Lean In

by Sheryl Sandberg

  I did not reach this conclusion in a vacuum. All through my life, culturally reinforced signals cautioned me against being branded as too smart or too successful. It starts young. As a girl, you know that being smart is good in lots of ways, but it doesn’t make you particularly popular or attractive to boys. In school, I was called the “smartest girl in the class.” I hated that description. Who wants to go to the prom with the smartest girl in the class? Senior year, my class voted me “most likely to succeed,” along with a boy. I wasn’t going to take any chances with the prom, so I convinced my friend, who worked on the yearbook, to remove my name. I got a prom date who was fun and loved sports. In fact, he loved sports so much that two days before the prom, he canceled on me to go to a basketball game, saying, “I know you’ll understand since going to the playoffs is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” I did not point out that as a high school girl, I thought going to the prom was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Luckily, I found a new date who was less of a sports fan.

  I never really thought about why I went to such efforts to mute my achievements from such a young age. Then, about ten years after I graduated from business school, I was seated at dinner next to Deborah Gruenfeld, a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Stanford, and our friendly small talk quickly turned into an intense discussion. Having studied this issue, Professor Gruenfeld was able to explain the price women pay for success. “Our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in a double bind,” she said. “We believe not only that women are nurturing, but that they should be nurturing above all else. When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a negative impression and makes us uncomfortable.”7

  If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent. Since people want to hire and promote those who are both competent and nice, this creates a huge stumbling block for women. Acting in stereotypically feminine ways makes it difficult to reach for the same opportunities as men, but defying expectations and reaching for those opportunities leads to being judged as undeserving and selfish. Nothing has changed since high school; intelligence and success are not clear paths to popularity at any age. This complicates everything, because at the same time that women need to sit at the table and own their success, doing so causes them to be liked less.8

  Most people, myself included, really want to be liked—and not just because it feels good. Being liked is also a key factor in both professional and personal success. A willingness to make an introduction or advocate for or promote someone depends upon having positive feelings about that person. We need to believe in her ability to do the job and get along with everyone while doing it. That’s why, instinctively, many of us feel pressure to mute our accomplishments.

  In October 2011, Jocelyn Goldfein, one of the engineering directors at Facebook, held a meeting with our female engineers where she encouraged them to share the progress they had made on the products they were building. Silence. No one wanted to toot her own horn. Who would want to speak up when self-promoting women are disliked? Jocelyn switched her approach. Instead of asking the women to talk about themselves, she asked them to tell one another’s stories. The exercise became communal, which put everyone at ease.

  Owning one’s success is key to achieving more success. Professional advancement depends upon people believing that an employee is contributing to good results. Men can comfortably claim credit for what they do as long as they don’t veer into arrogance. For women, taking credit comes at a real social and professional cost. In fact, a woman who explains why she is qualified or mentions previous successes in a job interview can lower her chances of getting hired.9

  As if this double bind were not enough to navigate, gendered stereotypes can also lead to women having to do additional work without additional reward. When a man helps a colleague, the recipient feels indebted to him and is highly likely to return the favor. But when a woman helps out, the feeling of indebtedness is weaker. She’s communal, right? She wants to help others. Professor Flynn calls this the “gender discount” problem, and it means that women are paying a professional penalty for their presumed desire to be communal.10 On the other hand, when a man helps a coworker, it’s considered an imposition and he is compensated with more favorable performance evaluations and rewards like salary increases and bonuses. Even more frustrating, when a woman declines to help a colleague, she often receives less favorable reviews and fewer rewards. But a man who declines to help? He pays no penalty.11

  Because of these unfair expectations, women find themselves in “damned if they do” and “doomed if they don’t” situations.12 This is especially true when it comes to negotiations concerning compensation, benefits, titles, and other perks. By and large, men negotiate more than women.13 A study that looked at the starting salaries of students graduating with a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University found that 57 percent of the male students, but only 7 percent of the female students, tried to negotiate for a higher offer.14 But instead of blaming women for not negotiating more, we need to recognize that women often have good cause to be reluctant to advocate for their own interests because doing so can easily backfire.15

  There is little downside when men negotiate for themselves. People expect men to advocate on their own behalf, point out their contributions, and be recognized and rewarded for them. For men, there is truly no harm in asking. But since women are expected to be concerned with others, when they advocate for themselves or point to their own value, both men and women react unfavorably. Interestingly, women can negotiate as well as or even more successfully than men when negotiating for others (such as their company or a colleague), because in these cases, their advocacy does not make them appear self-serving.16 However, when a woman negotiates on her own behalf, she violates the perceived gender norm. Both male and female colleagues often resist working with a woman who has negotiated for a higher salary because she’s seen as more demanding than a woman who refrained from negotiating.17 Even when a woman negotiates successfully for herself, she can pay a longer-term cost in goodwill and future advancement.18 Regrettably, all women are Heidi. Try as we might, we just can’t be Howard.

