Sheryl Sandberg’s Accidental Revolution

How Sandberg’s grief became the catalyst for a new, emotionally honest management style at Facebook and beyond.
Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg
How Sandberg’s grief became the catalyst for a new, emotionally honest management style at Facebook and beyond.

Sheryl Sandberg’s husband died of a heart arrhythmia on a Friday evening. They’d been vacationing in Mexico, and from the moment she saw him on the resort’s gym floor, a life built on relentless order — in the workplace, in the home, and especially in balancing the two — was thrust into terrifying chaos. She flew home and broke the news to her two young children. She listened to Bono perform “One” in front of 1,700 people crammed into the Stanford Memorial Auditorium for a memorial. She spent seven days welcoming friends for the traditional Jewish shiva, accepting food she mostly didn’t eat. Then, on the following Monday, Sandberg dropped her kids off at school, eased her SUV out of the parking lot, and headed for Facebook. Her boss — Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg — had encouraged her to take as much time as she needed before returning to work, but grief counselors had advised her to get her kids back to their regular schedule. She thought it would be good to return to work while they were at school. “I wanted out of my house,” she says, thinking back nearly two years. “I mean, I love my job.”

As Facebook’s chief operator, Sandberg holds one of the most iconic jobs in tech. She’s the most famous number two to have ever existed, and she’s famous because of what she has managed to achieve. In the nine years since she joined Facebook, Sandberg launched an ad business that has led the company to be worth $408 billion, helped take the company public, wrote a best-selling book on women in the workforce, and helmed a movement by the same name: Lean In. When other promising tech startups reach their adolescence and their young male founders need help, they often put out a public call for a Sheryl Sandberg.

Along the way, Sandberg has pioneered her own approach to leadership, the hallmark of which has always been the kind of openness that Facebook prizes. In multiple commencement speeches, she has implored graduates to “bring your whole self to work,” saying, “I don’t believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.”

Sandberg’s whole self was always a bit more polished than everyone else’s. She was a paragon of efficiency. She remembered names. She hosted dinner parties in her home, seamlessly multitasking so she could put her kids to bed and then join three dozen Silicon Valley women for a salon. As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who taught Sandberg at Harvard and later hired her as his chief of staff, once told the The New Yorker, “Sheryl always believed that if there were thirty things on her to-do list at the beginning of the day, there would be thirty check marks at the end of the day.”

Then she lost her husband. On that morning that she first returned to work, as the dry hot Menlo Park sun came out and the cars turned into the parking garage beneath Building 20, she wasn’t thinking about her Lean In fan base, or the thousands of young Facebook employees who looked up to her. The image of her husband on the gym floor kept flashing across her mind like a sick and twisted augmented reality. “All I wanted to do was survive,” she remembers.

By her own account, the day did not go well. She fell asleep in a meeting. In another, she talked about having worked with a colleague at Google; he’d actually worked for its competitor, Microsoft. In still another, she heard herself rambling. “I kept going, I couldn’t stop,” she said. And as her words filled the air, her fears began to spiral. Maybe she’d lost her edge. Maybe she’d have to quit, or worse, be sidelined or fired. Just like that, Sandberg, the woman who’d written the book on confidence, had none.

On the first Friday in April, I visit Sandberg at Facebook headquarters. She’s dressed in jeans and a tan sweater, her husband’s wedding ring dangling from a chain around her neck. She joins me in her glass conference room, pulling her legs up beneath her in an Aeron chair. I’ve interviewed her many times over the last few years; she has changed. She’s calmer. It’s true of her kids, too, she says. Recently, her son’s team lost the basketball playoffs. “Everyone else is super upset,” she says. “I looked at him. He’s like, ‘Mom, this is sixth grade basketball. I’m fine.’”

