Is Sheryl Sandberg Leaning Out at Facebook?

by Daniel Gross Jun 14, 2013 The Daily Beast

Facebook's rock star chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg insists that she's not leaving the social network. But status updates are prone to change, writes Daniel Gross.About 66 minutes into Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this week, a stockowner stood up and posed a question to Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s long-serving chief operating officer who this spring penned a best-selling book, Lean In, and then created a nonprofit group, Leanin.org to promote women in the workplace. 

“You wrote a great book in the last year, spent a lot of time promoting it, traveling around. I’m sure it did a lot of positive things for Facebook’s ability to attract people.” He said. “However, my concern is that took a lot of time and activity in addition to your substantial responsibilities as COO of Facebook. How can you assure me that you’ll be just as committed to Facebook over the next 12 months as you were the previous four or five years? Because without you there is no business in Facebook.”

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. (Yonhap/EPA, via Landov)

“I love my job at Facebook,” Sandberg said. “Facebook has been and remains my number one priority. I also have no plans to leave.”

That exchange really encapsulates the dilemma Sandberg is in, and the extremely rare place she occupies in America’s corporate culture. No, it’s not that she’s a senior woman in Silicon Valley; the CEOs of tech giants Yahoo! and HP are women, after all. Rather, it’s that she’s one of the nation’s few rock-star chief operating officers.

Quick. Name a chief operating officer of a major company. COO is the ultimate non-glamorous job. Aside from missing a letter that CEOs have in their title, COOs lack the juice they have. They’re the vice presidents to the presidents, the inside men to the CEO’s outside men, the Scottie Pippen to the CEO’s Michael Jordan. CEOs are supposed to be the charismatic visionaries. The chief operating officer is supposed to deal, quietly and competently, with the annoying stuff—personnel, overseeing the core business, making sure the trains run on time. It’s a huge job, and a vitally important one. A COO’s successful labor frees up the CEO to think deep thoughts, write books, and hold forth at Davos or on the Charlie Rose show about vital global issues.
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