Build Your Skills Not Your Resume
... Do Real Work
To lead in this fast, connected, competitive world, you can’t just rely on who you are or the degree you hold. You need the ability to communicate authentically
Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and now a member on the company’s board, graduated from Harvard Business School in 1995. One of Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires, she returned to the campus recently to deliver the Class Day keynote address to graduating students.
Sandberg, 42,
offered career advice and spoke of what she thinks makes a great leader.
Excerpts from her speech:
It wasn’t really that long ago when I was sitting where you are, but the world has changed an awful lot. My section, section B, tried to have HBS’ first online class. We had to use an AOL chat room and dial-up service (your parents can explain). We had to pass out a list of screen names, because it was unthinkable to put your real name on the Internet. And it never worked. It kept crashing…the world wasn’t set up for 90 people to communicate at once online.
To reach more people than you could talk to in a day, you had to be rich and famous and powerful, be a celebrity, a politician, a CEO, but that’s not true today. Now ordinary people have voice, not just those of us lucky to go to HBS, but anyone with access to Facebook, Twitter, and a mobile phone. This is disrupting traditional power structures and levelling traditional hierarchy. Voice and power are shifting from institutions to individuals, from the historically powerful to the historically powerless, and all of this is happening so much faster than I could have imagined when I was sitting where you are today and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.
As the world becomes more connected and less hierarchical, traditional career paths are shifting as well. In 2001, after working in the government, I moved out to Silicon Valley to try finding a job. My timing wasn’t really that good. The bubble had crashed, small companies were closing, big companies were laying people off. One woman CEO looked at me and said, ‘We wouldn’t even think about hiring someone like you’.
After a while, I had a few offers and I had to make a decision. So what did I do? I am MBA-trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows, and compared the companies and the missions and the roles. One of the jobs on that sheet was to become Google’s first business unit GM, which sounds good now, but at the time no one thought consumer Internet companies could ever make money. I was not sure there was actually a job there at all. Google had no business units, so what was there to generally manage? And the job was several levels lower than jobs I was being offered at other companies. So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO, and I showed him the spreadsheet and said, ‘This job meets none of my criteria’. He put his hand on my spreadsheet and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t be an idiot’. Excellent career advice.
And then he said, ‘Get on a rocket ship’. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, just get on.
As you start your post-HBS career, look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they’re giving you. Do real work. Don’t plan too much, and don’t expect a direct climb.
You are entering a different business world than I entered. Mine was just starting to get connected. Yours is hyper-connected. Mine was competitive. Yours is way more competitive. Mine moved quickly, yours moves even more quickly. As traditional structures break down, leadership has to evolve as well. From hierarchy to shared responsibility, from command and control to listening and guiding. As you lead in this new world, you will not be able to rely on who you are or the degree you hold. You’ll have to rely on what you know. Your strength will not come from your place on some org chart, your strength will come from building trust and earning respect. You’re going to need talent, skill, imagination and vision, but more than anything else, you’re going to need the ability to communicate authentically, to speak so that you inspire the people around you and to listen so that you continue to learn each day on the job. The workplace is a difficult place for anyone to tell the truth, because no matter how flat we want our organizations to be, all organizations have some form of hierarchy. What that means is that one person’s performance is assessed by someone else’s perception. This is not a setup for honesty. A good leader recognises that most won’t feel comfortable challenging authority, so it falls upon authority to encourage people to question. It’s easy to say you’re going to encourage feedback but it’s hard to do, because unfortunately it doesn’t always come in a format we want to hear.
When I first started at Google, I had a team of four and it was important to me that I interview everyone, being part of my team meant I had to know you. When the team had gotten to 100 people, I realised it was taking longer to schedule my interviews so one day at my meeting of just my direct reports, I said maybe I should stop interviewing, fully expecting them to jump in and say no, your interviews are a critical part of the process. They applauded. Then they fell over themselves explaining that I was the bottleneck.
I was embarrassed, then I was angry and I spent a few hours quietly fuming. Why didn’t they tell me I was a bottleneck? Then I realised that if they hadn’t told me, that was my fault. I hadn’t been open enough to tell them I wanted that feedback and I would have to change that going forward. When you’re the leader, it is really hard to get good and honest feedback, no many how many times you ask for it. One trick I’ve discovered is that I try to speak really openly about the things I’m bad at, because that gives people permission to agree with me, which is a lot easier than pointing it out in the first place.
Motivation comes from working on things we care about, but it also comes from working with people we care about, and to care about someone, you have to know them. If you want to win hearts and minds, you have to lead with your heart as well as your mind. I don’t believe we have a professional self from Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. That kind of division probably never worked, but in today’s world, with a real voice, an authentic voice, it makes even less sense.
