Three Things I Learned From Jeff Weiner’s (CEO @LinkedIn) Interview
Jeff Weiner (@jeffweiner) was interviewed by Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) of Pando (@pandodaily) Thursday night in San Francisco.
I personally walked away with three core lessons, ranging from the most common advice I’ve heard in Silicon Valley to something that almost no one talks about.
1. Focus
Yes, you’ve heard this one before as it has become a Silicon Valley mantra of sorts. After all, building a company is an all-consuming pursuit so it requires significant focus. Jeff added another perspective though.
At his tenure at Yahoo!, the company had expanded into so many business lines — search, news, email, etc.—and the entrepreneurial firehose kept on adding to the number of products that the company had to manage. Over time, competitors swarmed into all of these businesses and specialized in these verticals.
The “problem” was that Yahoo! was the number 1 or number 2 players in almost every category that they got involved in. Yahoo! couldn’t focus during that period because it is very hard to look at a business line that’s number 1 or 2 in a space and justify shutting it down.
Jeff argued that a leader needs to look 3, to 5, to 7 years into the future and ask “are we still going to be number 1 or 2 in that category?” If the answer is “no”, then a leader and a company will have to make incredibly courageous decisions to shift away from those categories, which are still number 1 or 2 today.
Competitors specialized and over time was able to focus all of their time and resources on one of the areas that Yahoo! was in, eventually outpacing them.
2. Thoughtfulness
Jeff and his partner Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) at LinkedIn have built an amazing company through a very thoughtful approach.
Thoughtful in two sense — first, thinking deeply and applying intellectual rigor to everything and second, thinking about other people.
Raw intellect is not so rare in the technology world, but thoughtfulness goes beyond. It is the process of thinking deeply and thoroughly through everything and constructing mental frameworks to solve problems. These are not superficial frameworks, but profound constructs that are crafted through collective experience, pattern recognition and years of continuous iteration. Simply put, it is having a systematic and strategic way to everything in work and life.
The second concept of thoughtfulness is thinking about other people. It is an important value that we learn from our upbringing but is hardly prevalent in competitive companies. Jeff credits Reid for always looking out for other people and will do anything he can to be helpful. This second form of thoughtfulness is a crucial piece of Silicon Valley culture that has built it into the community that it is today.
3. Compassion
This is one of the least common words I hear in Silicon Valley and probably business in general. We have come to admire the leader with an uncompromising attitude and superhuman intensity, which in some cases is a slippery slope to justify an asshole culture.
Jeff’s concept of compassion and compassionate leadership provides a fresh look at what it takes to be a great leader.
As a leader, it’s easy to project your own worldview on other people and then get frustrated if someone cannot do a job the way you want it to be done.
Jeff told a story of a time when one of his direct reports was frustrated at a team member and subtly undermined that member. It became painfully obvious to everyone else in the organization the dysfunction it caused. Jeff asked his direct report to be more compassionate and find a way to play to the strength of this team member. He reasoned that this team member was only there because of the team leader’s decision to have him on the team. It’s up to this leader to move the member to an area of his strength, to a different function within the team or ultimately to out of the organization. If someone isn’t performing well, it is the leader’s responsibility to try to understand, listen and resolve it smoothly.
Within weeks, the direct report told Jeff that after moving this team member to a different function, performance of the whole team increased significantly. At that point, Jeff realized that he had unfortunately been doing the exact same thing to another direct report of his—projecting his own methods onto that person and becoming frustrated. From that day on, he aspired to alway manage compassionately.
I was inspired by Jeff’s concept of compassionate leadership and how much it can improve a team and a culture.
It’s easy for a leader to impose on team members, it takes a great deal more of patience, maturity and self awareness to listen, to coach, to do the tough work of helping team members find ways to fulfill their potentials. It’s an idea that pays dividend in the long term and it’s an idea that I almost never hear in the fast, competitive and hard-driving world of technology.
Final
When asked the final question of the night, “what mediocre superpower would you want to have?”, Jeff answered without hesitation:
Infinite patience.
This post is my personal takeaways from the event. To see the full interview for yourself, please visit Pando’s video library where this interview will be posted within a few days.
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