Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. Our goal on this show is to bring you the best thought leadership on managing teams, organizations, and your career.
This week we're giving you a taste of another HBR show, the New World of Work. In this video interview series, which can be found on hbr.org, Editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius speaks with top leaders about how their organizations are handling today's biggest challenges. And in this conversation, he's joined by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky.
这周我们为大家带来 HBR 的另一个节目 - 新的工作世界的味道。这个视频采访系列可以在 hbr.org 上找到,主编 Adi Ignatius 与顶尖领袖交谈,了解他们的组织如何应对当今最大的挑战。在这次对话中,他邀请了 LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky 加入。
The platform now has 875 million members in counting. And Roslansky credits that success largely to the company's strong culture and clear values. He speaks with Adi about everything from pandemic adaptations to the skills he wants to see in talent. Here's the interview.
Let's just leap right in. I mean, one of the questions I'd like to ask everybody is, how did you become this person? Tell us a little bit about your background and maybe one or two pivotal moments that led you to becoming now CEO of one of the most important social networks in the world.
Yeah, well, again, Adi, thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan of the program. And it is a true honor to be the CEO of LinkedIn, especially through what's a pretty pivotal time in the world of work. I don't know if there's one or two moments that I'd point to, but I would probably point to three things that have got me here.
Number one is luck. I was born at the right time to the right set of parents that were loving and caring and taught me the value of work and set me up with a great education. Number two is also luck. I was lucky to be a freshman in college in 1996 when the internet was just starting to get going and meet a couple of people who together we started a company taught myself how to code and just was lucky to kind of be in that place at that time and really learn about the internet and learn about technology. And then number three is actually luck as well. So I was lucky that as a junior product manager a long time ago at Yahoo, I had the opportunity to work and meet a gentleman by the name of Jeff Weiner who would go on to become the CEO of LinkedIn. I came with them. It's his first employee. And there's been a lot of hard work and choices along the way, but when you take a big step back on all of it, I think luck, luck and luck were pretty pivotal to getting me to the position that I'm in today. So that's our first takeaway for our viewers. Just sit back and get lucky. But that's you're being very modest and obviously you created opportunities where then luck could luck could work your way. So that's that's great.
I know you talk a lot about culture and values at LinkedIn. I'd love to know though what does that mean to you actually in terms of running a successful business. We all use those words. We know they're important. But what does it really mean to you? I mean, it's a hot topic right now.
Let me share why I think it's a hot topic rightfully so take a look at what's happened over the last couple of years through the pandemic. Every company was thrown into this need to really rethink how the company works. Do we work remotely? Do we work hybrid? Vaccines, no vaccines, time off, in office, etc. And what everyone's actually doing when you're rethinking how your company works is you're rethinking your culture and your values.
That's what led to a thing that we call the great talent reshuffle over the past couple of years is, you know, not only companies are rethinking how they work and employees are thinking about, you know, not only why they work or where they work, but how they work in general. For us, we define culture as the collective personality of our organization. It's who we are, but more importantly, it's who we aspire to be.
Every organization has a personality and it's really important, at least in my belief, to define what that culture and what those values should be at your company in order to help this foundation be strong to make the right decisions on top of it. And I think a lot of companies right now are just rightfully so as they go through this great reshuffle in this new world of work, redefining what it means to work at their company, redefining the values that are needed to make decisions, redefining how they want to work.
And I led the company about a year ago through an exercise to rethink or to enhance our culture and values and have to tell you, it was a really difficult exercise for me. I've been at the company for over 13 years.
And I think culture and values are embedded in everything that we do. We, you know, it was the only culture and values that I'd ever known, but we found that it was a very valuable exercise because some of the culture and values and the words that we use, they were antiquated in the new world of work.
So we took a very principled approach, very thoughtful process involved the entire company in rethinking what's important to us as a company. Who are we? Who do we aspire to be? And we made a couple of changes and enhancements to our set of culture and values.
And I think it's really benefited us well because every day, there's roughly 20,000 employees that linked in. And I think it's really important to make decisions and you have to come back to something common, a common framework upon which to make those decisions.
And I feel great about, you know, the culture and values that we've laid out is going to help us move into the future right now. I know a lot of companies are doing the same also.
So I think the framework, what you are, then how important is where you are? How important is it that people are present to kind of establish and build on these kind of cultural definitions and values? So the where is interesting and the where is, you know, I don't care who you are, you know, where you're leading right now in the world.
