- One of Meta’s longest-tenured execs shared insights from the 19 years she’s worked with Mark Zuckerberg.
- Head of product Naomi Gleit talked about lessons from his leadership on “Lenny’s Podcast.”
- She said one of her biggest takeaways is focusing on what you can control.
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A Meta exec recently reflected on some of the lessons she’s learned from nearly two decades working with company cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Naomi Gleit was employee No. 29 at the company when it was still called Facebook; today, she is Meta’s head of product and its second-longest-serving employee after Zuckerberg himself. She talked about her experience working with Zuckerberg for over 19 years during an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” released Sunday.
“I always say Mark is a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. He is the fastest person at upskilling of anyone I’ve ever met,” she said. Gleit cited as one example when Zuckerberg took up learning Mandarin and became 8th-grade fluent in a year as one of his yearly personal challenges.
Gleit also recalled Zuckerberg’s “four steps to how to approach life” from a time roughly a decade ago when they taught an after-school class about how to build a business in an East Palo Alto middle school.
She recalled a lesson they taught in that class, with Mark writing on a chalkboard:
1) Love yourself.
2) Only then can you truly serve others.
3) Focus on what you can control.
4) For those things, never give up.
“In that you can see some of what I think we all see in Mark, for example, for those things never give up, he has that aspect of him and it makes sense,” Gleit said. “For me, number 3 is really the hardest, which is ‘Focus on what you can control’ because I think I probably think I can control more things than I actually can.”
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Gleit also talked about Meta’s culture around feedback.
“One thing I think Mark has done really well in general is just have a culture, including on his leadership team, of people who give him feedback,” she said.
“I think a lot of times as you get more successful or as you have more fame or if you have more wealth, you lose having an accurate feedback loop and people may not want to be 100% honest with you for various reasons,” she added. “And Mark has tried to ensure that he himself has an accurate feedback loop, or we as a company have more of an accurate feedback loop, by surrounding himself and our leadership team and creating a culture of giving direct and honest feedback.”
Another Meta exec, CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, previously talked about Zuckerberg’s approach to feedback. Bosworth said that Zuckerberg will “most often tell you that you’re wrong” before asking people what they think of the idea in an attempt to “pressure test” it. Oftentimes, he will ultimately implement the suggested changes, Bosworth said.
Zuckerberg has also been known to be direct in his feedback for the company, saying during a town hall in 2022 that, “realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Reuters reported at the time. A year later, during Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency,” Meta gave thousands of employees subpar performance reviews, The Wall Street Journal reported. Layoffs followed as the company’s organizational structure got flatter.
Zuck celebrated his company turning 20 years old in February and more recently reflected on his two decades at the helm of the tech giant.
“One of the things that I look back on and regret is I think we accepted other people’s view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong, or were responsible for, that I don’t actually think we were,” he said last month.
He has also talked about changing his public image over the years.
“Being awkward and getting negative feedback on how I came across definitely made me more careful and scripted,” Zuckerberg said in July. “Still not my best thing, but getting a bit more comfortable just being me as I get older.”