  When I was negotiating with Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for my compensation, he made me an offer that I thought was fair. We had been having dinner several nights a week for more than a month and a half, discussing Facebook’s mission and his vision for the future. I was ready to accept the job. No, I was dying to accept the job. My husband, Dave, kept telling me to negotiate, but I was afraid of doing anything that might botch the deal. I could play hardball, but then maybe Mark would not want to work with me. Was it worth it when I knew that ultimately I was going to accept the offer? I concluded it was not. But right before I was about to say yes, my exasperated brother-in-law, Marc Bodnick, blurted out, “Damn it, Sheryl! Why are you going to make less than any man would make to do the same job?”

  My brother-in-law didn’t know the details of my deal. His point was simply that no man at my level would consider taking the first offer. This was motivating. I went back to Mark and said that I couldn’t accept, but I prefaced it by telling him, “Of course you realize that you’re hiring me to run your deal teams, so you want me to be a good negotiator. This is the only time you and I will ever be on opposite sides of the table.” Then I negotiated hard, followed by a nervous night wondering if I had blown it. But Mark called me the next day. He resolved the gap by improving my offer, extending the terms of my contract from four to five years and allowing me to buy into the company as well. His creative solution not only closed the deal, but also set us up for a longer-term alignment of interests.

  The goal of a successful negotiation is to achieve our objectives and continue to have people like us. Professor Hannah Riley Bowles, who studies gender and negotiations at Harvard’s Kennedy School o
f Government, believes that women can increase their chances of achieving a desired outcome by doing two things in combination.19 First, women must come across as being nice, concerned about others, and “appropriately” female. When women take a more instrumental approach (“This is what I want and deserve”), people react far more negatively.

  There is a saying, “Think globally, act locally.” When negotiating, “Think personally, act communally.” I have advised many women to preface negotiations by explaining that they know that women often get paid less than men so they are going to negotiate rather than accept the original offer. By doing so, women position themselves as connected to a group and not just out for themselves; in effect, they are negotiating for all women. And as silly as it sounds, pronouns matter. Whenever possible, women should substitute “we” for “I.” A woman’s request will be better received if she asserts, “We had a great year,” as opposed to “I had a great year.”20

  But a communal approach is not enough. According to Professor Bowles, the second thing women must do is provide a legitimate explanation for the negotiation.21 Men don’t have to legitimize their negotiations; they are expected to look out for themselves. Women, however, have to justify their requests. One way of doing this is to suggest that someone more senior encouraged the negotiation (“My manager suggested I talk with you about my compensation”) or to cite industry standards (“My understanding is that jobs that involve this level of responsibility are compensated in this range”). Still, every negotiation is unique, so women must adjust their approach accordingly.

  Telling a current employer about an offer from another company is a common tactic but works for men more easily than for women. Men are allowed to be focused on their own achievements, while loyalty is expected from women. Also, just being nice is not a winning strategy. Nice sends a message that the woman is willing to sacrifice pay to be liked by others. This is why a woman needs to combine niceness with insistence, a style that Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, calls “relentlessly pleasant.”22 This method requires smiling frequently, expressing appreciation and concern, invoking common interests, emphasizing larger goals, and approaching the negotiation as solving a problem as opposed to taking a critical stance.23 Most negotiations involve drawn-out, successive moves, so women need to stay focused … and smile.

  No wonder women don’t negotiate as much as men. It’s like trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels. So what should we do? Should we play by the rules that others created? Should we figure out a way to put on a friendly expression while not being too nice, displaying the right levels of loyalty and using “we” language? I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations. I know it is not a perfect answer but a means to a desirable end. It is also true, as any good negotiator knows, that having a better understanding of the other side leads to a superior outcome. So at the very least, women can enter these negotiations with the knowledge that showing concern for the common good, even as they negotiate for themselves, will strengthen their position.

  In addition, there are huge benefits to communal effort in and of itself. By definition, all organizations consist of people working together. Focusing on the team leads to better results for the simple reason that well-functioning groups are stronger than individuals. Teams that work together well outperform those that don’t. And success feels better when it’s shared with others. So perhaps one positive result of having more women at the top is that our leaders will have been trained to care more about the well-being of others. My hope, of course, is that we won’t have to play by these archaic rules forever and that eventually we can all just be ourselves.

