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 "d.a.m.ned if they do" and "doomed if they don"t" situations.12 This is especially true when it comes to negotiations concerning compensation, benefits, t.i.tles, 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, "d.a.m.n 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 of 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, p.r.o.nouns matter. Whenever possible, women should subst.i.tute "we" for "I." A woman"s request will be better received if she a.s.serts, "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 ill.u.s.trated 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 b.i.t.c.h, but an honest b.i.t.c.h." 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 ma.s.s-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 ma.s.s 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 Inst.i.tute, and Sue Decker, then CFO of Yahoo. We were talking about the name of the conference, and I mentioned that when I saw the t.i.tle 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 [email protected] 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.
The most common metaphor for careers is a ladder, but this concept no longer applies to most workers. As of 2010, the average American had eleven jobs from the ages of eighteen to forty-six alone.1 This means that the days of joining an organization or corporation and staying there to climb that one ladder are long gone. Lori often quotes Pattie Sellers, who conceived a much better metaphor: "Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder."
As Lori describes it, ladders are limiting-people can move up or down, on or off. Jungle gyms offer more creative exploration. There"s only one way to get to the top of a ladder, but there are many ways to get to the top of a jungle gym. The jungle gym model benefits everyone, but especially women who might be starting careers, switching careers, getting blocked by external barriers, or reentering the workforce after taking time off. The ability to forge a unique path with occasional dips, detours, and even dead ends presents a better chance for fulfillment. Plus, a jungle gym provides great views for many people, not just those at the top. On a ladder, most climbers are stuck staring at the b.u.t.t of the person above.
A jungle gym scramble is the best description of my career. Younger colleagues and students frequently ask me how I planned my path. When I tell them that I didn"t, they usually react with surprise followed by relief. They seem encouraged to know that careers do not need to be mapped out from the start. This is especially comforting in a tough market where job seekers often have to accept what is available and hope that it points in a desirable direction. We all want a job or role that truly excites and engages us. This search requires both focus and flexibility, so I recommend adopting two concurrent goals: a long-term dream and an eighteen-month plan.
I could never have connected the dots from where I started to where I am today. For one thing, Mark Zuckerberg was only seven years old when I graduated from college. Also, back then, technology and I did not exactly have a great relationship. I used Harvard"s computer system only once as an undergraduate, to run regressions for my senior thesis on the economics of spousal abuse. The data was stored on large, heavy magnetic tapes that I had to lug in big boxes across campus, cursing the entire way and arriving in a sweaty mess at the sole computer center, which was populated exclusively with male students. I then had to stay up all night spinning the tapes to input the data. When I tried to execute my final calculations, I took down the entire system. That"s right. Years before Mark famously crashed that same Harvard system, I beat him to it.
When I graduated from college, I had only the vaguest notion of where I was headed. This confusion was in deep contrast to my father"s clear conviction of what he wanted to do from a young age. When my dad was sixteen, he felt a sharp abdominal pain during a basketball practice. My grandmother-good Jewish mother that she was-a.s.sumed it was hunger and fed him a big dinner. That made it worse. He ended up in the hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute appendicitis, but because he had eaten, they couldn"t operate for twelve excruciating hours. The next morning, a surgeon removed his appendix and, along with it, the pain. My father chose his career that day, deciding that he would become a physician so he could help ease other people"s suffering.
My mother shared my father"s desire to help others. She was only eleven when she heard her rabbi give a sermon on the importance of civil rights and tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase that means "repairing the world." She responded to the call, grabbing a tin can and knocking on doors to support civil rights workers in the South. She has remained a pa.s.sionate volunteer and human rights activist ever since. I grew up watching my mother work tirelessly on behalf of persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union. She and her friend Margery Sanford would write heartfelt appeals calling for the release of political prisoners. In the evenings, my dad would join them. Thanks to the collective efforts of concerned people all over the world, many lives were saved.
Throughout my childhood, my parents emphasized the importance of pursuing a meaningful life. Dinner discussions often centered on social injustice and those fighting to make the world a better place. As a child, I never thought about what I wanted to be, but I thought a lot about what I wanted to do. As sappy as it sounds, I hoped to change the world. My sister and brother both became doctors, and I always believed I would work at a nonprofit or in government. That was my dream. And while I don"t believe in mapping out each step of a career, I do believe it helps to have a long-term dream or goal.
A long-term dream does not have to be realistic or even specific. It may reflect the desire to work in a particular field or to travel throughout the world. Maybe the dream is to have professional autonomy or a certain amount of free time. Maybe it"s to create something lasting or win a coveted prize. Some goals require more traditional paths; anyone who aspires to become a Supreme Court justice should probably start by attending law school. But even a vague goal can provide direction, a far-off guidepost to move toward.
With an eye on my childhood dream, the first job I took out of college was at the World Bank as research a.s.sistant to Larry Summers, who was serving a term as chief economist. Based in Washington, D.C., the Bank"s mission is to reduce global poverty. I spent my first nine months in the stacks of the Bank library on the corner of Nineteenth and Pennsylvania, looking up facts and figures for Larry"s papers and speeches. Larry then generously arranged for me to join an India health field mission to get a closer look at what the Bank actually did.
Flying to India took me into an entirely different world. The team was working to eradicate leprosy, which was endemic in India"s most remote and poorest regions. The conditions were appalling. Due to the stigma of the disease, patients were often exiled from their villages and ended up lying on dirt floors in awful places that pa.s.sed for clinics. Facts and figures could never have prepared me for this reality. I have the deepest respect for people who provide hands-on help to those in crises. It is the most difficult work in the world.
