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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Sheryl Sandberg Speaks at Tsinghua University Commencement 2015 [Watch (HLS stream): Sheryl Sandberg Speaks at Tsinghua University Commencement 2015](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/g9R7RCzS.m3u8) (13:37)  _Published 2015-06-29. Sheryl Sandberg Speaks at Tsinghua University Commencement 2015_ --- Jul 27, 2023 6:29 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [FIRSTS Sheryl Sandberg ](/video/NAumZ50p/) ### FIRSTS Sheryl Sandberg [Darren Walker Speaks at University of Texas at Austin Commencement 2015](/video/AwpfWrUD/) ### Darren Walker Speaks at University of Texas at Austin Commencement 2015 [Salman Rushdie Speaks at Emory University Commencement 2015](/video/eM70A958/) ### Salman Rushdie Speaks at Emory University Commencement 2015 --- ## Transcript [ Applause ] I am honored to be here today to address Dean Cheng, the distinguished faculty of the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management, proud family members, supportive friends, and most importantly The Class of 2015. Unlike my boss, Mark Zuckerberg, I don't speak Chinese. I apologize but he did ask me to pass along his congratulations. And I'm thrilled to congratulate this magnificent class, and I ask you to give yourselves a round of applause. [ APPLAUSE ] When Dean Qian invited me to speak today, I thought, come to speak to a group of people way younger and cooler than I am? I can do that. I do that every day at Facebook, because my boss, Mark, is 15 years younger than I am [ LAUGH ] and most of our employees are more his contemporaries than mine. I like being surrounded by young people except when they say, Cheryl What was it like at university without a cell phone? Well Sheryl, come over here! We need to see what old people think of this feature. I graduated from college in 1991 and business school in 1995. Which I remind you is not that long ago. [ LAUGH ] But I can tell you the world has changed a lot in 25 years. When I was in business school, my school tried to have our first online class. We'd passed out a list of names. Because it was unthinkable to have your real name on the internet so we needed screen names. And it kept crashing because the technology did not exist to put 90 people online at once. But for a few brief moments in between crashes we glimpsed the future. And it was a future where technology would connect us. As colleagues, as friends, and as family. The world we live in today is not one I could have imagined 25 years ago. And 25 years from now you Will have helped shape the future of the world that we all live in. As graduates of Tsinghua, you will be leaders not just in China, but globally. China is the world leader in economic growth and educational attainment. And it's not just political and business leaders who recognize China's importance. American parents do as well. In the San Fransisco Bay area where I live, the hardest schools to get your children in to are the ones that teach Chinese. But the fact is Countries don't lead. People lead. And so as you graduate today, you start your path towards leadership. And you ask yourself, what kind of leader will you be? What impact will you have on others? [ UNKNOWN ] What will be your mark on the world? At Facebook we have posters on the wall, slogans, and sayings, that help us to try to think big and broad as much as we can, every single day. I think they are very important leadership lessons in these posters. And so today I'm gonna talk about 4 of them, that I think will have meaning for you. The first, fortune favors the bold. Facebook exists because Mark believed that the world would be a better place if technology would connect us as individuals He believed so much, he dropped out of Harvard, to pursue that mission. What he did wasn't lucky, it was bold. It's unusual to find your passion as early as Mark, it took me far longer, when I was sitting where you are, in a graduation robe I never could've considered a job at Facebook because there was no Internet nd Mark was 11 years old. [ LAUGH ] When I was sitting where you were, I thought I would only ever work in the government or in non- profits because I thought those organizations made the world a better place, where companies just chased profits. But then when I was working at the US Treasury Department, I saw from afar how technology companies were changing the world and I changed my mind. So when my government job ended, I decided to move to Silicon Valley. Now, in retrospect, that seems very shrewd. But in 2001, that was questionable at best. The tech bubble had burst, all the big companies were laying people off, and all the small companies were going out of business. I gave myself four months to find a job. It took almost a year. The first CEO I got to interview with said to me, I took this interview as a favor for a friend but I would never, emphasize never, hire you. Because people from the government can't work in technology. Eventually I persuaded someone to hire me. And 14 years later I still love working in tech. It was not my original plan, but I got there eventually. So if you find yourself on one path, but you long for something else, keep trying. And if that path isn't right, try again Keep trying and trying until you find something that stirs your passion, a job that matters to you and to others. It is a luxury to combine passion and contribution and it also the clearest path to happiness. Second Feedback is a gift. When I started at Facebook I knew that my job success would entirely depend upon my relationship with