This is the question that everyone is asking themselves. This is where culture and values is really important. When you make a tough decision like where should our company work? You don't want it to be some subjective thing. You want it to be built on top of a foundation.
So one of our values is we trust and care about each other because that's the value in terms of how we make decisions in the company. We got to a position of where we work that's based on that trust and that care. We trust each other to work where it works best for us and our teams. That's our hybrid work policy.
I'm not your dad. I'm not your babysitter. I trust you to get your job done based on where it works best for you. And we've seen a lot of success. You know, our offices are open. A lot of employees come into the office.
We have the great tools that help collaboration and video conferencing make it easy. But we found that we can be successful as a company, you know, based on that work policy again. And it's rooted in our values. It doesn't work for every company.
But based on who we are and who we aspire to be, that's how we operate LinkedIn. So that's pretty similar. I think to what we're doing at Harvard Business Review and it's all about flexibility.
But you know, there are plenty of companies that you suggested who. You know, they don't buy that and they, you know, there's still a fear that if workers aren't kind of there and present that somehow they won't be giving, giving their all, what would be your advice to people who are thinking that way?
Well, I mean, first and foremost, I really go back to culture and values and there's not a right or wrong way. It's the type of company you want to run, the type of company you want to be and that works.
I'll ask the哇fully step where you have ideas to life at the time it was, it was made from BTS, and to that end, I probably wasn't right, I probably wasn't right but I will tell you, something fascinating.
I was recently in London with Microsoft, CR�nadella, and we were discussing with companies in London, this really fascinating dynamic that came out of Microsoft. of employees, report that they are productive at work and a hybrid work environment right now. Yet 85% of managers believe that their employees are not being productive.
And it's what Satya coined as productivity paranoia. And I think what's really going on there is when everyone was in the office years ago, the job of a manager, you'd walk around, that's how you'd see if someone was productive or getting worked on or being in the office. So a lot of the role of the manager was just to make sure that you're there, to make sure that you're physically present.
And we move to a hybrid world that requires a much different management and leadership style. I actually think there's a lot of a lot of new pressure and learning and a different way of thinking that has to go upon managers in this time, where you can't just focus on someone being in the office.
You can't ground yourself in physical presence being whether or not someone is being productive and effective. It has to be based on whether or not someone is being effective at the job. So that requires number one, ensuring that if you're a manager, you're very clear, you have clarity on what a role entails.
Why do I have this role to begin with? And what's required for the person in this role to be successful? And then ultimately you need to focus on outcomes. You focus on whether or not that person being successful in the role as it's been laid out versus whether or not they are in or out of the office. And we're going through this process that linked in to help managers understand this and train managers on. And it's not an easy transition for anyone.
But I think in order to be successful in a hybrid world, it's really all about managers and leaders thinking differently about their role and really based on success based on outcomes instead of time and office.
So beyond managing the kind of hybrid question, this seems like a tough time to be a leader. You got recession looming maybe. You have inflation definitely. Political uncertainty. It feels like wave after wave of social people. What does it take to be successful business leader now in this complex context?
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. You can't only be a leader when the sun is shining and the sun is definitely not shining these days. I think the key, it's really about uncertainty, yes, it's challenging. But I think the right leaders that are going to really be above and all of this, the ones that see this as an opportunity.
People who get good at managing through the cycles, they understand that they're playing in the right markets, they understand where to set themselves up for success. And it's a phrase I've been using around adaptive leadership. You can be adaptive or you can be reactive.
I mean trust me on a daily basis, there are 10 new decisions that you have to make right now as a CEO that you never have had to make before in your life and no one's had to make them before. And so the question is, do you try and get ahead of it in an adaptive way or do you let it happen to you?
So, I think adaptive leadership is really rooted in three things. Number one, you can decide to play up or play down. A lot of people, when something bad happens, they play down, they play to the lowest common denominator.
I think adaptive leaders, they play up. They play to win. They stay positive. And though the plays may be different, they understand that they have to be running different plays. I think reactive leaders, you know, they're aggressively cycling between playing to win or hunkering down and not really playing up, beginning to pull down, and I think that's the wrong way to do it.
I think adaptive leaders see these cycles as an opportunity. There's always an opportunity in some of this, especially as there's uncertainty and things are moving around versus change is some kind of tax or burden to be dealt with. I think last but not least, it's just constantly pivoting. Adaptive leaders constantly pivot. They iterate, they adjust.
