Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, believes that being a CEO can only be learned by actually being a CEO. He acknowledges that the role comes with unexpected challenges that you don’t know how to handle, but the world expects you to. Managing his psychology has been the most important skill he had to acquire early on. He emphasizes the importance of assembling the right team and maintaining a balanced perspective amidst the highs and lows of the job. Roslansky played a key role in transforming LinkedIn from a job site to a platform for sharing insights on professional growth. He values work/life balance and prioritizes spending time with his family. As an adaptive leader, he prefers making small adjustments rather than complete shifts in strategy. While LinkedIn had to close its job application for Chinese users and lay off employees due to fierce competition and regulatory scrutiny, Roslansky remains optimistic about the opportunities in China’s workforce. He believes in finding opportunities and not being afraid of change. He took over as CEO just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and he led LinkedIn’s response by providing tools and content to help users during the upheaval. His efforts contributed to the company’s revenue growth, and he continues to learn and engage with the platform as one of LinkedIn’s “Top Voices.”
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Ryan Roslansky’s LinkedIn page lists 46 skills, from product management to problem solving.
But neither fully prepared him to run the professional networking site when he took over as CEO three years ago.
“I fundamentally believe that you can only learn to be a CEO by being a CEO,” he says. “Your first day in a role like this, you’re entering a world where you’re about to face a whole list of unexpected challenges that you don’t know how to do. The problem is that the whole world expects you to know how to do it.
Sitting behind his tidy desk, 16 stories up at LinkedIn’s San Francisco headquarters, with a bookshelf behind him bearing a photo of a Baby Yoda daughter and a sign reading “hard things are hard,” Roslansky points out. the dark screen of your computer. He’ll turn it back on after our hour-long conversation and find out he’s been mentioned 500 times on LinkedIn, he predicts. With 20,000 employees and over 930 million users, something must have gone wrong. Customers, whose complaints range from routine failures to fake commenters and abuse by scammerswill look for him to fix it.
“It’s probably not in my Linkedin Profilebut I think the most important skill I had to acquire early on was learning to manage my psychology,” says Roslansky.
“Product strategy, business strategy, people, operations: those things you can easily figure out, but you have to learn to put your mind in the right place quickly.”
Doing so, says the 45-year-old, requires first assembling the right team around him, both direct reports and mentors (among whom he diplomatically stands out Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO who led the 2016 acquisition of Microsoft by the software group). LinkedIn). Second, “you can’t let the highs be too high or the lows too low. . . You have to maintain a kind of constant band in the midst of all that. And finally, he says, he can’t get so caught up in the minutiae of day-to-day that he loses sight of the larger corporate vision.
Roslansky offers such insights in a sharp, bulleted style befitting an executive who launched the “influencer” and content programs that turned LinkedIn from a site for recruiters and job seekers into a haven for people to disperse views on how to get to the top and what to do once you get there.
The CVs that LinkedIn members have shared since it began two decades ago add up to 10 billion years of experience, he says. One of the challenges of his job has been figuring out how to “get all this knowledge out of people’s heads.”
The new sharing tools, news feeds, newsletters, and video series that he and his team have created are designed to keep users coming back more often. “Solving problems is a much more common use case than looking for a job,” he observes.
Roslansky’s own LinkedIn profile details his 14 years with the company, starting as chief product officer in 2009, and his previous jobs at Glam Media, Yahoo and the real estate-themed dotcom company he left college to lead in 1997.
But it doesn’t capture the experience that he says most shaped him as a leader – an episode from his childhood. Roslansky grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe. His parents were hippies turned real estate entrepreneurs who taught her something about taking control of his career.
When he was 13, he was put on a plane to Florida, where he enrolled in the intensely competitive Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy alongside the likes of Maria Sharapova and Andre Agassi. The only American in his bedroom, “I learned to survive by understanding other people very well,” he recalls, building empathy in later life for what motivates people and how they think. “As a product person, it’s probably the most important skill you could have.”
A day in the life of Ryan Roslansky
there is a set of [meetings] that we use to run the company effectively and that are very important to me. Every Tuesday we have our executive team meeting. It’s the middle of the day and that’s where we talk about everything that’s going on in the company.
Every other week, I bring the entire company together for what we call a “business connection.” It’s in a format where we go over the top priorities of the company, we have an “open mic,” we call it, for anyone’s questions. It’s a meeting time every two weeks, no matter what. . . You know, trust is consistency over time and you can’t replace any of those things.
Which is probably ironically the most important thing to me is having a solid work/life balance. I have three daughters and it’s extremely important to me to make sure I’m there for them as much as I’m here for LinkedIn. So I will always take my daughters to school. I’ll always be home for dinner. Those things are not negotiable. And I think more than anything, it keeps me grounded and balanced. Because if I didn’t have them set, it’s very easy to get caught up answering what’s going on here all day.
Roslansky describes himself as an “adaptive” leader. “You can pretty much decide that you are going to adapt as a leader, or you can stay as you are,” he explains. But when challenges arise, he prefers to do “little twists” rather than “circles”: teetering too far in a new direction, only to have to turn back later.
It’s one of the reasons he has avoided making proclamations about when people should return to their offices. (LinkedIn has yet to lay down the law on how often it expects staff to come in, saying it trusts them to decide whether to choose in-person, remote or hybrid work.) Otherwise, he says, “you’re just destroying these people in these companies around.”
There is a place where the adaptation and the pivots seem not to have been worth it. In May, LinkedIn closed your job application for Chinese users and eliminated more than 700 jobs, in the face of fierce competition and regulatory scrutiny. The Financial Times dubbed the first stage of his withdrawal from China: the close of his social networking site located in 2021: the end of a unsustainable compromise between profit and ethics.
“I’ve been constantly trying to find ways to make LinkedIn work within China,” Roslansky admits. He says he is still optimistic about the opportunity offered by the country’s large workforce, even though he has yet to find a sustainable business case.
LinkedIn is keeping its options open by allowing Chinese companies to hire through its global platform, he notes, but “one of the worst things you can do. . . it’s keeping something going that just works and thinking that next year is going to be the year that this is really going to work. We tried for about 10 years.”
Roslansky’s definition of adaptive leadership also means trying to “play it up” rather than playing it down, or looking for the opportunities a situation presents rather than succumbing to fear of the worst happening.
He has been called to the top job at LinkedIn in February 2020, weeks before covid-19 was declared a pandemic, and took the reins in June, when a sudden freeze in hiring and advertising was strangling the top two sources of revenue for the company. He made a big early bet that LinkedIn could find new growth by rolling out tools for users who were out of work, pushing skills-building content for job swappers involved in what he called “the great shakeup,” and helping employees that were previously on the desktop. navigate the shift to remote work.
“I put all my eggs in the basket that we are going to transform LinkedIn to help the world learn when they can’t meet in person, sell when they can’t go, and meet a client and recruit when they can. Do not interview someone in person. As companies began hiring and advertising again, revenue increased from $8 billion to $10.3 billion in the year to June 2021. It is expected to exceed $15 billion for the year to June 2021. 2023.
Along the way, Roslansky has been working to master the platform he helped create. With more than 725,000 followers, she has become one of LinkedIn’s “Top Voices,” part of a pantheon of corporate influencers that includes Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington and Nadella. He noted that the regular videos of him on the site, in which he interviews other executives about his career paths, also make him something of a match for journalists who write about leadership.
“I’m excited to talk to you because I’m excited to know how you do this,” he replies disarmingly. She has 46 abilities, in other words, but she’s still looking to add to them.
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