What I Learned from Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn

Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, recently sat down for a fireside chat with Jeff Berman at the Upfront Summit, a gathering in Los Angeles of many of the top technology entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the country. It's a very informative talk so I hope you'll watch the video embedded below but I've also got the quick summary below.

The talk was really composed of three distinct sections: Compassionate Leadership, Leading in a Public Era (where political views become fair game) and The Future of Work (given the impact of AI and automation).

Compassionate Leadership

Jeff has become well known for his philosophies of "compassionate leadership" that borrow from the teachings of the Dalai Lama and apply life lessons to business. Leadership is such an important topic and a word often used but seldom given proper reflection about what it truly means.

Jeff spoke about the difference between empathy (feeling what another living thing feels) and compassion (maintaining enough space and distance between you and another person such that you can do something about they way that they feel). He gave the analogy that you can see a person on a hiking trail that is stuck with a bolder on his or her chest and have empathy for how badly it must feel, but having "compassion" is finding a way to help get the boulder off!

In a business perspective he said it's about putting yourself in the other person's shoes and helping somebody else to achieve an objective. He spoke about conflicts that we all have in the work place and how if you come from a position of compassion you will try to see beyond your own perspective of the conflict to try and understand how to make the situation better for the other person.

"We need to get out of our own head and understand the other person's perspective"

Jeff said something that really resonate with me about why compassionate leadership is so important. From my own experience I see that so much time and energy inside of companies is spent on conflict between humans who aren't aligned on a decision they think should be made. This conflict leads to delays in taking actions or even possibly taking the wrong actions to appease multiple people's sensibilities. He said that compassionate leadership isn't just about "virtue" but it's about doing business better and creating more value. And the take-away quote for me was

"A company's value is about the speed and quality of its decision making."

Leading in a Public Era

Jeff Berman asked Jeff Weiner about the current political climate. He said that he felt historically perhaps leaders didn't talk about political issues because it could lead to lost business but in today's climate increasingly it seems that employees have an interest in knowing how their leadership team feels about issues that affect them.

Jeff answered the question by acknowledging the difficulties that leaders face today but said that it was no longer possible for more leaders to stay silent on important topics that employees have a stake in. I know from my own experience that increasingly people care about protection on immigration, LGBTQ rights, climate change and so many other topics so I was interested to hear what Jeff had to say.

He said that it used to be a golden rule that you never talk about politics but today it's a requirement. He said that "nature abhors a vacuum" so that if you don't speak about about issues your key stakeholders (employees, customers, analysts, stockholders, etc) may assume what your point-of-view is. If you don't say where you stand on certain issues people will assume the worst.

"People need to know what the company's values are. You don't need to comment on everything or all the time but people need to know where you stand."

Employees care deeply about where you stand because they are affected. He praised Marc Benioff for taking a leadership role in our industry in having a point-of-view on important political protections for employees.

The Future of Work

Berman asked Jeff about LinkedIn's role in helping people with the transition as jobs are lost and new jobs are created as a result of AI / automation. This was perhaps the most fascinating part of the interview because it really spoke to the value of LinkedIn as a global enterprise and the role it hopes to play in the decades ahead. Of course we all have ideas about what LinkedIn is or isn't but this discussion really opened my eyes about the potential of the company.

Jeff spoke about LinkedIn's mission about it's six pillars (my words) for the future. The Mission:

"To create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. We'll do this by creating a global economic graph." 

PILLARS

1. Create a profile for every member of the 3 billion people in the global workforce
2. Create a profile for the 50-60 million global businesses
3. Create a digital representation for every job made available - there are 20 million of these at any moment in time
4. Create a digital representation for every skill attainable for the jobs offered by these companies
5. Create a digital representation for every higher education company and training facility
6. Create a publishing platform that enables people to share professionally shareable knowledge

What struck me about this was Jeff's discussion about how LinkedIn's "professional graph" is increasingly becoming an "economic graph" and helping governments better match its citizens with jobs available and skills required for future jobs. He said that at any moment in time LinkedIn can know the fastest growing jobs in any locality in the world and the relative skills of the workers in that locality and can measure the size of the gap and provide data to local community colleges.

They are working with governments all through the world to provide data. I found this fascinating because as technology continues to disrupt jobs but also create new ones it will be critical for local governments to help their citizens and employers adapt. I hope you'll listen to the short interview to hear his messages for yourself.