What I Learned From Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner at Zoomtopia 2018

I’ve had the opportunity to meet with a lot of great minds over the past few years, but talking with Jeff Weiner on the stage of Zoomtopia 2018 was a true highlight. As CEO of LinkedIn from 2008 to present, Jeff has taken his company from 338 employees to over 12,000, from 33 million members to 575 million, and from $100 million in revenues to over $5 billion. Jeff is a leader, in the truest sense of the word, and for me, a role model. We’ll be posting the recording of our fireside chat later this month, but in the meantime, I wanted to share my five favorite lessons I took from my time with Jeff.

1. What is compassion, and what is compassionate management?

Jeff explained to me that empathy is feeling what another person feels. Compassion is empathy plus action. It’s actually doing something to help the other person. In a work environment, this involves stepping back to be a “spectator of your thoughts” and taking time to understand others. We are naturally egocentric, meaning that we see the world from our own perspective. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but it means that we tend to expect others to behave just as we would and to get frustrated when they act differently. Instead, we must coach them to play to their strengths.

“If you want to get the best out of someone, you need to take the time to understand who they are. What are they trying to accomplish? What are their hopes, dreams, fears, and insecurities? And then do everything within your power to set them up to be successful.”

2. How do you build and maintain trust, especially through major transitions?

Generating trust was foundational to Jeff and LinkedIn as they navigated through three phases of growth (the early days when Jeff was the new CEO, their IPO, and their acquisition by Microsoft). For Jeff, trust = consistency / time, and there is no substitute for either dimension. In large part, this involved making sure that the company maintained its values. So, for example, when employees assumed that they would lose their transparent culture once they went public, Jeff made a point of continuing their highly-transparent all-hands meetings.

"We have to play up to who we aspire to be in terms of our culture, not down to the lowest common denominator driven by fear."

3. How do you shift your mindset and your company’s mindset to compassion?

Jeff discussed a few day-to-day practices that help him be a great leader:

• He takes care of himself - gets a good night’s sleep, exercises, and eats healthy
• He found a mindfulness practice (he uses meditation)
• He has 90 minutes of “buffer” in his daily schedule (typically in 3 half-hour blocks) - he uses this time to think, answer emails, take last-minute meetings, and so forth. “I couldn’t do my job without it.”

While compassionate management starts with the CEO and company leadership, Jeff made it clear that every employee has to manifest their company culture and values, including compassion. He shared several steps to make it happen:

• As leaders, we must be more mindful. We must be spectators of our thoughts, especially as we feel ourselves becoming emotional, and understand the thoughts of others.
• We must demonstrate compassionate management. If you see a conflict, hit the pause button, deescalate the situation, and explain what you’re doing.
• Hire to your values, and don’t lower the bar just because you need to hire quickly. This is the most common way Jeff has seen a company in hypergrowth go off the rails.
• Once someone is hired, they should see the values reinforced constantly, particularly in their onboarding.
• Bake your values into your evaluation process. At LinkedIn, they look at both the results and how they are generating the results. Don’t overweigh the results themselves - this can lead to bad practices and habits.

4. How does compassionate management show up in terms of the ways a company interacts with its external stakeholders?

Jeff explained that LinkedIn’s vision, “To create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” has compassion baked right into it. They don’t just want to create value for people with a strong pedigree and relationships, they want to help our entire 3-billion person workforce. That requires his team to think outside of their own needs and experiences, put themselves in the shoes of others, and proactively address unintended consequences.

Jeff gave the example of LinkedIn’s “Ask for referral” button, which helped job candidates highlight common connections to recruiters. Those who used the feature were eight times more likely to get hired. By most measures this was a huge success, but then his team realized that there was an unintended consequence. This feature doesn’t help workers without strong networks, and could perpetuate them being excluded from opportunities. For this reason, LinkedIn created the Career Advice Hub, where any LinkedIn member could request help and advice. So far, roughly two million members have been helped by roughly one million other members. This shows the power of asking difficult questions and being compassionate.

5. What are the most important skills that workers should develop to future-proof their employment?

Jeff surprised some of our audience when he said that the biggest skills gap is actually soft skills - written and oral communication, team building, collaboration, and so forth. The good news is that all companies possess some expertise in this, so the task is really to find these internal experts and spread their knowledge. The second area where he said we need to build skills is basic digital fluency. If a person can send emails, navigate spreadsheets, and prepare presentations decks, they are better equipped when the time comes for them to learn more advanced digital skills.

I want to extend my most sincere thanks to all the incredible speakers at Zoomtopia 2018. It was such an honor to share the stage with all of you, including my role model and friend, Jeff. LinkedIn has an incredible leader at the helm, and it was a real privilege to learn from him.