How to be a good leader? Be a good human, says LinkedIn’s Dan Shapero

THE lowest point of LinkedIn chief operating officer Daniel Shapero’s career incidentally happens to be its beginning – a period of 18 months in which he spent going through three startups.

Kind of unfairly, it led to him being labelled as a job-hopper, but the truth was two of the startups he joined closed down, while he was laid off from the third.

Which was a pity for a young, wide-eyed Shapero, who was coming out of university already having started and sold a business, inspired by a family of elders who dabbled in entrepreneurship and hoping to be the hero of his own success story too.

“When I graduated from university, you have all these dreams of this amazing career you’re going to start – and the first startup I joined ran out of money in six months, the second I joined… you know, a big part of the company got laid off, including me, six months after I joined. The third, again, ran out of money,” Shapero, 44, tells The Business Times with a wry smile.

“And it was just such a stark difference between the journey I envisioned, and the reality of being in startups in the dot-bomb phase. And so I was terrified about, what does it mean for my career? What does it mean for me?”

Career lesson #1: You can still bounce back from a rocky start

His experience gave him the ability to assure others who worry about having good starts to their careers of this, given where he managed to move on to.

Thankfully, his next employer, Bain & Company, was one that favoured candidates with entrepreneurship experience and interest, and it was after four years he spent there that he was able to springboard himself (another interesting story) into LinkedIn.

Career lesson #2: Follow people you think you can learn and grow best from

Shapero may see his startup period as a rocky start to his career, but maintains he learned “a tremendous amount” from the people he worked with.

“My best career decisions have often been made because I met someone I thought I could learn from. And I think that startups change direction, product, strategy, but it’s really the people that you work alongside that make the experience,” he said.

It was also how he knew he would thrive at LinkedIn – a company centred on the core idea that “business is about people”, and the idea of people being at the centre of business resonated strongly with him.

“I think the greatest thing you can see when you join an organisation is that the people around you inspire you to be more like the qualities you want to embody. And when I met the person who recruited me into LinkedIn, I thought, ‘Wow, if I’m just a little bit more like this person, I’ll be a better version of me’ ... And so I think just remembering that whatever environment you go into will shape you in some way is a really important part of making good career decisions.”

Career lesson #3: Don’t be afraid to take a big step to learn something important

Here’s another crazy thing Shapero did in his career: after excelling in sales, and working his way up to vice-president (VP) of global sales at LinkedIn in just four years, he quit his role and went back down the food chain to the lowest individual contributor level in LinkedIn’s product organisation division (large pay cut and all).

Why? Because he realised that in terms of his career development, he was lacking in product knowledge.

You wouldn’t see this if you looked at his LinkedIn profile – but he really did move down, and then spent three years working back up to VP level. If you think about it, this is doubly impressive considering he didn’t know the first thing about working in a product team.

“I decided that I was willing to do an investment in myself for a period of time … it was very much just switching a job from running a large sales team, to being an individual contributor in the product team and working my way back up… and at the beginning, it was quite stressful.”

Career lesson #4: How to convince people who are suspicious of your ability or sincerity

Stressful it was indeed – Shapero found himself, a mid-career person, in the trenches with fresh graduates who knew more than him about how to do his job, and he needed to gain their trust, and learn from them.

“I said, this is my first job as a product manager. I don’t know what I have to offer yet. But I know that all of you as my engineering team are going to determine whether I’m successful or not ... And because they didn’t have any, they were all new, I was like, ‘I will go figure out how to get everyone LinkedIn T-shirts’. That was all I had, right? That was my inspiration. Until I figured out how to really do the job well.”

He was also aware that people were doubtful how willing he would be to roll up his sleeves – given that he had come from a very senior role. An opportunity arose in a dataset of thousands of titles that needed to be standardised in a certain language, but required someone to organise.

“And so I said, ‘I’ll do them by hand’. So I stayed up all night one night, and I did them all one at a time. And there were no more questions about whether I was going to do the work.”

Leadership lesson #1: The values people emulate at a company are the ones you celebrate and reward

How does a company as huge as LinkedIn seed its culture and values so strongly among its employees? Shapero’s answer is that it lies in defining what success means, and then celebrating those things consciously and consistently.

At LinkedIn, Shapero says they make it a point to promote people who not only do well at their jobs, but who also lift up the people around them – develop them and contribute to their success – and further the company’s values. This also means they do not reward or celebrate people who may have succeeded at their jobs but are not living up to their values.

“There are all of these decisions that companies make that remind an organisation what it values, and most people pay constant attention to that through all of these signals, and then they try to live up to what the organisation cares about,” he says. “They don’t listen to what we say; they watch what we do.”

Leadership lesson #2: Great humans make great leaders

Shapero admits that he and his fellow LinkedIn senior officials have spent so long thinking about good leadership and people management that he can now express his leadership principles remarkably simply.

“A lot of the characteristics of great leadership are the same characteristics of a great human being. Do you speak from the heart? Do you say what you do; do what you say? Do you respect people? Do you listen? Are you self-aware? Those are things that great people do. And guess what? People want to follow great people,” he said.

Part of being a good human, he adds, comes from being a dad – and he has two sons and a daughter, who have made him “more attuned to the importance of gender parity on a team”.

This is so important to Shapero that he boasts “almost a perfect 50/50” gender distribution across the entire LinkedIn organisation, from VPs to fresh hires.

“Part of the reason we’re so successful is because we have incredible female leaders,” he says. “And they like working at LinkedIn, because LinkedIn sort of is a culture that sees them, and values them.”

Leadership lesson #3: What are you solving for?

Ultimately, what it comes down to for leaders is the question of what they are solving for in their workplace – and for Shapero, leaders should always be solving for two things:

• How to have the best people possible on your team?
• How do you make sure that team works together incredibly well?

Breaking this down, Shapero says leaders need to consider the leadership style, policies and practices that get them access to the best people, and in turn which help them work together.

“And that is probably a mix of being flexible and agile, and allowing people to work the way they need and to figure out how to foster connection and camaraderie and success,” he shares. “So I think if you just start with the question, which is literally ‘How do I build the best team?’ then you might think more creatively about your policies.”