“Don’t mess up the culture as we scale!” That’s the family-friendly version of what one of the founders of Airbnb told the employee experience specialist Mark Levy when he arrived at the company in 2013 and was cotasked with modernizing the human resources function.
I have always admired Levy’s work from afar and, recently, I was fortunate to interview him for a deep dive into how his work at Airbnb helped transform the company between 2013 and 2018.
During our conversation, Levy explained that when he joined Airbnb, the company’s HR team wasn’t exactly cohesive. Several teams supported employees in different ways—but reported to different parts of the business. The question, Levy points out, was not whether to modernize the department, but how to modernize it.
Levy notes that Airbnb was not looking for a traditional approach to HR and he had a mandate from the founders to create something unique. According to Levy, one of Airbnb’s cofounders told him that everything he had heard about HR, he didn’t like. The cofounder asked Levy whether Airbnb could do HR differently.
Levy and his team pulled all the company’s various HR functions under one roof, and added functions like wellness and social impact to create a new remit of employee experience. Airbnb renamed the department Employee Experience, a change that was more than cosmetic. The new name sent a clear message that the accumulation of all Airbnb’s HR functions should focus on a singular outcome—enhancing employee engagement. The freshly baked department played a vital role in cultivating a sense of infectious belonging among employees that spread to Airbnb’s hosts all over the globe, and in the process helped Airbnb elevate its global brand.
What Levy and his team also did differently was facilitate a culture of cocreation where, in Levy’s words, HR does things with employees (not to them) and where employees help determine priorities and design solutions to problems. For example, when Levy’s team redesigned performance management, he engaged with the head of engineering, then designed and piloted a new process with the engineering team as a test group before introducing it to the rest of the company. Rather than being designed in isolation, the new process was codesigned with employees to ensure performance management was creating solutions that employees valued.
Throughout my conversation with Levy, who is the coauthor of the book, Employee Experience Design: How to Co-Create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive, I listened for nuggets of wisdom that other business leaders could use to modernize their HR departments. Here is what I took away:
Be intentional about what you want out of HR
Airbnb wanted to ensure that its mission to “create a world where anyone can belong anywhere” and its values of “Champion the mission,” “Be a host,” “Embrace the adventure,” and “Be a cereal entrepreneur” were preserved as the company expanded. [The latter slogan derives from the time in Airbnb’s early stages when the founders sold collector cereal boxes for $40 apiece to pay down debt.] If you want your HR team to help anchor your culture as you grow, be intentional about what you want, letting the team know in no uncertain terms what your expectations are when it comes to the areas you want them to focus on, and the outcomes you expect your organization to achieve as a result of HR’s work.
Embrace nontraditional approaches to HR
Airbnb knew that a traditional approach to HR wouldn’t align with its unique culture, and the company could benefit from a nontraditional approach. One of the elements of this approach at Airbnb was Ground Control—a self-organizing team of employees who focused on two-way internal communications between employees and senior leadership, creating opportunities for employee recognition and celebration, helping embed the company’s mission and values into its culture, and assessing how company initiatives would impact employees. Empowering employees to organize this function instead of taking a command and control approach allowed them to play an important role in shaping the culture and HR’s contribution. The lesson for senior leaders? Don’t be afraid to configure your HR team in new and innovative ways to meet the organization’s needs.
Reposition your HR Department in the eyes of employees
Many business leaders, as well as employees, have a poor view of HR—especially when it’s limited to transactional roles where HR is considered to be the organization’s “policy police” or “compliance cops.” If you want to set your HR team up for success, you need to reposition the importance of HR to your organization. Your employees need, and deserve, to understand what modern HR is all about, how it has evolved from its origins as an administrative function, and the value it brings to the organization—especially in developing and maintaining a workplace culture where employees are highly engaged and excited by the work they are doing.
Airbnb helped reposition HR’s role by having employees involved in designing and owning the culture. One notable example: Employees were enlisted to help design the physical workplace, choosing a listing from one of Airbnb’s hosts and creating a living room that replicated a home environment to be used at the Airbnb office for meetings.
This simple but meaningful activity helped HR reposition itself in the eyes of Airbnb employees as being more than the department responsible for compliance and policy observance. If you want your HR department to be effective and respected by employees, find ways to demonstrate to employees—not just tell them—that HR is interested not only in enforcing policies, but also in company culture, employee engagement, internal communications, and the overall employee experience.
Evolving your HR Department requires support from the very top
Levy’s mandate to create something different from what might typically be expected of HR at other companies came straight from the top. If you want your HR department to evolve, you need to provide it with the support and resources required to carry out its mandate.
Have a singular focus
When it comes to outcomes, your HR department should have a singular focus. Even though modern HR can comprise several roles—recruitment, onboarding, talent nurturing, etc.—the collective outcome of HR’s day-to-day tasks should result in engagement that nudges your employees to love the organization they work for and the work they do on a daily basis.
Airbnb revolutionized its HR function, ensuring that it brought tangible and measurable results, by cocreating a workplace environment where employees feel valued, engaged, and inspired to help the company achieve its long-term strategic goals. You can too!
Empower your employees by allowing them to have a say in how HR goes about building its ecosystem in the workplace. Employees are in an ideal position to know what type of support and leadership they need from their HR team—so, rather than projecting what you think your employees need, ask them directly. Your employees are more likely to embrace initiatives that they helped to create. By allowing your employees to cocreate your HR landscape, you increase the chances of developing an HR function that is not just effective in carrying out its role, but is also embraced and trusted by employees.