And that’s what it is. Sandberg affects the air of someone who has gained perspective — who looks around at Facebook’s 17,000 employees, all of the code-red emergencies, the legal issues, the clients whose names she must remember and those she’d rather forget, and reminds herself that it’s all some version of sixth grade basketball, and she is fine. “I am a bigger-picture manager because I’ve lived through something that’s a big picture,” she says. “I can move on much faster.”

This is the definition of resilience, the big idea behind her new book. Dubbed Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy, and cowritten with Wharton professor Adam Grant, it’s a guide for anyone confronting the kind of straight-up hardship that renders everything else temporarily meaningless. The death of a husband, or a child. A sexual assault. Cancer.

Sandberg never intended to grieve publicly. Whether driven by intuition or the smart counsel of friends like Grant, she simply did everything she knew to feel better. And because it’s the way she operates, she felt compelled to share what she’d learned about the hardest thing that has yet happened to her. The more she shared, the more people — Facebook’s employees; random strangers who’d experienced their own loss — reached back to her, and their messages (often posted on Facebook) made her feel less alone.

She doesn’t profess to be an expert. Sandberg knows her experience is uniquely influenced by her station in life. She’s rich. She has important friends. Lean In has made her famous. Despite this, or maybe because of it, her sudden loss was met with deep compassion by friends, employees, and beyond that, strangers the world over. Representatives of the White House expressed condolences on her Facebook page. My mother, who has never met her, wept.

It took Sandberg falling apart completely for her to come up with Option B. She had to survive a loss that briefly seemed insurmountable to bring us her next big idea. In the process, somewhat by accident because she felt she had no other choice she found a way to bring even more of her whole, messy, sad, intelligent, demanding, heartbroken self to work.

Even more than Option B is a self-help tome, it’s a management book. Sandberg shows how a boss can lift a whole organization by admitting she (or he) needs help. Management coach Kim Scott, who authored the book Radical Candor and once reported to her at Google, says this skill is increasingly important. “What you have in the generation of leaders that Sheryl represents is a move away from bureaucracy to relying on human relationships for managers to get things done,” she says. “That’s in the air, here in Silicon Valley, and I think Sheryl is largely responsible for it.”

With Option B, Sandberg is becoming the advocate for a radical approach to office openness. Everyone knows that the 20th century model of the Organization Man, characterless and rigidly devoted to the success of the corporation, is history. Work flexibility and individuality are in vogue. Yet we still expect our colleagues to contain and conceal their personal lives. Take five days’ bereavement leave when a spouse dies. Accept the company fruit basket that arrives in the mail. Return a week later and persist. Tech companies have been at the forefront of new, more flexible approaches to work that give workers more leeway to manage their personal lives. But we’ve all — everyone last one of us — struggled with how to talk about hard things with each other, at work and at home, and so often, we’ve reverted to silence.

This is unacceptable to Sandberg. This year, Facebook instituted a new 20-day bereavement leave for the death of a spouse. As important, Sandberg believes people can do a better job at supporting each other when they return. “I want people to help take care of each other at work,” she says. “That’s what I want. Do you know how many hours we spend at work? We spend more time at work than we spend at home. When people are suffering, we don’t help enough.”

On the evening of Sandberg’s first day back, when her kids were in another room getting ready for bed, she called Zuckerberg to apologize. “I’m a disaster,” she remembers telling him. “I’m terrible. I fell asleep. I said stupid things.” Zuckerberg heard her out. But then, he told her he was glad she’d come in. He mentioned two important points she’d made. The mistakes? He joked they were mistakes she might have made anyhow. It was a gentle assist that, she says now, helped remind her she was capable.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg are close. On that awful Friday night, Sandberg had called him from the hospital, and he and his wife Priscilla came to her house when she arrived home the next morning. Zuckerberg planned the funeral. They’d spoken every day since then. But while he checked in with her constantly once she returned to the office, most others responded by giving her space. She’d show up, and slip into meetings. But in between, no one spoke to her. People avoided eye contact when she walked by. Or, they’d ask, “how are you?” It was a well-meaning question with an obvious answer: How did they think she was? Her husband had died. She’d slip into her conference room, pull her blinds down, and cry. “It felt quiet and isolating and sad and scary,” she says.