  We still have a long way to go. In November 2011, San Francisco magazine ran a story on female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and illustrated it by superimposing the featured women’s heads onto male bodies.24 The only body type they could imagine for successful entrepreneurship was wearing a tie or a hoodie. Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby. In fact, these “bad mother with a briefcase” images are so prevalent that writer Jessica Valenti collected them in a funny and poignant blog post called “Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies.”25

  Until we can get there, I fear that women will continue to sacrifice being liked for being successful. When I first arrived at Facebook, a local blog devoted some serious pixels to trashing me. They posted a picture of me and superimposed a gun into my hand. They wrote “liar” in big red letters across my face. Anonymous sources labeled me “two-faced” and “about to ruin Facebook forever.” I cried. I lost some sleep. I worried that my career was over. Then I told myself it didn’t matter. Then everyone else told me it didn’t matter—which only reminded me that they were reading these awful comments too. I fantasized about all sorts of rejoinders, but in the end, my best response was to ignore the attacks and do my job.

  Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, believes that learning to withstand criticism is a necessity for women. Early in her career, Arianna realized that the cost of speaking her mind was that she would inevitably offend someone. She does not believe it is realistic or even desirable to tell women not to care when we are attacked. Her advice is that we should let ourselves react emotionally and feel whatever anger or sadness being criticized evokes for us. And then we should quickly move on. She points to children as her role model. A child can cry one moment and run off to play the next. For me, this has been good advice. I wish I were strong enough to ignore what others say, but experience tells me I often can’t. Allowing myself to feel upset, even really upset, and then move on—that’s something I can do.

  It also helps to lean on one another. We can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the attacks are not personal. We can joke, as Marlo Thomas did, that “a man has to be Joe McCarthy in order to be called ruthless. All a woman needs to do is put you on hold.” Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few. If women held 50 percent of the top jobs, it would just not be possible to dislike that many people.

  Sharon Meers was motivated to write Getting to 50/50 after observing this kind of tipping point firsthand. In the late 1990s, Amy Goodfriend was chosen to lead Goldman Sachs’s U.S. derivatives team (and later became the first female partner in the Equities Division). It was a seismic event and caused four senior men to quit the group. Amy faced a lot of skepticism and criticism. Before Sharon joined the team, a male friend told her, “Amy’s a bitch, but an honest bitch.” Sharon found that Amy was a great boss, and over the next few years, the derivatives group was transformed under her leadership. Once there were more than five female managing directors in the division—a critical mass—the negativity and grumbling began to die down. It became normal to have female leaders, and by 2000, the stigma seemed to have dissipated. Sadly, when those senior women later left and the critical mass shrank, the faith that women could be as successful as their male peers shrank with it.

  Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders—including female leaders themselves. Since 1999, editor Pattie Sellers of Fortune magazine has overseen an annual conference that she calls the Most Powerful Women Summit. On my first night there in 2005, I was in the lounge with two close friends, Diana Farrell, then head of the McKinsey Global Institute, and Sue Decker, then CFO of Yahoo. We were talking about the name of the conference, and I mentioned that when I saw the title on Google’s corporate calendar, I ran to find Camille to ask her to change the name to “Fortune Women’s Conference.” Diana and Sue laughed and said that they had done the exact same thing.

  Later, Pattie explained that she and her colleagues chose this name on purpose to force women to confront their own power and feel more comfortable with that word. I still struggle with this. I am fine applying the word “powerful” to other women�
�the more the better—but I still shake my head in denial when it is applied to me. The nagging voice in the back of my head reminds me, as it did in business school, “Don’t flaunt your success, or even let people know about your success. If you do, people won’t like you.”

  Less than six months after I started at Facebook, Mark and I sat down for my first formal review. One of the things he told me was that my desire to be liked by everyone would hold me back. He said that when you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress. Mark was right.

  4

  It’s a Jungle Gym,

  Not a Ladder

  ABOUT A MONTH AFTER I joined Facebook, I got a call from Lori Goler, a highly regarded senior director of marketing at eBay. I knew Lori a bit socially, but she made it clear this was a business call and cut to the chase. “I want to apply to work with you at Facebook,” she said. “So I thought about calling you and telling you all of the things I’m good at and all of the things I like to do. Then I figured that everyone was doing that. So instead, I want to ask you: What is your biggest problem, and how can I solve it?”

  My jaw hit the floor. I had hired thousands of people over the previous decade and no one had ever said anything remotely like that. People usually focus on finding the right role for themselves, with the implication that their skills will help the company. Lori put Facebook’s needs front and center. It was a killer approach. I responded, “Recruiting is my biggest problem. And, yes, you can solve it.”

  Lori never dreamed she would work in recruiting, but she jumped in. She even agreed to drop down a level, since this was a new field for her and she was willing to trade seniority for acquiring new skills. Lori did a great job running recruiting and within months was promoted to her current job, leading People@Facebook. When I asked her recently if she wanted to go back to marketing someday, she responded that she believes human resources allows her to have a greater overall impact.