The ex-CEO was previously forced to resign from Lockheed Martin after a 2012 ethics investigation confirmed he had a personal relationship with a subordinate.
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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entreprene…
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One of the things that continues to surprise me about executive coaching is how often conversations about work become conversations about family.
Clients rarely come in wanting to talk about their parents. They want to decide whether to take a promotion, how to navigate a difficult boss, become more effective leaders, or determine why they’re burned out. Family history almost never makes the agenda. And yet, more often than not, that’s where we end up.
Not because their parents are an active problem, but because many of the assumptions shaping our professional lives were formed long before we ever had careers.
What kind of a person does this make me?
I was reminded of this recently while working with a client who was wrestling with whether to accept a promotion. On paper, it seemed like an easy decision. The role was more senior, more interesting, and aligned with where she said she wanted her career to go. It came with more influence, greater responsibility, and a meaningful increase in compensation. There wasn’t much downside. But she couldn’t bring herself to say yes.
As we talked, she kept returning to the same question: What kind of person does this make me?
At first, I assumed we were talking about work-life balance. But the longer we sat with it, the more it became clear that something else was underneath her hesitation. Accepting the promotion felt like a betrayal of some internal standard she couldn’t quite name.
I asked where she thought that standard came from. She paused for a moment before telling me about her parents.
An inherited blueprint
Her father had built a successful career and worked long hours. Her mother worked part time and somehow managed to be everywhere at once. She volunteered at school, remembered every birthday, drove to every activity, and created the kind of home that felt calm, predictable, and deeply attended to. My client spoke about her childhood with enormous warmth. She felt incredibly lucky to have been raised that way.
The interesting part was that she wasn’t trying to reject either of her parents’ examples. She loved her career. She had worked hard to build it and found genuine meaning in it. She had no desire to step away from it.
But somewhere along the way, she had also absorbed an idea about what a successful family looked like. Every late meeting made her wonder if she was letting her children down. Every career opportunity carried an unexpected emotional weight. Without realizing it, she was evaluating her own life against a blueprint she had inherited rather than one she had consciously chosen.
As she talked, I found myself thinking less about her parents and more about the invisible standards we inherit without ever examining.
One of the things coaching has taught me is that we inherit far more than our parents’ values. We inherit their definitions.
Their definition of success, of responsibility, of what hard work requires. Their definition of what it means to be dependable, ambitious, generous, or “good enough.”
The remarkable thing about these definitions is that they rarely announce themselves as inherited. They simply become the water we swim in. We don’t think, This is how my family understood success. We think, This is what success is. Once you begin looking for these inherited definitions, you see them everywhere.
The executive who cannot delegate because competence became synonymous with doing everything herself.
The physician who feels guilty taking a vacation because productivity was always the measure of worth in his family.
The founder who wears exhaustion almost as proof of commitment because that’s what dedication looked like growing up.
The leader who hesitates before speaking in meetings because confidence was mistaken for arrogance in her childhood.
On the surface, these look like workplace challenges. We call them perfectionism, burnout, impostor syndrome, or difficulty setting boundaries. Sometimes they are, but just as often they’re something else. They’re inherited beliefs colliding with the realities of modern work.
What struck me most about my client’s story wasn’t the difference between her life and her mother’s. Every generation faces constraints the previous one didn’t. Her mother likely gave up professional opportunities my client now has. My client is navigating a workplace that follows her home in ways her mother’s never did. They were solving different problems. The conflict came from assuming that because she valued what her mother created, she needed to re-create the exact circumstances in which it had been created.
When beliefs feel like reality
I wonder how often we make the same mistake in our careers. How many of us equate long hours with commitment because that’s what we watched growing up? How many assume leadership means having all the answers because that’s what authority looked like in our families? How many pursue stability, prestige, or achievement without ever stopping to ask whether those goals actually belong to us?
These questions matter because inherited definitions are remarkably difficult to see. They don’t feel like beliefs. They feel like reality.
That’s why coaching conversations that begin with promotions or difficult colleagues often end somewhere entirely different.
People think they’re deciding between two jobs. But they’re actually deciding whether they’re willing to question a definition of success they’ve carried for decades.
For my client, the breakthrough came when we stopped talking about whether she should accept the promotion and started talking about what she was actually trying to preserve.
It wasn’t a particular work schedule, or the number of hours she spent at home. It wasn’t even her mother’s life. What she wanted was something much deeper. She wanted her children to feel known. She wanted them to feel remembered, supported, and important. She wanted to create the same emotional experience she had growing up.
Once we separated the value from the way it had been expressed, the decision became much clearer.
I’ve started to think that this may be one of the most important developmental tasks of adulthood. At some point, we have to distinguish between the values we’ve inherited and the forms those values happened to take in our families.
Maybe your parents taught you that commitment matters. That doesn’t necessarily mean answering emails at 10 p.m.
Maybe they taught you that excellence matters. That doesn’t require proving your worth through constant overwork.
Maybe they taught you that family comes first. That doesn’t mean re-creating the exact rhythms of your childhood.
The forms change. The values often don’t.
The strongest leaders I’ve worked with aren’t the ones who reject everything they learned from the families who raised them. They’re the ones who become curious enough to examine it. They ask themselves which beliefs still serve them, which belonged to a different time, and which they want to carry forward intentionally.
Because leadership isn’t just about making better decisions. It’s about recognizing the invisible scripts you’ve been following all along—and deciding whether they’re still the ones you want to live by.