The silence and awkwardness wasn’t for lack of caring. Among Facebook’s employees, Sandberg is largely revered. One day shortly after her husband passed, employees organized a gathering in Facebook’s internal courtyard, Hacker Square, for an extended moment of silence. Yet up close, people were tongue-tied around her, not knowing how to help. Lori Goler, who runs human resources, recounts driving by Sandberg’s house, unsure of whether to stop and go in.

The isolation felt unbearable. “Three weeks sounds short unless you’re living this,” Sandberg said, adding that early on, “living through a day felt like an eternity.” To cope, she wrote in her journal, filling up pages with reflections, letters to her husband or her kids, or things she wanted to tell the other parents at their school.

Thirty days after Goldberg’s funeral marked sheloshim, the end of the Jewish period of mourning for a relative. The night before, Sandberg penned a Facebook post to mark the day. She did it in haste, without overthinking her words, intending it primarily for people she knew — colleagues, casual friends, other parents. Reading it over, she decided it was too personal to post.

The next morning, she woke up feeling awful. She reconsidered posting her essay. “I was like, ‘It can’t get worse. It might get better,’” she remembers.

So she clicked the blue “Post” button.

The post, which lent her book its name, was her inspirational stake in the ground for a future of meaning and life. “I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning,” she wrote. Her piece was a lyrical reflection on the places she’d found comfort, and the things she’d discovered.“ I have learned that I never really knew what to say to others in need,” one paragraph began, offering advice on what felt okay to talk about. “When I am asked ‘How are you?’ I stop myself from shouting, My husband died a month ago, how do you think I am? When I hear ‘How are you today?’ I realize the person knows that the best I can do right now is to get through each day.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that nearly everyone I know read that post. Today, it has more than 74,000 comments, including notes from colleagues, peers in tech, friends, and strangers who read her words and recognized their own truths.

After that day, Sandberg’s colleagues started talking to her again. She had taught them what to say.

Every year in late May, Facebook gathers its policy and communications team for a day-long retreat. Employees fly in from satellite offices in Germany, say, or Japan. It’s a chance to address problems, and set strategy for the year to come.

Sandberg always speaks, but that year Caryn Marooney, who was then in charge of technology communications, remembers everyone told her she could skip it. She insisted on coming anyway. As 200 people looked on, she began telling the group what she was going through, and how it was. “There were a lot of tears. It was incredibly raw, and then she said, “I’m going to open it up to Q and A,” Marooney remembers. People spoke up.

Talking about her situation allowed Sandberg — and the entire team — to move past it and transition into a productive conversation. Having acknowledged the proverbial elephant in the room, they could all focus on the work at hand. “I think people think that vulnerable is soft, but it’s not,” said Marooney, as she described Sandberg’s tough approach to business questions that followed. “It was a blueprint of what we saw from Sheryl going forward.”

Sandberg also brought this approach to one-on-one meetings. Around campus, she is credited for Facebook’s check-ins, in which people start gatherings by reporting on how things are going, personally and professionally. “For those first six months especially, just about every one of our weekly one-on-ones involved some period of crying and talking about the pain,” says David Fischer, who runs business and marketing partnerships for Facebook.

Fischer has worked with Sandberg now for two decades—first at the US Treasury Department, then Google, and now Facebook—which is to say that they’d mastered the dynamics of their working relationship. And yet Goldberg’s death shifted them, forging a deeper closeness. “Certainly, anyone who’s known me a long period of time would say I was someone who usually had that wall up unless I knew you really well,” he says. “I learned, ‘Why am I doing that? I don’t think I’m helping myself…and I’m not protecting people.” He found himself sharing his own feelings with the people he managed.

