Facebook has been Mark Zuckerberg’s whole career — that’s good and bad

AP

• Mark
  Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and founder, has spent his
  entire career at one company.
• According to The New Yorker, Zuckerberg often relies on
  COO Sheryl Sandberg to find out how things work at other
  companies.
• Workplace experts say it’s important for long-tenured
  leaders like Zuckerberg to surround themselves with other
  perspectives.
• As for individuals, it can be helpful to move around
  between companies, or between departments at the same company,
  to develop new skills.

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A recent
New Yorker profile of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg includes a
telling quotation from COO Sheryl Sandberg:

“Sometimes Mark will say, in front of the company, ‘Well, I’ve
never worked anywhere else, but Sheryl tells me…'”

Sandberg added: “He acknowledges he doesn’t always have the most
experience. He’s only had the experience he’s had, and being Mark
Zuckerberg is pretty extraordinary.”

Zuckerberg is 34 years old; he founded Facebook in college. As
The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos points out, Zuckerberg has designed
the entire company to suit his unique preferences. (Osnos writes
that Zuckerberg chose Facebook’s signature royal blue because he
is red-green color-blind and can see royal blue most clearly.)

While Zuckerberg is an extreme example, the quotation from
Sandberg raises questions about the relative benefits and
drawbacks of building your career in one place. We asked two
workplace experts for their opinions, although they can’t comment
on Zuckerberg specifically since they don’t know him personally.

Long-tenured leaders should surround themselves with people who
have different perspectives

Jaime Klein, who is the founder of Inspire Human
Resources, mentioned some organizational benefits of having a
long-tenured leader, including “institutional knowledge” and
“cultural stability.” Klein has observed that, when organizations
go through a leadership transition, there tends to be a period of
time where everyone is unproductive.

That said, Klein added that the downside of having a long-tenured
leader is that “you don’t have the importing of fresh ideas.” We
tend to “surround ourselves with fabulous people that remind us
of our fabulous selves,” Klein said, as opposed to people with
different perspectives.

One potential solution, according to Klein and Erica Keswin, who is a
workplace strategist, an executive coach, and the author of the
forthcoming book “Bring
Your Human to Work,” is for CEOs to surround themselves with
leaders who have more diverse backgrounds. That’s what Zuckerberg
seems to have done in hiring Sandberg, who came from Google and
has government experience.

“It takes a strong leader,” Keswin said, to recognize the gaps in
their skill set and hire people whose competencies complement
theirs.

Klein called it “cross-pollination”: The leaders with outside
experience bring innovative ideas and the more tenured leaders
know how to implement those ideas in the context of their
particular organization.

Keswin had another suggestion for long-tenured CEOs and founders:
Join organizations with people in top leadership positions from
other companies. That way, they can get candid feedback on their
performance and hear how other leaders have tackled similar
challenges.

Individuals can find it helpful to move around between — or
within — organizations

As for people who aren’t in top leadership positions, Keswin had
a similar tip: Seek out opportunities to work across the
organization so that you’re constantly learning and growing. That
might mean volunteering for side projects in other departments.

“You become more valuable to that business because you can
connect the dots,” Keswin said.

Klein’s view is that moving between different organizations can
be beneficial for individual employees, specifically because they
develop different skills at each one. “Many times it does help
people, if they feel like they can’t reach their career
potential,” to move companies, she said.

It can also be helpful to work under a new leader, “with new
ideas, new mentoring techniques, and new ways to develop that
person.”

Often, the decision to switch companies comes down to intuition
over logic. As Klein said, “Everyone knows deep in their souls
when it’s time to go.”