Lean In

by Sheryl Sandberg

  He was right. He did get the flat one. Actually, we all got flat A’s on the exam. My brother was not overconfident. Carrie and I were overly insecure.

  These experiences taught me that I needed to make both an intellectual and an emotional adjustment. I learned over time that while it was hard to shake feelings of self-doubt, I could understand that there was a distortion. I would never possess my brother’s effortless confidence, but I could challenge the notion that I was constantly headed for failure. When I felt like I was not capable of doing something, I’d remind myself that I did not fail all of my exams in college. Or even one. I learned to undistort the distortion.

  We all know supremely confident people who have no right to feel that way. We also all know people who could do so much more if only they believed in themselves. Like so many things, a lack of confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t know how to convince anyone to believe deep down that she is the best person for the job, not even myself. To this day, I joke that I wish I could spend a few hours feeling as self-confident as my brother. It must feel so, so good—like receiving a cosmic flat one every day.

  When I don’t feel confident, one tactic I’ve learned is that it sometimes helps to fake it. I discovered this when I was an aerobics instructor in the 1980s (which meant a silver leotard, leg warmers, and a shiny headband, all of which went perfectly with my big hair). Influenced by the gospel of Jane Fonda, aerobics also meant smiling solidly for a full hour. Some days, the smile came naturally. Other days, I was in a lousy mood and had to fake it. Yet after an hour of forced smiling, I often felt cheerful.

  Many of us have experienced being angry with someone and then having to pretend everything’s great in public. My husband, Dave, and I have our moments, and just when we are getting into it, it will be time to go to a friend’s house for dinner. We put on our “everything’s great” smiles, and amazingly, after a few hours, it often is.

  Research backs up this “fake it till you feel it” strategy. One study found that when people assumed a high-power pose (for example, taking up space by spreading their limbs) for just two minutes, their dominance hormone levels (testosterone) went up and their stress hormone levels (cortisol) went down. As a result, they felt more powerful and in charge and showed a greater tolerance for risk. A simple change in posture led to a significant change in attitude.12

  I would not suggest that anyone move beyond feeling confident into arrogance or boastfulness. No one likes that in men or women. But feeling confident—or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities. It’s a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized. During the six and a half years I worked at Google, I hired a team of four thousand employees. I did not know all of them personally, but I knew the top hundred or so. What I noticed over the years was that for the most part, the men reached for opportunities much more quickly than the women. When we announced the opening of a new office or the launch of a new project, the men were banging down my door to explain why they should lead the charge. Men were also more likely to chase a growth opportunity even before a new opening was announced. They were impatient about their own development and believed that they were capable of doing more. And they were often right—just like my brother. The women, however, were more cautious about changing roles and seeking out new challenges. I often found myself trying to persuade them to work in new areas. I have had countless conversations where women responded to this encouragement by saying, “I’m just not sure I’d be good at that.” Or “That sounds exciting, but I’ve never done anything like it before.” Or “I still have a lot to learn in my current role.” I rarely, if ever, heard these kinds of comments from men.

  Given how fast the world moves today, grabbing opportunities is more important than ever. Few managers have the time to carefully consider all the applicants for a job, much less convince more reticent people to apply. And increasingly, opportunities are not well defined but, instead, come from someone jumping in to do something. That something then becomes his job.

  When I first joined Facebook, I was working with a team to answer the critical question of how best to grow our business. The conversations were getting heated, with many people arguing their own positions strongly. We ended the week without consensus. Dan Rose, leader of our deal team, spent the weekend gathering market data that allowed us to reframe the conversation in analytics. His effort broke the logjam. I then expanded Dan’s responsibilities to include product marketing. Taking initiative pays off. It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if she is always waiting to be told what to do.

  Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer, was asked by The Huffington Post, “What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from a mistake you’ve made in the past?” She responded, “I said no to a lot of opportunities when I was just starting out because I thought, ‘That’s not what my degree is in’ or ‘I don’t know about that domain.’ In retrospect, at a certain point it’s your ability to learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that there is no perfect fit when you’re looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.”13

  Virginia Rometty, IBM’s first female CEO, told the audience at the 2011 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that early in her career, she was offered a “big job.” She worried that she lacked the proper experience and told the recruiter that she needed to think about it. That night, she discussed the offer with her husband, who pointed out, “Do you think a man would have ever answered that question that way?”