Instead of, you know, I think reactive leaders, you know, they overrotate and they thrash. And, you know, in general, it's not easy. It's human nature to get, you know, kind of pulled into the cycle, but the more that you can stay adaptive, I think the better folks are going to be.
And one of the most important areas where I think right now that we see across the global labor market where more adaptive thinking and leadership is needed is around what I've been calling a skills first mentality. I think companies that focus on skills is the currency.
Companies that shift away from, you know, more antiquated signals like, you know, only degree or pedigree or where someone worked will help ensure that the right people can be in the right roles with the right skills doing the best work. I think it's going to create a much more efficient, a much more equitable labor market, which then creates better opportunity for all, but that's part of that adaptive mindset shift as well.
Let's talk about skills. I mean, as, as, you know, we're in this new world of work and what is, you know, what's your advice? What are the skills that people should be developing? Is they're trying to succeed in the new world of work workplace?
Yeah, I mean, be it because of COVID or digital transformation or, you know, looking at kind of what's going on in the AI space right now, a fourth industrial revolution, what's really happening?
And again, I think at LinkedIn, we have really great data to see the shifts happening, but roles are being created and displaced at truly a record pace right now. So whatever your role, whatever your company, whatever your industry, you need to keep up with these really quick and big changes that are going on.
And even if you aren't changing your job, your job is most likely changing on you. So for far too long, we've used degrees. Oh, this person went to this great school, so they must be good for a previous company. This person, you know, worked at this great company, so they must know what they're doing or networks. I know someone that knows this person, so they must be great at. So, you know, we could be getting everything better to do to assess talent..
But when the the labor market is moving much quicker, we really need to figure out something to focus on. And I think that alternative flexible, accessible path is really going to be based on skills. And it's not just actually about new entrance to the job market. One of the things we're looking at recently in the LinkedIn data is the fact that if you take the same role from 2015 to 2022 that existed in the world, roughly 25% of the skills that are required for that role have changed. It's not, you know, it's pretty obvious that a lot of those are technical skills that are now needed. A lot is moving kind of into the digital space, but that is moving.
And, you know, coming out of the pandemic, there's, there's, there's, there's one, there's really fascinating anecdote that I saw in the data to show why this could be more valuable for the world. When the pandemic hit on LinkedIn, we saw a ton of food service workers out of work. And that makes sense. Restaurants are closing. No one's going in. No one's going to have to eat. That should have this huge pool of people that are out of work. On the flip side, the most in-demand roles that we saw get created is the pandemic kicked off. We're digital customer service roles.
That makes a lot of sense. You know, things are moving more digital. People need customer service in their companies. So they have to like ramp up on customer service agents inside of those roles. Now what's fascinating is if you took the average food service worker in that period, they had 70% of the skills that are needed to be an entry level customer service agent. However, what happened is a lot of these food service workers went unemployed and stayed unemployed. And a lot of these customer service jobs went unfilled because there wasn't enough talent to build them. If we had just taken a view on what are the skills necessary? Who has those skills? How can we help them acquire a couple of skills to help them become employed? We would have found ourselves in a much more efficient labor market.
You take a big step back. That dynamic is happening across every industry, job function, geography, etc. where there's this labor imbalance. If you were to focus more on skills, it'd be much more productive and efficient. Yeah, interesting. So then there's the question of retaining talent. You know, you're in a, I assume, a very competitive market. You're basically a tech company. You're out in Silicon Valley and competing against other giants trying to retain top kind of engineer talent.
What's your secret or what's your playbook for retaining the best people? I don't have any secrets except going back to where we started this conversation. The key for me is being intentional and authentic about our vision, which is our why and our culture and values, which is our how and you attract and retain people who are inspired by why we do things and what we do. I think that's that's the key to all of this, which is you you want to align people with what you do as a company to have the most productive workforce to have the most retention.
People believe in what you're doing as a company. They will stay longer. So my role is to try and bring together the most talented set of individuals possible who care about building, you know, linked in, care about building a platform that exists to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. I think something that is important right now more than ever is well. It's just understanding that inside of your company, it's really important to help people find their next career and their career path. So in turn, mobility is just a really big topic for us right now.
I truly believe that your next best employee is most likely your current employee in many situations. And again, this is a reason why if you focus on skills and understand the skills of your existing workforce and then where you need to go as a company, there's just a lot of great work that can be done there to help existing employees find different roles inside of your company as long as they're aligned to the mission of building.
