up. I'm just curious about your comments on that.
I think there are ways in which Airbnb has an advantage in its mission in the sense that we can say this is what we're about and we can trumpet that to the world. If that is what you are about, come join us. If that's not what you are about, no harm, no foul. Don't join us. It's a little bit different for us. I would argue, insofar as Google's mission is not necessarily about belonging. We have stood aside and our founders decided that this is really what we are about. We are not a travel company, we are a belonging company. When you put that strong stake in the ground, I think that you have the means to draw boundaries. There was a string of events a few years ago where Airbnb, where black, became a meme where we were discovering that there were hosts that were frankly not allowing guests in their doors because they were black or people who were experiencing did not even get a reservation because they were black. It caused us to put into effect an anti-discrimination task force to really dig into the problem. We have announced things this week that we are doing to continue to further that work. We just put out an email to our hosts and we said, "Listen, we are about belonging and if you're not, just go somewhere else. But if you're going to host, we want you to sign this commitment. This is what you're about. That you will welcome people into your home regardless of what they look like." And we lost 1.3 million people off the platform when we did that.
But it's a decision that we made. I think when you put stakes in the ground and you stand by them, then you attract the people that want to be a part of that. If you don't attract the people who don't, then great. The rub becomes what happens when you do what happens when you continue to find events like that? Then the call to action is you just don't tolerate it. They have other places they can go.
That is a powerful lesson right there about recognizing that not everybody maybe right for this and being a piece of that and respecting them for who they are, but also drawing those boundaries. Very nice.
Let's wrap up with one final question which is, can you say a little bit more about how employees can get to feel valued? How do you foster that?
This is going to sound so basic. But I always think that really creating a sense of belonging and a sense of being valued starts with really getting to know people. We have held a lot of sessions for our managers and put tools in their hands to just sit down and interview. What do you care about? What are the things that you value most? What do you really hope to accomplish during your time here? How do you really want to contribute to this mission? What does belonging mean to you? How would I know if you felt a sense of belonging at Airbnb? Just sitting down and asking some really deep questions around how I can help deliver on those things for you, how I can help you discover things you haven't discovered for, but really understanding who you are and what makes you tick and what makes you unique.
Many people skip that step and just assume that they are going to learn it through osmosis. These are things that have to be designed. I do think that feeling a sense of value and being able to meaningfully contribute really starts with really truly being seen. We often skip that stuff. I would always recommend starting there.
That's really powerful and at the same time, very practical guidance that you just offered us. I think any or all of us can immediately go in and implement that. There is a version of that that I am sensing one can even apply in our personal life. Sometimes, some of these conversations aren't even had in families. We don't really understand our own people at a deep level. I don't know if you are familiar with the research of John Gottman, who is one of the experts on marital relationships and what they call masters of relationship versus the disasters of relationships. One of the practices they found is that, those are thrive in relationships, really use this kind of a deeper dive understanding. He calls it like building love maps, which is like having an understanding, a way to navigate through the inner life of that other individual by over time discovering some of these aspirations, life purpose, things that really value and things like that. Sometimes you feel like I must know because I live with them. But actually, unless you go through the process of heartfelt discovery and inquiry and sharing, sometimes it's funny how much of those things just remain unspoken.
Absolutely. We don't gather those things by accident. We have to gather those things with a sense of purpose and intention. Otherwise, they just don't come. Life takes over and you are making coffee next to each other, but you're not necessarily understanding what's really going on in someone's heart or their mind. I love that love map idea. I'm going to have to look that up. Thanks for sharing this.
Sure. My pleasure. What is evident to me from this is that we've got to have you back on the show. The clock has rung. I'm going to have to bring this to closure.
Kate, you have certainly done more than you do for all of us. I'm so grateful for the time. You have offered us so much warmth and spirit and real practical advice at a time things must be hard. Hard for Airbnb, hard for you and we would be cheering you on and for Airbnb to continue to adapt its ways in order to continue to just live out its mission.
One of the things that they talk about is that, you know, the purpose might stay the same, but then the outer expression of that sometimes need to be adapted for whatever conditions the world puts us in. Sometimes it scales up, sometimes down, sometimes pivots in either direction, whatever the purpose is the same.
Yeah. It's what gets you through.
Thank you again. I look forward to having you back.
Excellent. So lovely being here. Thank you so much for having me.
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