Sandberg believes there’s a sound business reason for encouraging this openness. Research suggests she’s right. In a 2016 episode of the podcast Invisibilia Hanna Rosin tells the story of what happened when, in the late 1990s, Shell began its first attempts at deep water drilling, which was a far more dangerous pursuit than earlier endeavors. Oil rig workers have a machismo culture. A leadership coach approached Shell and suggested trainings to open workers up emotionally. The men were initially hostile when asked to, say, draw pictures of their family or share stories about an alcoholic father. But as one or two people began to change, others joined in and the dynamic of the room switched. As the men became more open with each other about their feelings, they began to communicate more about other things like the technical information that helps a rig run more smoothly. This led to an 84 percent decline in accidents, according to an article published about the work in Harvard Business Review.

As Sandberg writes in Option B, “When it’s safe to talk about mistakes, people are more likely to report errors, but less likely to make them.”

In January 2016, Marooney found out she had breast cancer. It took a while for doctors to confirm the diagnosis. “You keep coming back, and you know why you’re going back,” she remembers. “You’re just hoping that the end result is ‘no.’” Instead, she was told she’d need surgery, and then a six-week daily course of radiation.

Shortly before the official diagnosis, Zuckerberg and Sandberg let Marooney know they wanted her to become the global head of communications. It was an important promotion to a big job. “This is the job that I wanted and worked for, for 20 years,” she remembers thinking. “What the fuck?” But that’s not what she said. She confided in Sandberg that she thought she had cancer; if the results came back positive, she planned to turn the promotion down. “I just can’t even think about thinking about it, let alone thinking about doing a good job,” she remembers saying.

Sandberg told Marooney not to decide, but to focus on getting better. Marooney wasn’t sure how she was even going to stay on top of the job she had, though it was important to her to keep working through her treatment. “For me, coming into work ended up helping me not make cancer my full-time job,” she said. Sandberg stepped in to help. “I was so overwhelmed, it would be like, ‘well, this presentation is the same day as a doctor’s appointment, so I have to quit,’” Marooney remembers. Sandberg would suggest someone else give the presentation, or perhaps they could reschedule it. “It was so simple, but I couldn’t see it,” says Marooney.

Once surgery was behind her, Marooney could once again think of the future. She really wanted that job. Radiation was still ahead of her, and she’d need to reduce her workload to half-days for awhile. But that would be temporary, and she knew she could count on her colleagues’ support. She accepted.

That May, the global policy and communications team hosted their annual offsite once more. Again, colleagues flew in. This was the first time Marooney would address the group as their new leader. She’d already been doing the job for awhile, yet she hadn’t met many of them. “My version of a new leader would have gotten on a plane and met all these teams,” she said. “Instead, it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m your new leader. A lot of you don’t know me. I haven’t reached out. I can’t and I have cancer. I need a lot of help.”

A year later, Marooney is in recovery. Her story is validating to Sandberg. “Had Dave not died, would she have told us all she had cancer?” she wonders out loud. “I think we have this false and old-fashioned idea of what is professional and what is personal, as if we could go to work and put on a suit and be someone else. I’ve never believed that. You bring your whole self to work and that’s where you find strength and resilience and you build relationships.” In other words, your vulnerabilities, when shared, are your most effective tools for working with other people.

Sandberg always believed this, but now she has also lived it in its most extreme form. And because of who she is, as the model of confidence and success for a generation of aspiring female leaders, and because of what Facebook is as a trendsetter in business culture, Sandberg is uniquely positioned to share this message, turning her personal healing into a new movement in how we all work.

And just maybe, starting a movement will help Sandberg survive her cataclysmic loss. Two years isn’t a long time for anyone to place such an extreme event into context. I ask Sandberg what she hopes to achieve with Option B, and her answer is personal. It concerns her own healing process. “I’m doing this because I want meaning. I’m doing this because if something good doesn’t come out of his death, and you knew Dave…” she says. She is choked up; we pause. “All this death and loss…If there is meaning, like any meaning, it’s easier.”

Art direction by Robert Shaw.