Come In Listening, Not Swinging
Earn trust before you inflict change: the first 90 days of a leader inheriting a team.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Katie Dill (Head of Design at Stripe; formerly Airbnb and Lyft) joined Airbnb with a diagnosis already formed from her interview loop and started driving change immediately. One month in, half her design team booked an hour-and-a-half meeting with HR and read her a list of grievances off printed sheets. The theme was not that her changes were wrong — it was that she had not earned the right to make them. The framework replaces the 'come in swinging' entry with a listening-first sequence that keeps the same destination but builds the trust that carries the team there.
Origin
Told first-hand by Katie Dill about her first month leading the ~10-person experience design org at Airbnb, a team that had previously reported directly to a founder. She credits the team's willingness to confront her as the biggest learning moment of her leadership career.
Core principles
- 01Interview-loop intel gives you a diagnosis, not a mandate.
- 02You can inflict change on people, or make change with them — only the second one holds.
- 03When you receive hard feedback, the instinct to explain is the disease, not the cure.
- 04Individual complaints are noise; the theme across them is the signal.
- 05Listening does not mean slowing down the direction — it means changing how you carry people into it.
- 06Trust is a prerequisite for change velocity, not a reward for it.
How to run it
- 1
Hold your diagnosis loosely
Arrive with the pattern you formed during interviews (what's broken in cross-functional collaboration, why engagement is low) but treat it as a hypothesis to be tested with the team, not a change plan to be executed on them.
Pro tip Write your incoming diagnosis down on day one and date it. Re-read it at day 60 to see how much of it survived contact with the people doing the work.
Watch out The people who briefed you during the hiring process are usually not the people you now manage. Their view of the team is an outside view.
- 2
Run listening before initiatives
Before shipping org changes, spend the first weeks understanding what each individual and the team is setting out to do, what they care about, and what motivates them. This is the material trust is built from.
Pro tip Ask each person what they think is broken AND what they'd defend to the death. The second question tells you what your change plan is about to run over.
- 3
When the ambush comes, shut up and take it
If the team confronts you, your instinct will be to correct the record — 'there was a good reason for that', 'that's not how it actually was'. Suppress it. Hear the whole thing out. Responding defensively confirms the exact complaint they came to deliver.
Pro tip Take notes silently. Thank them for the risk they took. Schedule the response for a later meeting so you are not reacting live.
Watch out Defending yourself in that room converts a recoverable trust gap into a permanent one.
- 4
Extract the theme, not the items
Ignore the individual grievances for a moment and ask what single thing is true across all of them. In Dill's case the whole list resolved to one sentence: I hadn't earned their trust. The theme is the thing you fix.
Pro tip If you can't name the theme in one sentence, you're still arguing with the list.
- 5
Keep the direction, change the method
Do not retreat from the changes the org genuinely needs. Keep moving in that direction but bring people with you — surface the why, involve them in the how, show the shared goal. Same destination, different vehicle.
Pro tip Watch engagement scores as the objective read on whether the trust repair is working, not your own sense of how meetings feel.
Watch out Over-correcting into pure consensus is its own failure — the org still needed the change.
In the wild
One month into leading Airbnb's design org, Dill found a 90-minute meeting on her calendar with five of her ten designers and the HR partner. In a plain white room, they took turns reading from printed papers listing what she was doing wrong. She resisted the urge to defend herself, listened, and identified the common theme: she had not earned their trust before driving change.
→ She shifted her operating mode to listening-first while still pushing the org changes. A couple of months later the design team had the best engagement scores in the company.
Common mistakes
Coming in swinging
Arriving 'ready to go' with a change agenda formed from interview-loop hearsay. The changes may even be right, but a team that doesn't believe you care about them or share their goals will not follow you into them.
Answering the feedback in the room
The urge to explain context ('there was a good reason for that') reads as proof you're not listening — which is usually the exact complaint. Explanation is for later; the room is for absorbing.
Treating the grievance list as a to-do list
Fixing every individual item while missing the theme leaves the trust deficit intact. The list is a symptom set; the theme is the disease.
Is it for you?
Best for
A leader taking over an existing team — especially one that previously reported to a founder or a beloved manager — who has a clear mandate to change how the team works.
Not ideal for
Founding a team from scratch, or a genuine turnaround where the mandate is explicitly to remove people and there is no existing team to bring along.
From the transcript
“the theme that was across all of that is that I hadn't earned their trust”
“instead of coming in swinging you know come in listening”
“and then you know a couple months later we had the best engagement scores in the company”
From the episode
Failure