Airbnb CEO and co-founder, Brian Chesky, has been at the helm of the company for 17 years and has been very vocal about ignoring leadership advice that he found thoughtless. In an interview with Fortune, the entrepreneur shared that one such advice that he finds unwise is to not have favourites at the workplace. 

In the interview, Chesky said that he opts to openly acknowledge the employees he likes the most at his company. He admitted that while recognising certain employees has a negative impact, not doing so shows poor leadership, reported Moneycontrol.

“At most companies, there’d be a protest if the CEO picked [favourites]. It would be considered unfair and not systematic,” he said in the interview.

However, he noted that if executed well, employee favouritism can allow leaders to point out top performers and utilise their skills and knowledge for strategy planning efforts. This can also help give a boost to other workers to follow their example.

“You can have people making sure there’s no unconscious bias, people keeping you honest, looking for disparate impact inside the organisation. You can do a lot of surveys, and you can use that to reinforce your assumptions. if you can’t have favorites, if you can’t say this is a high performer, and this is what excellence is, then you are going to be in big, big trouble. That’s just not good leadership,” he added.

While the founder didn’t disclose his favourite employees, he did say that he likes to text regularly with employees he favours. Notably, Chesky is known to collect his top 100 employees annually for a secretive meeting that lasts three days. The employees discuss the future of the company in the meetup which is called ‘The Roadmap Review’.