I’ve cried at work. I’ve told people I’ve cried at work. And it’s been reported in the press that Sheryl Sandberg cried on Mark Zuckerberg’s shoulder, which is not exactly what happened. I talk about my hopes and fears and ask people about theirs. I try to be myself. Honest about my strengths and weaknesses and I encourage others to do the same. It is all professional and it is all personal, all at the very same time.
It wasn’t really that long ago when I was sitting where you are, but the world has changed an awful lot. My section, section B, tried to have HBS’ first online class. We had to use an AOL chat room and dial-up service (your parents can explain). We had to pass out a list of screen names, because it was unthinkable to put your real name on the Internet. And it never worked. It kept crashing…the world wasn’t set up for 90 people to communicate at once online.
To reach more people than you could talk to in a day, you had to be rich and famous and powerful, be a celebrity, a politician, a CEO, but that’s not true today. Now ordinary people have voice, not just those of us lucky to go to HBS, but anyone with access to Facebook, Twitter, and a mobile phone. This is disrupting traditional power structures and levelling traditional hierarchy. Voice and power are shifting from institutions to individuals, from the historically powerful to the historically powerless, and all of this is happening so much faster than I could have imagined when I was sitting where you are today and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.
As the world becomes more connected and less hierarchical, traditional career paths are shifting as well. In 2001, after working in the government, I moved out to Silicon Valley to try finding a job. My timing wasn’t really that good. The bubble had crashed, small companies were closing, big companies were laying people off. One woman CEO looked at me and said, ‘We wouldn’t even think about hiring someone like you’.
After a while, I had a few offers and I had to make a decision. So what did I do? I am MBA-trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows, and compared the companies and the missions and the roles. One of the jobs on that sheet was to become Google’s first business unit GM, which sounds good now, but at the time no one thought consumer Internet companies could ever make money. I was not sure there was actually a job there at all. Google had no business units, so what was there to generally manage? And the job was several levels lower than jobs I was being offered at other companies. So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO, and I showed him the spreadsheet and said, ‘This job meets none of my criteria’. He put his hand on my spreadsheet and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t be an idiot’. Excellent career advice.
And then he said, ‘Get on a rocket ship’. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, just get on.
As you start your post-HBS career, look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they’re giving you. Do real work. Don’t plan too much, and don’t expect a direct climb.
You are entering a different business world than I entered. Mine was just starting to get connected. Yours is hyper-connected. Mine was competitive. Yours is way more competitive. Mine moved quickly, yours moves even more quickly. As traditional structures break down, leadership has to evolve as well. From hierarchy to shared responsibility, from command and control to listening and guiding. As you lead in this new world, you will not be able to rely on who you are or the degree you hold. You’ll have to rely on what you know. Your strength will not come from your place on some org chart, your strength will come from building trust and earning respect. You’re going to need talent, skill, imagination and vision, but more than anything else, you’re going to need the ability to communicate authentically, to speak so that you inspire the people around you and to listen so that you continue to learn each day on the job. The workplace is a difficult place for anyone to tell the truth, because no matter how flat we want our organizations to be, all organizations have some form of hierarchy. What that means is that one person’s performance is assessed by someone else’s perception. This is not a setup for honesty. A good leader recognises that most won’t feel comfortable challenging authority, so it falls upon authority to encourage people to question. It’s easy to say you’re going to encourage feedback but it’s hard to do, because unfortunately it doesn’t always come in a format we want to hear.
When I first started at Google, I had a team of four and it was important to me that I interview everyone, being part of my team meant I had to know you. When the team had gotten to 100 people, I realised it was taking longer to schedule my interviews so one day at my meeting of just my direct reports, I said maybe I should stop interviewing, fully expecting them to jump in and say no, your interviews are a critical part of the process. They applauded. Then they fell over themselves explaining that I was the bottleneck.
I was embarrassed, then I was angry and I spent a few hours quietly fuming. Why didn’t they tell me I was a bottleneck? Then I realised that if they hadn’t told me, that was my fault. I hadn’t been open enough to tell them I wanted that feedback and I would have to change that going forward. When you’re the leader, it is really hard to get good and honest feedback, no many how many times you ask for it. One trick I’ve discovered is that I try to speak really openly about the things I’m bad at, because that gives people permission to agree with me, which is a lot easier than pointing it out in the first place.
Motivation comes from working on things we care about, but it also comes from working with people we care about, and to care about someone, you have to know them. If you want to win hearts and minds, you have to lead with your heart as well as your mind. I don’t believe we have a professional self from Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. That kind of division probably never worked, but in today’s world, with a real voice, an authentic voice, it makes even less sense.
I’ve cried at work. I’ve told people I’ve cried at work. And it’s been reported in the press that Sheryl Sandberg cried on Mark Zuckerberg’s shoulder, which is not exactly what happened. I talk about my hopes and fears and ask people about theirs. I try to be myself. Honest about my strengths and weaknesses and I encourage others to do the same. It is all professional and it is all personal, all at the very same time.
ET120630
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