You haven’t read it yet? What are you waiting for? I think that Powering Up! has more “actionable” knowledge, but Lean In has become a cultural reference.

Click on the photo to link to the book on Amazon.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Sheryl Sandberg

Career progression often depends upon taking risks and advocating for oneself—traits that girls are discouraged from exhibiting.
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Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don’t expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don’t.
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Taking initiative pays off. It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if she is always waiting to be told what to do.
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In retrospect, at a certain point it’s your ability to learn quickly and contribute quickly that matters. One of the things I tell people these days is that there is no perfect fit when you’re looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.”
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If we want a world with greater equality, we need to acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up. We need institutions and individuals to notice and correct for this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing more women. And women have to learn to keep their hands up, because when they lower them, even managers with the best intentions might not notice.
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Author Ken Auletta summarized this phenomenon in The New Yorker when he observed that for women, “self-doubt becomes a form of self-defense.”6 In order to protect ourselves from being disliked, we question our abilities and downplay our achievements, especially in the presence of others. We put ourselves down before others can.
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When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a negative impression and makes us uncomfortable.”
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If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent.
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“relentlessly pleasant.”
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“I want to apply to work with you at Facebook,” she said. “So I thought about calling you and telling you all of the things I’m good at and all of the things I
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like to do. Then I figured that everyone was doing that. So instead, I want to ask you: What is your biggest problem, and how can I solve it?”
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Everyone has room to improve. Most people have a style in the workplace that overshoots in one direction—too aggressive or too passive, too talkative or too shy. In that first deal, I said too much. This was not a shock to anyone who knows me. Once I identified this weakness, I sought help to correct it. I turned to Maureen Taylor, a communications coach, who gave me an assignment. She told me that for one week I couldn’t give my opinion unless asked. It was one of the longest weeks of my life.
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She once explained, “I mentor when I see something and say, ‘I want to see that grow.’ ”
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Mentorship is often a more reciprocal relationship than it may appear, especially in situations where people are already working at the same company.
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Fred Kofman, a former MIT professor and author of Conscious Business.
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A recent study even found that “sense of humor” was the phrase most frequently used to describe the most effective leaders.
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In 2012, Gloria Steinem sat down in her home for an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Gloria reiterated that progress for women in the home has trailed progress in the workplace, explaining, “Now we know that women can do what men can do, but we don’t know that men can do what women can do.”34 I believe they can and we should give them more chances to prove it.
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As Marie Wilson, founder of the White House Project, has noted, “Show me a woman without guilt and I’ll show you a man.”
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As Gloria Steinem observed, “Whoever has power takes over the noun—and the norm—while the less powerful get an adjective.”
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I admitted that I could see these dynamics playing out in the workforce, and that, in order to fix the problems, we needed to be able to talk about gender without people thinking we were crying for help, asking for special treatment, or about to sue.
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“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.
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