So I want to talk about LinkedIn a little bit. What is LinkedIn at this point? I mean, is it a social network? Is it a job search platform? Is it a professional self-branding app? I mean, what is LinkedIn?
So LinkedIn is a platform that exists to create opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And I know that sounds like a tagline, but that is actually the vision of the company. It's what we aspire to every day. We believe that the really valuable way to get there, I know you've spoken to Reid Hoffman in the past, who's the founder of LinkedIn, along with Alan Blue, is that we can help people become more productive and successful via other people.
You can learn from other people, you can hire with other people, you can help sell or buy with other people, you can help connect and start coming to other people. So how do we create at the core a platform that helps professionals show who they are and connect for a variety of purposes?
And you know, if we just were on a fiscal calendar as of 21 FY 23, which we just ended our trailing 12-month revenue surpassed $14 billion, which is up roughly 17% year-to-year, which is a great testament, especially in this market, to how mission-critical the platform has become to help professionals for all of those use cases.
I mean, right now, every single-minute on LinkedIn, more than 9,000 connections are formed, nearly 10 hires are made, more than 100 hours of learning content are consumed. And, you know, we have a diverse set of business models throughout those different, you know, marketplaces of connecting people that align to really help companies find value and members find value.
And what's valuable, and we're teaching about that, is, and what I think is probably one of our core competitive advantages is, I think right now, especially, you know, in 2022, in the world of work that we see, I think companies that are naturally aligned with doing good and doing well, they have massive competitive advantages built in.
So for companies that start just by focusing on doing well in business, doing good for the world becomes a compromise. It's the last slide of a PowerPoint presentation or it's the creation of a.org website. But when you can seamlessly unify doing good for the world and doing well in business inside of the product you build, I think it's a real strong competitive advantage.
And when we build products that LinkedIn, people find jobs, they hire, they learn skills, they make deals, they start companies, it's an ecosystem that creates value for members, customers, the world, and we're LinkedIn. So I'm very proud of kind of that ethos and rule that we occupy right now.
Before the interview, we announced that we're going to do it and solicit some questions. I have a question from I lean from Palo Alto. And the question is, you know, can you talk about any long-term plans you may have to make LinkedIn more work friendly?
So for example, you know, could users use LinkedIn for video calls, share their screens with business presentations and negotiations, or anything else, or the thoughts to make, you know, it more the sort of the flow of work platform.
Yeah, you know, I mean, for a variety of professionals it is in their flow of work. So absolutely for recruiters, for L&D professionals, for marketers, for sellers, you know, LinkedIn is a tool that people have opened on a daily basis.
As it relates to general collaboration, to general communication, we are very fortunate to be part of, you know, Microsoft. And, you know, I think that Microsoft has the best and breed tools through teams and through office, etc. to help people do that kind of general communication and collaboration.
关于一般的合作和沟通,我们非常幸运地成为那个拥有优质工具的 Microsoft 的一部分。我认为,在团队和办公软件等方面,Microsoft 拥有最佳的工具,可以帮助人们进行一般的沟通和合作。
We want to help through our products, whatever we can, to make those products more valuable. But that's really from Microsoft ink to focus in terms of what we do. For LinkedIn specifically, you know, in order for, in order for the, the world of work to move forward, in order for labor markets to grow and continue, there's really three, in my opinion, three key things that are critical to get right.
One, a more efficient labor market. And we've talked through this interview about what we're trying to do there in general to help, you know, match talent to opportunity massive scale in innovative, in new ways that'll create a more efficient and dynamic labor force.
Number two is access to, you know, goods and services. And we're really focusing on ensuring that we can bring, you know, B2B products and services into a much more efficient market, similar to how maybe a lot of consumer, you know, products are bought in Seoul.
You know, B2B is a huge market, B2B is a lot of companies are, you know, representing what they do with a sell across LinkedIn. But we believe we can make that a better process for everyone involved, especially for buyers, you know, especially for sellers. Sellers don't want to be sitting there sending out millions of emails and seeing people they want to find the right people to have the right conversation.
People are interested in buying products. So, we're focused a lot there as well. And the biggest, you know, kind of thing that I'm focused on right now inside of the company is the third thing that I think is critical to get right is just access to knowledge and information and skill building.