  “What it taught me was you have to be very confident,” Ginni said. “Even though you’re so self-critical inside about what it is you may or may not know. And that, to me, leads to taking risks.”14

  I continue to be alarmed not just at how we as women fail to put ourselves forward, but also at how we fail to notice and correct for this gap. And that “we” includes me. A few years ago, I gave a talk on gender issues to a few hundred employees at Facebook. After my speech, I took questions for as long as time permitted. Later that afternoon, I came back to my desk, where a young woman was waiting to talk to me. “I learned something today,” she said. “What?” I asked, feeling good, as I figured she was about to tell me how my words had touched her. Instead, she said, “I learned to keep my hand up.” She explained that toward the end of my talk, I had said that I would take only two more questions. I did so, and then she put her hand down, along with all of the other women. But several men kept their hands up. And since hands were still waving in the air, I took more questions—only from the men. Instead of my words touching her, her words hit me like a ton of bricks. Even though I was giving a speech on gender issues, I had been blind to one myself.

  If we want a world with greater equality, we need to acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up. We need institutions and individuals to notice and correct for this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing more women. And women have to learn to keep their hands up, because when they lower them, even managers with the best intentions might not notice.

  When I first started working for Larry Summers, then chief economist at the World Bank, he was married to a tax attorney, Vicki. He was very supportive of Vicki’s career and used to urge her to “bill like a boy.” His view was that the men considered any time they spent thinking about an issue—even time in the shower—as billable hours. His wife and her female colleagues, however, would decide that they were not at their best on a given day and discount hours they spent at their desks to be fair to the client. Which lawyers were more valuable to that firm? To make his point, Larry told them the story of a renowned Harvard Law School professor who was asked by a judge to itemize a bill. The professor responded that he could not because he was so often thinking about two things at once.


  Even now, I’m a long way from mastering the art of feeling confident. In August 2011, Forbes put out its annual World’s 100 Most Powerful Women list.15 I’m savvy enough to know that the list wasn’t based on a scientific formula and that magazines love these features because they generate lots of page views as readers click through each name. Still, I was shocked—no, horrified—to learn that Forbes ranked me as the fifth most powerful woman in the world, right after German chancellor Angela Merkel, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, and the CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi. This put me ahead of First Lady Michelle Obama and Indian politician Sonia Gandhi. Absurd. My own mother called to say, “Well, dear, I do think you are very powerful, but I am not sure you are more powerful than Michelle Obama.” You think?

  Far from feeling powerful, I felt embarrassed and exposed. When colleagues at Facebook stopped me in the halls to say congratulations, I pronounced the list “ridiculous.” When friends posted the link on Facebook, I asked them to take it down. After a few days, my longtime executive assistant, Camille Hart, summoned me into a conference room and closed the door. This was serious. She told me that I was handling the Forbes thing poorly and that I needed to stop subjecting anyone who brought up the list to a diatribe on its absurdity. I was showing too many people how uncomfortable I felt and revealing my insecurity. Instead, I needed to simply say, “Thank you.”

  We all need colleagues like Camille, who was honest enough to point out my less-than-gracious response. She was right. Whether the list was ridiculous or not, I didn’t write it and I didn’t have to react negatively to it. I doubt a man would have felt so overwhelmed by others’ perception of his power.

  I know that my success comes from hard work, help from others, and being at the right place at the right time. I feel a deep and enduring sense of gratitude to those who have given me opportunities and support. I recognize the sheer luck of being born into my family in the United States rather than one of the many places in the world where women are denied basic rights. I believe that all of us—men and women alike—should acknowledge good fortune and thank the people who have helped us. No one accomplishes anything all alone.

  But I also know that in order to continue to grow and challenge myself, I have to believe in my own abilities. I still face situations that I fear are beyond my capabilities. I still have days when I feel like a fraud. And I still sometimes find myself spoken over and discounted while men sitting next to me are not. But now I know how to take a deep breath and keep my hand up. I have learned to sit at the table.

  3

  Success and Likeability

  OKAY, so all a woman has to do is ignore society’s expectations, be ambitious, sit at the table, work hard, and then it’s smooth sailing all the way. What could possibly go wrong?

  In 2003, Columbia Business School professor Frank Flynn and New York University professor Cameron Anderson ran an experiment to test perceptions of men and women in the workplace.1 They started with a Harvard Business School case study about a real-life entrepreneur named Heidi Roizen. The case described how Roizen became a successful venture capitalist by using her “outgoing personality … and vast personal and professional network [that] included many of the most powerful business leaders in the technology sector.”2 Flynn and Anderson assigned half of the students to read Heidi’s story and gave the other half the same story with just one difference—they changed the name “Heidi” to “Howard.”

