Deb Liu
The workplace is, in many ways, not made for introverts. One introverted CEO has some advice on how she climbed the ranks regardless.
Deb Liu has been CEO of genealogy company Ancestry.com since 2021 and was formerly a senior executive at Facebook, where she created Facebook Marketplace. She shared her tips for success at work for the more reserved among us in an episode of "Lenny's Podcast" last week.
Liu recalled a great product manager on a previous team who was overlooked when it was time for promotions because "she was not good at broadcasting or explaining what she does."
"So much of what product and just general leadership is is not just doing the work, it's not just having the product, it's having great product marketing to go with it," Liu said. "You make a light bulb but you're selling light. I really think about how she was making an amazing number of light bulbs, she was lighting up all the houses, but she was not marketing the light."
Liu added that while it's "absolutely not" fair that great employees might go unnoticed in these cases, "that's the world we live in," and introverts can choose to adapt to the circumstances.
"First, I think, for the individual is realizing that you are your own best marketer," she advised. "You have to actually share what you do. If a great product is out in the world but no one is told about it, did it exist? And so one of the things that's very important is really to get that product marketing."
Liu went on to say that leaders of an organization should look for ways to more evenly recognize everyone's contributions.
"We should change our workplaces so everyone can be successful," she said. "As more introverts get into leadership, they need to actually change the world to make more space for people like them as well."
Liu shared one way she's tried to do this in her own work.
"In my leadership teams over the last several years we had this thing where we all vote, but we vote offline in a document and we put a number in and then we put our comments in," she said. "And that way everyone has an equal voice in this document. And then we talk about it. Usually, of course, the extroverts speak first, but everyone has a vote, and we can actually see what people's points of view are."
In Liu's own career, she said she thought of speaking up as a skill she could learn, even if it didn't come naturally to her at first.
"It's not, 'Well I'm uncomfortable.' I hear this a lot where people say, 'Well, you wouldn't understand, I'm an introvert.' I'm like, 'So was I.' But instead I just said, 'Okay, this is a necessary skill, and it's a learnable skill.' You don't have to be comfortable with it, you don't have to love it, but you just have to do it."
