Expedia CEO: “I Suck At Hiring People – My Job Is Development”

This week, Glassdoor announced The Highest Rated CEOs in the UK for 2017. So, we caught up with #9 ranked UK CEO Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia (also voted #39 in US) to discuss what it means to be a top CEO across both sides of the Atlantic. We also discovered that he doesn't fancy himself as a hiring manager and that jumping into pools with colleagues at company parties has been far more effective than trying to get to know employees during office hours. Glassdoor: What was your first job? Dara Khosrowshahi: My first job was a summer spent working as an attendant at the neighborhood Mobil gas station before automated pumps took over the world. Cash was king and they still sold leaded and unleaded gas! What is your typical morning routine? I wake up at 5am and work out – either run on a treadmill or my new favourite, my Peloton Bike. I need that morning workout to clear my head and relieve some of the stress of the job. Then coffee, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. My meetings usually start at 7am or 8am. What does “leadership” mean to you? You need leadership at all levels of a company. Many people confuse managing with leading. Leading is about setting an example, sometimes pushing hard. It’s about making your team and the people around you better. You can be a leader without managing anyone and I’ve often found that the most important leaders at the company are individual contributors who have terrific followership. What has been your most rewarding moment as CEO? Your most challenging? They are one and the same. Five years ago I had to take operational control of Expedia.com because the brand president and I couldn’t meet eye-to-eye on strategy. I had to make a change fast and I needed to connect deeply with the organization and help engineer a turnaround. I learned more in that span of time than I ever have in my career and I have to admit that I had a heck of a lot of fun. Pulling back to my CEO job was hard but my wife was pretty happy about it! What do you do to foster employee trust and engagement? We are hardcore about driving transparency across the company – it’s one of our key cultural norms. The higher up in an organization you go, the less you know about what is REALLY going on. People package their messages, everything gets filtered. If you want the real story from your employees, you have to give the real story from up top. So we are honest, sometimes to a fault, about what is going on. If I’m brutally honest with them, hopefully they can be brutally honest back to me. Your employees love working here as we see from the strong rating on Glassdoor — how do you make this a great place to work day in and day out? Well, winning helps. I think you can invest [a] huge effort in culture and environment, but you are running uphill if your company isn’t a success. We’ve been lucky enough to be in a great part of the economy (travel), which continues to move online, and we’ve built and bought some winning brands on a global basis. Beyond that, we’ve focused on building independent brands and businesses that control their own destiny and don’t have to ask for permission for everything they do. Bureaucracy inevitably seeps in and you have to periodically sweep it away. Winning teams are fun. Winning teams that can move fast are even more fun! Good leadership is not just one person — how do you work with your leaders and management teams to make sure employees have great leadership here? We are always looking for people who have followership and are able to groom future leaders who move into different parts of the company. I call them talent exporters. The more talent you export inside the company, the more celebrated you are. Any advice for leaders of other companies? Stay true to who you are. There isn’t just one style of leadership that works universally. Understand your strengths and play to those strengths. I remember reading an article about a hugely respected CEO who managed by “walking the halls.” So I decided that I needed to walk the halls more and I had my assistant block off “walk the halls” time for me. The fact that I had to block off the time versus just walking around because I wanted to should have been the first clue that failure was imminent. I would walk around with a pained expression, forcing awkward conversations with employees who had better things to do. It lasted two very painful months. Now, instead of walking halls I jump into pools at our pool parties. Way more fun. Why do you think you get such high approval from your own employees? Because I am authentic with them and most of them feel like they can be authentic with me. I like people. I love our company and I really care for our employees. It gives me real pleasure for them to develop and succeed. I think they see that. It’s clear you inspire many of your own employees — who inspires you? My Dad really inspires me. He is a quiet, reserved person, but he commands such respect from my family and everyone around him. When he speaks, he speaks with total clarity. He’s a religious man, a Muslim. Recently he talked to me about how Islam was being debased by certain folks who are using it for the projection of power and their own personal agendas. When my father talks, people listen. What type of people do you like to hire and why? Unlikely confession coming from a CEO: I suck at hiring people. You have to be dead honest with yourself and recognize your strengths and weaknesses. My strength is developing people, pushing them, growing them, putting them in new areas to round out their skills. I leave the hiring to my team. My job is development. If you weren’t a CEO, what would you be (in terms of a job or career)? Rock star. Bono doesn’t know it, but one of his luckiest breaks was my becoming a CEO – the competition dried right up. Yup, I’m going to stick with that one…

Does Dara sound like someone you’d like to work for? Apply here for jobs at Expedia, the UK’s  #1 Best Place To Work.