Managing Compassionately: My Conversation with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner

My latest Never Stand Still guest, Jeff Weiner, is someone who hasn’t had to sacrifice heart in order to be successful. As the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff has grown the company from 338 employees to over 14,000 and increased its revenue from $78 million to more than $6 billion. But one of the things I admire most about Jeff is that he’s accomplished all of this while ranking as a top CEO employees want to work for on Glassdoor—claiming the #1 spot a couple years ago and consistently placing in the top 10 since then.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Jeff for a #NeverStandStill conversation at LinkedIn’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, and got to ask him about his leadership style, the trends he’s seeing for the future of work, how he’s overcome challenges in his career, and more. Here are three of my favorite takeaways from our conversation:

1.    Manage compassionately to create a virtuous cycle.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Jeff’s reputation as a CEO who people want to work for comes from a leadership philosophy he calls “compassionate management.” It came to him when he was reading The Art of Happiness, which taught him about the distinction between empathy and compassion: “compassion is empathy plus action.” When it comes to managing or working with other people, Jeff articulated that compassion can help you “better understand what they're trying to accomplish, and you can work towards that end, and you can do that together.” And when you do that within a company, “you can create a very virtuous cycle, where otherwise a vicious cycle would exist.”

At PayPal, we talk a lot about living our values of collaboration, innovation, inclusion, and wellness. Jeff leads LinkedIn in a similar way, and I love that one of their codified values stemming from compassion is that “relationships matter.” I’ve seen these strong relationships pull the best talent out of people, create efficiencies, and increase productivity at PayPal, and it’s something we should all strive to live by every day.

2.    Make plans to learn, not just to accomplish tasks.

When I saw a few months ago that Jeff had posted on his LinkedIn about the importance of having a “To Learn” list in addition to a “To Do” list, I knew I wanted to ask him about it. In our conversation, he said, “It occurred to me that for as much as I think virtually all of us in the business world recognize the importance of ongoing learning and development…while we all have to-do lists—and most people can offer up their to-do list instantaneously—almost no one I know has a to-learn list.” It’s true, and it got me thinking about what might be on mine. I’ve always found that the more I dig into a topic or skill, the more I’m humbled by what I still have to learn. Jeff told me that right now he’s focused on how people access opportunity, especially those who are underserved or underrepresented, and how LinkedIn can play a role in closing the network gap. We’re focusing on the same thing at PayPal in terms of democratizing access to financial services.

3.    Invest in soft skills for the future of work.

LinkedIn has incredible access and unique insight into global trends in hiring, the types of jobs that are increasingly popular, and desired skillsets that hiring managers are looking for in a workforce that’s changing rapidly. Despite the fact that advanced technology is a hot topic these days and has an acute skills gap in terms of supply and demand, Jeff shared that the biggest gap is actually in soft skills—like oral and written communication, leadership, and collaboration. He shared, “It's going to be much harder for AI and algorithms to fully replace the way in which human beings are capable of connecting with one another. So, the work that is more rote, more replicable, more scalable, there's going to be displacement there. But, when it comes to the way in which people connect with one another, and work with one another…those jobs are more likely to be available in light of the rise of certain kinds of technology.”

Many thanks to Jeff for taking the time to speak with me about so many important topics. In the spirit of lifelong learning, one of the things on my “To Learn” list is to continue speaking with leaders like Jeff who have a lot to teach us about business, relationships, and life.

Over the course of our conversation, Jeff shared more details about what compassionate management looks like in practice, how LinkedIn has operationalized their vision to link people with professional opportunity, and how he emerged from a career challenge with a new mindset. You can listen to our full conversation on the Never Stand Still podcast available on Apple Podcasts. Let me know which of Jeff’s insights stood out to you.