Mark. So before I accepted the job I asked him for a committment. That we would sit down every Friday and he would give me feedback. So that any issues he had would be aired very quickly and discussed. He not only said yes, right away he said, let's make it reciprocal. I'll give you feedback and you give me feedback. So, for years, every Friday afternoon we sat down and told each other what we thought we could have done better. As the years went by, sharing honest reactions became part of our relationship. And now we do it in real time, we don't have to wait for Friday afternoons. Now, getting feedback from your boss is one thing. But it's just as important to get feedback from the people who work for you. It's not easy to do because employees are often eager to please those above them. And no one really wants to question or criticize their higher ups. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Wall Street. In 1990, Bob Rubin became CEO of Goldman Sachs. At the end of his first week on the job, he looked at the books and they had a lot of golds And he said, why do we own so much gold? And someone said, well that was you sir. And he said, me. Apparently the day before he was walking around the trading floor and he said to someone, gold looks interesting. That got translated as Ruben likes gold. And someone spent hundreds of millions of dollars to please the new boss. On a much smaller scale I face a similar challenge. When I joined Facebook my job was to build the business side of a company, but not destroy the engineering culture which made Facebook great. So I tried to discourage people from doing formal PowerPoint presentations for meetings with me. At first I just asked everyone, and they all ignored me. Every time they had a meeting with me they would come in with their PowerPoint. So two years in, I said okay, I don't like rules, but I have a rule. No more PowerPoint in meetings with me. [ COUGH ] About a month later I was getting ready to walk on a stage and speak to our global sales team and someone said to me, " You know, you really should address the whole PowerPoint thing. People are really upset that they can't use PowerPoint for their client And I said, who said they couldn't use PowerPoint for their clients? And they said you did. So I got on the stage and I said I never said you couldn't use PowerPoint for our clients. I just said you couldn't use it for me. And the next time you hear a really bad idea Speak up even if you think it is from me make sure you tell me I'm wrong. A good leader recognizes that most people who work for you will not feel comfortable challenging authority. So it falls upon authority to solicit their feed back I learned from my Powerpoint mistake and now whenever I go to meetings I always ask colleagues, what could I do better? And, I always thank the people who have the guts to answer me honestly and I often thank them publicly to show others that I'm grateful for the feedback. I firmly believe that we lead best when we walk side by side with our colleagues. When we dont just talk but we listen. Third, nothing is someone elses problem. When I started my career I saw people who were in leadership roles and I thought, there so lucky They have so much control, but when I was in business school, I took a class where they said that the more senior you got, the more dependent you were on other people. I thought my professors were wrong. They were right. I am dependent on my sales team, not the other way around. If they fall short it is my mistake. As a leader, my performance is not just what I can do but it's what my whole team at Facebook does. Companies in every country have to operate in ways that are right for their cultures, but I think there are some leadership principles which are universal. And the most important is that it is better to inspire than direct. Yes, people will do what their bosses say in most organizations. But great leaders don't just want compliance. They want to elicit genuine enthusiasm, complete trust, real dedication. They don't just win the minds of their teams, they win their hearts. If the people who work for you one day believe in you, and believe in your mission, they will not just do their daily tasks well, but they will do it with true passion. No one won more hearts than my beloved husband Dave, who passed away suddenly two months ago. Dave was a really inspiring leader. He was kind and generous and thoughtful. He raised the performance of everyone around him. He did it as the CEO of Survey Monkey, a great company he helped build, and he did it for me and our children. [ APPLAUSE ] [ APPLAUSE ] Our friend Bill Gurley, a leading venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, wrote a post called Be Like Dave. And he wrote, Dave showed us all exactly what being a great human being looks like. But it was never frustrating because Dave's greatness was not competitive or threatening. It was gentle. Inspirational and egoless. He was the quintessential standard for the notion of leading by example. [ APPLAUSE ] Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei has said that leadership Is making others better. As a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts into your absence. Like Dave, you can do this. For not just yourselves but for other people. [ applause ] [ APPLAUSE ] Fourth, lean in. The Chinese proverb holds women hold up half the sky and this is quoted all over the world. Women have a special role in China's history and presence. And it was wonderful to see that half of your speakers today were women [ APPLAUSE ] Yes. 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