I returned to D.C. with a plan to attend law school, but Lant Pritchett, an economist in Larry"s office who has devoted his life to the study of poverty, persuaded me that business school would be a better alternative. I headed back to Cambridge. I tried to stay socially conscious by joining the highly unpopular Nonprofit Club. I also spent my second year studying social marketing-how marketing can be used to solve social problems-with Professor Kash Rangan. One of the cases we worked on concerned the shortage of organ donations, which results in eighteen deaths each day in the United States alone. I never forgot this case, and seventeen years later, Facebook worked with organ registries around the world to launch a tool to encourage donor registration.
After business school, I took a job as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles. The work never entirely suited me, so I stayed for only a year and then moved back to D.C. to join Larry, who was now deputy secretary of the Treasury Department. At first, I served as his special a.s.sistant. Then, when he was named secretary, I became his chief of staff. My job consisted of helping Larry manage the operations of the department and its $14 billion budget. It gave me the opportunity to partic.i.p.ate in economic policy at both a national and an international level. I also ran point on some smaller projects, including the administration"s proposal to promote the development of vaccines for infectious diseases.
During my four years at Treasury, I witnessed the first technology boom from a distance. Its impact was obvious and appealing even beyond being able to wear jeans to work. Technology was transforming communication and changing lives not just in the United States and developed countries, but everywhere. My long-term dream instinct kicked in. When President Clinton"s administration ended, I was out of a job and decided to move to Silicon Valley. In retrospect, this seems like a shrewd move, but in 2001, it was questionable at best. The tech bubble had burst, and the industry was still reeling from the aftershocks. I gave myself four months to find a job but hoped it would take fewer. It took almost a year.
My Silicon Valley job search had some highs, like getting to meet my business crush, eBay CEO Meg Whitman. It also had some lows, like meeting with a high-level executive who started my interview by stating that her company would never even consider hiring someone like me because government experience could not possibly prepare anyone to work in the tech industry. It would have been so cool to have thanked her for being honest and walked out of her office. But alas, I was never cool. I sat there hemming and hawing until every last molecule of oxygen had been sucked from the room. True to her word, she never even considered hiring me.
Fortunately, not everyone shared her view. Eric Schmidt and I had met several times during my Treasury years, and I went to see him just after he became CEO of the then relatively unknown Google. After several rounds of interviews with Google"s founders, they offered me a job. My bank account was diminishing quickly, so it was time to get back to paid employment, and fast. In typical-and yes, annoying-MBA fashion, I made a spreadsheet and listed my various opportunities in the rows and my selection criteria in the columns. I compared the roles, the level of responsibility, and so on. My heart wanted to join Google in its mission to provide the world with access to information, but in the spreadsheet game, the Google job fared the worst by far.
I went back to Eric and explained my dilemma. The other companies were recruiting me for real jobs with teams to run and goals to hit. At Google, I would be the first "business unit general manager," which sounded great except for the glaring fact that Google had no business units and therefore nothing to actually manage. Not only was the role lower in level than my other options, but it was entirely unclear what the job was in the first place.
Eric responded with perhaps the best piece of career advice that I have ever heard. He covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job-fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to not be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. He told me, "If you"re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don"t ask what seat. You just get on." I made up my mind that instant. Google was tiny and disorganized, but it was a rocket ship. And even more important to me, it was a rocket ship with a mission I believed in deeply.
Over the years, I have repeated Eric"s advice to countless people, encouraging them to reduce their career spreadsheets to one column: potential for growth. Of course, not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to work in an industry like high tech. But within any field, there are jobs that have more potential for growth than others. Those in more established industries can look for the rocket ships within their companies-divisions or teams that are expanding. And in careers like teaching or medicine, the corollary is to seek out positions where there is high demand for those skills. For example, in my brother"s field of pediatric neurosurgery, there are some cities with too many physicians, while others have too few. My brother has always elected to work where his expertise would be in demand so he can have the greatest impact.
Just as I believe everyone should have a long-term dream, I also believe everyone should have an eighteen-month plan. (I say eighteen months because two years seems too long and one year seems too short, but it does not have to be any exact amount of time.) Typically, my eighteen-month plan sets goals on two fronts. First and most important, I set targets for what my team can accomplish. Employees who concentrate on results and impact are the most valuable-like Lori, who wisely focused on solving Facebook"s recruiting problem before focusing on herself. This is not just thinking communally-the expected and often smart choice for a woman-but simply good business.
Second, I try to set more personal goals for learning new skills in the next eighteen months. It"s often painful, but I ask myself, "How can I improve?" If I am afraid to do something, it is usually because I am not good at it or perhaps am too scared even to try. After working at Google for more than four years, managing well over half of the company"s revenues, I was embarra.s.sed to admit that I had never negotiated a business deal. Not one. So I gathered my courage and came clean to my boss, Omid Kordestani, then head of sales and business development. Omid was willing to give me a chance to run a small deal team. In the very first deal I attempted, I almost botched the whole thing by making an offer to our potential partner before fully understanding their business. Fortunately, my team included a talented negotiator, Shailesh Rao, who stepped in to teach me the obvious: letting the other side make the first offer is often crucial to achieving favorable terms.
Everyone has room to improve. Most people have a style in the workplace that overshoots in one direction-too aggressive or too pa.s.sive, too talkative or too shy. In that first deal, I said too much. This was not a shock to anyone who knows me. Once I identified this weakness, I sought help to correct it. I turned to Maureen Taylor, a communications coach, who gave me an a.s.signment. She told me that for one week I couldn"t give my opinion unless asked. It was one of the longest weeks of my life. If I had bitten my tongue each time I started to express my opinion, I would have had no tongue left.