And a product manager a couple days ago, you know, went through the LinkedIn data and pulled this stat for me that, you know, we believe there's an estimated 10 billion years of experience on LinkedIn and the membership on LinkedIn. So, how do we help people build their identity by sharing a lot of that knowledge and experience in new ways and in new formats? And on the flip side, help people learn more through other professionals to help them become more productive and successful.
And I think there's some real value here and us focusing on creating those, you know, professional work related products that can help through that knowledge exchange. This is an example. We recently built a newsletter product and, you know, in the last six months it's grown to 150 million people have subscribed to a newsletter on LinkedIn across, you know, thousands of authors who create a newsletter to share their knowledge. And, you know, we started to do podcasts. We have an editorial team that helps curate the news.
But, you know, for me, if we can get this foundation of, you know, a billion professionals that have access to great knowledge that exists in the heads of other professionals to make everyone more productive and successful, I think it's going to do a lot for the world and be able to move the world forward in a very productive way.
This sounds pretty interesting. I think you've already got my resume. I fun like Dan, but I want to hear more about this.
这听起来相当有趣。我想你已经拿到了我的简历。我像丹那样好玩,但我想听更多关于这件事的详情。
I wonder, is developing a metaverse experience a priority for you?
我想知道,对你来说,开发元宇宙体验是否是首要任务?
Is another one where I feel wonderful that we are part of the Microsoft ecosystem, you know, Microsoft sits on the bleeding edge of technology, especially metaverse technology. So we don't need to go out and create anything on our own. We can leverage a lot of what's being built there.
I think for the professional context a couple things would be interesting events. I recently did a customer event where, you know, a hundred people got together and we all put on, you know, headsets and had a virtual meeting and I gave a keynote and we had, you know, conversations and we're all kind of walking around in this room even though we're sitting in our desk. That was kind of cool.
People wanting to travel, they can all get together and have more of an experience like that. So maybe that's interesting. I think events are interesting. I think learnings are potentially a great one as well. Especially more, if the technology evolves from more front line or hands-on learning, that's going to be valuable for us.
You know, we have a product called LinkedIn Learning. It's, you know, one of the largest online learning businesses. It helps people acquire skills 100 hours of learning content or watch every minute on LinkedIn. But, you know, for some of that stuff that's really about more hands-on or you have to, you know, kind of feel like you're inside of the environment to learn that could be valuable as well. So we'll kind of see how that evolves, but kind of taking a backseat, all of the great innovation that's happening that Microsoft.
This is a time, you know, in some ways of a peevil for social networks. You know, Facebook, I wouldn't say it's going through a peevil, but they're kind of redefining meta, you know, who they are, what they are, how they want to be out there. Twitter is going through kind of a crazy period right now.
Are you trying to capitalize on that, you know, to make some of this to work to LinkedIn's advantage?
你是想利用那个机会,让这些工作对LinkedIn有所裨益吗?
Not trying to capitalize on. I mean, I think the most important thing for us is to focus on, it goes, it's funny. I keep going back to this culture in my years, but it's such a foundational thing for us. We focus on what we exist to do. We focus on helping connect professionals globally, helping them find access to opportunity. We have massive runway ahead of us. We have large tabs in all the markets that we exist in. For us, the best thing that we can do is just focus on making LinkedIn great against the vision that we have for LinkedIn, and that's what we wake up doing every day.
You can check out new episodes of the New World of Work live on LinkedIn on Wednesdays. Be sure to register in advance on the HBR LinkedIn page. You can also browse the episode archive on YouTube or hbr.org.
This episode was produced by Mary too. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart, Hannah Bates is our Audio Production Assistant, and Ian Fox is our Audio Product Manager.
Thanks for listening to the HBR idea cast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Allison Beard.
谢谢你收听HBR idea cast。我们将于下周二推出新一期节目。我是Allison Beard。
Hi, it's Allison. Before you go, I have a question. What do you love about HBR?
嗨,我是艾莉森。在你走之前,我有一个问题。你喜欢哈佛商业评论的哪一点?
I worked at newspapers before I came to HBR, and the thing that is impressed me most is the amount of attention and care that goes into each and every article. We have multiple editors working on each piece. They put their all into translating these ideas typically from academia or from companies and practice into advice that will really change people's lives in the workplace.
If you love HBR's work, the best thing you can do to support us is to become a subscriber. You can do that at hbr.org slash subscribe idea cast, all one word no spaces. That's hbr.org slash subscribe idea cast. Thanks.