Why Did Airbnb's Design Team Confront Katie Dill?

Katie Dill says Airbnb's design team confronted her because she had not earned their trust. A month in, she was already changing how the team worked, and the designers had no reason to believe she knew them, understood what they were great at, or was there to help.

About a month after she arrived, an hour-and-a-half meeting landed on her calendar with five people from the design team and somebody from HR. The team was 10 people. They had reported to one of the founders, then to her. On a Wednesday morning she walked into the one gray, windowless room at Airbnb. The five sat at an oval table with a stack of paper and took turns reading everything they did not like about her leadership. She wanted to push back and did not. Listening, she heard the truth: she had made changes without transparency or context, and they had not seen her try to understand them. Whether the changes were the right ones mattered less than how she went about them. She spent time with each person, explained what she understood and why she was changing things, and made the changes with them.

Before the meeting the team had the worst engagement scores in the company. A few months later they had the best. During her time there she grew the team from 10 to 100.