Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

by Sheryl Sandberg

A 2011 McKinsey report noted that men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.14

Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.

I learned over time that while it was hard to shake feelings of self-doubt, I could understand that there was a distortion. I would never possess my brother’s effortless confidence, but I could challenge the notion that I was constantly headed for failure. When I felt like I was not capable of doing something, I’d remind myself that I did not fail all of my exams in college. Or even one. I learned to undistort the distortion.

If a woman pushes to get the job done, if she’s highly competent, if she focuses on results rather than on pleasing others, she’s acting like a man. And if she acts like a man, people dislike her. In response to this negative reaction, we temper our professional goals. Author Ken Auletta summarized this phenomenon in The New Yorker when he observed that for women, “self-doubt becomes a form of self-defense.”6 In order to protect ourselves from being disliked, we question our abilities and downplay our achievements, especially in the presence of others. We put ourselves down before others can.

Alice Walker, who observed, “The

most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Official mentorship programs are not sufficient by themselves and work best when combined with other kinds of development and training. Deloitte’s Leading to WIN Women’s Initiative is a good example. Deloitte had already established a program to support female employees, who still remained underrepresented at the highest levels of the company. This prompted Chet Wood, CEO of Deloitte Tax, to ask, “Where are all the women?” In response, Deloitte launched a leadership development program in 2008. The program targeted senior women in the tax division who were close to promotion. The women were assigned sponsors, received executive coaching, shadowed members of the executive committee, and took on global assignments. Of the twenty-one members of the inaugural group, eighteen have since been promoted.

effective communication starts with the understanding that there is my point of view (my truth) and someone else’s point of view (his truth).

Rarely is there one absolute truth, so people who believe that they speak the truth are very silencing of others. When we recognize that we can see things only from our own perspective, we can share our views in a nonthreatening way.

One thing that helps is to remember that feedback, like truth, is not absolute. Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.

I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. I don’t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career. No exceptions. And contrary to the popular notion that only unmarried women can make it to the top, the majority of the most successful female business leaders have partners. Of the twenty-eight women who have served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six were married, one was divorced, and only one had never married.10 Many of these CEOs said they “could not have succeeded without the support of their husbands, helping with the children, the household chores, and showing a willingness to move.”11

If I had to embrace a definition of success, it would be that success is making the best choices we can … and accepting them. Journalist Mary Curtis suggested in The Washington Post that the best advice anyone can offer “is for women and men to drop the guilt trip, even as the minutes tick away. The secret is there is no secret—just doing the best you can with what you’ve got.”32

Because the vast majority of leaders are men, it is not possible to generalize from any one example. But the dearth of female leaders causes one woman to be viewed as representative of her entire gender.6 And because people often discount and dislike female leaders, these generalizations are often critical.