  Professors Flynn and Anderson then polled the students about their impressions of Heidi or Howard. The students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, which made sense since “their” accomplishments were completely identical. Yet while students respected both Heidi and Howard, Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi, on the other hand, was seen as selfish and not “the type of person you would want to hire or work for.” The same data with a single difference—gender—created vastly different impressions.

  This experiment supports what research has already clearly shown: success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.3 When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less. This truth is both shocking and unsurprising: shocking because no one would ever admit to stereotyping on the basis of gender and unsurprising because clearly we do.

  Decades of social science studies have confirmed what the Heidi/Howard case study so blatantly demonstrates: we evaluate people based on stereotypes (gender, race, nationality, and age, among others).4 Our stereotype of men holds that they are providers, decisive, and driven. Our stereotype of women holds that they are caregivers, sensitive, and communal. Because we characterize men and women in opposition to each other, professional achievement and all the traits associated with it get placed in the male column. By focusing on her career and taking a calculated approach to amassing power, Heidi violated our stereotypical expectations of women. Yet by behaving in the exact same manner, Howard lived up to our stereotypical expectations of men. The end result? Liked him, disliked her.

  I believe this bias is at the very core of why women are held back. It is also at the very core of why women hold themselves back. For men, professional success comes with positive reinforcement at every step of the way. For women, even when they’re recognized for their achievements, they’re often regarded unfavorably. Journalist Shankar Vedantam once cataloged the derogatory descriptions of some of the first female world leaders. “England’s Margaret Thatcher,” he wrote, “was called ‘Attila the Hen.’ Golda Meir, Israel’s first female Prime Minister, was ‘the only man in the Cabinet.’ President Richard Nixon called Indira Gandhi, India’s first female Prime Minister, ‘the old witch.’ And Angela Merkel, the current chancellor of Germany, has been dubbed ‘the iron frau.’ ”5

  I have seen this dynamic play out over and over. When a woman excels at her job, both male and female coworkers will remark that she may be accomplishing a lot but is “not as well-liked by her peers.” She is probably also “too aggressive,” “not a team player,” “a bit political,” “can’t be trusted,” or “difficult.” At least, those are all things that have been said about me and almost every senior woman I know. The world seems to be asking why we can’t be less like Heidi and more like Howard.

  Most women have never heard of the Heidi/Howard study. Most of us are never told about this downside of achievement. Still, we sense this punishment for success. We’re aware that when a woman acts forcefully or competitively, she’s deviating from expected behavior. If a woman pushes to get the job done, if she’s highly competent, if she focuses on results rather than on pleasing others, she’s acting like a man. And if she acts like a man, people dislike her. In response to this negative reaction, we temper our professional goals. Author Ken Auletta summarized this phenomenon in The New Yorker when he observed that for women, “self-doubt becomes a form of self-defense.”6 In order to protect ourselves from being disliked, we question our abilities and downplay our achievements, especially in the presence of others. We put ourselves down before others can.

  During the summer between my first and second year in business school, I received a letter in the mail congratulating me on becoming a Henry Ford Scholar for having the highest first-year academic record. The check was for $714.28, an odd number that immediately signaled that several students had split the prize. When we returned to school for our second year, six men let it be known that they had won this award. I multiplied my check by seven and it revealed a nearly round number. Mystery solved. There were seven of us—six men and me.

  Unlike the other six winners, I didn’t let my award status become general knowledge. I told only my closest friend, Stephen Paul, and knew he would keep my secret. On the surface, this decision might have worked against me, since grades at Harvard Business School are based 50 percent on class participation. Professors teach ninety-minute classes and are not allowed to write anything down, so they hav
e to rely on their memory of class discussion. When a student makes a comment that others refer to—“If I can build on what Tom said …”—that helps the professor remember the critical points and who made them. Just as in real life, performance is highly dependent upon the reaction people have to one another. The other six Ford Scholars quickly became the most-quoted speakers as their academic standing gave them instant credibility. They also received early job offers from prestigious employers before the official recruiting period even began. One day in class, one of the exalted six made a comment that, to my mind, demonstrated that he had not even read the case being discussed. Everyone fawned all over him. I wondered if I was making a huge mistake not letting people know that I was the seventh student. It would have been nice to float through my second year of business school without even reading the material.

  But I never really considered going public. I instinctively knew that letting my academic performance become known was a bad idea. Years later, when I learned about the Heidi/Howard case study, I understood the reason why. Being at the top of the class may have made life easier for my male peers, but it would have made my life harder.