Ryan Roslansky’s LinkedIn page lists 46 skills, from product management to problem-solving.
But no one fully prepared him to run the professional networking site when he took over as CEO three years ago.
“I fundamentally believe that you can only learn how to become a CEO by being a CEO,” he says. “On the first day in a role like this, you enter a world where you are about to face a huge list of unexpected challenges that you don’t know how to do. The problem is that the whole world expects you to figure out how to do it.”
Sitting behind his tidy desk, 16 stories high at LinkedIn’s San Francisco headquarters, with a bookshelf behind it displaying a picture of Baby Yoda’s daughter and a sign that says “Hard things are hard,” Roslansky points to his darkened computer screen. He predicts he’ll turn it back on after our hour-long conversation and find out he’s been mentioned 500 times on LinkedIn. With 20,000 employees and over 930 million users, something is going to go awry. Customers, whose complaints range from routine errors to bogus commentators and abuse by scammers, will look to him to fix them.
“Maybe I don’t have it LinkedIn profileBut I think the most important skill I had to acquire early on was learning how to manage psychology,” Roslansky says.
“Product strategy, business strategy, people, processes: these are things you can figure out easily, but you have to learn how to get your mind in the right place quickly.”
Doing so, the 45-year-old says, first requires assembling the right team around you — both direct reports and mentors (among whom he diplomatically highlights Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO who led the software group’s acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016). Second, “you can’t let the highs get too high, or the lows drop too low . . . you have to maintain a kind of steady bar in the middle of it all.” And finally, he says, you can’t get so caught up in the day-to-day details that you lose sight of The largest company.
Roslansky presents such insights in the crisp, clear style befitting a CEO who launched the “influencer” programs and content that has transformed LinkedIn from a site for recruiters and job seekers into a haven for people to disseminate opinions about how to get to the top and what to do once you get there.
He says the resumes shared by LinkedIn members since its inception two decades ago add up to 10 billion years of experience. One of the challenges of his role was working out how to “get all this knowledge out of people’s heads”.
The new engagement tools, news feeds, newsletters, and video series he and his team created are designed to keep users coming back often. “Problem solving is a much more frequent use case than job hunting,” he notes.
Roslansky’s LinkedIn profile details his 14 years with the company, starting as chief product officer in 2009, and his prior jobs at Glam Media, Yahoo and the start-up dotcom he dropped out of college to run in 1997.
But it doesn’t reflect the experience that he says most shaped him as a leader — an episode from his childhood. Roslanski grew up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Lake Tahoe. His parents were hippies turned real estate entrepreneurs who taught him something about taking control of one’s career.
When he was 13, they put him on a plane to Florida, where he attended the highly competitive Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy alongside Maria Sharapova and Andre Agassi. The only American in his college dorm, “I learned how to survive by understanding other people well,” he recalls, and building empathy in later life for what motivates people and how they think. “As a productive person, that is probably the most important skill one can have.”
A day in the life of Ryan Roslanski
There is a set of (meetings) that we use to run the company effectively and they are very important to me. Every Tuesday, we have our executive team meeting. It’s half a day and that’s where we just talk about everything that’s going on around the company.
Every two weeks, I get the whole company together for what we call “The Connected Company.” It’s in a format where we go over the company’s top priorities, have an “open mic,” we call it, for anyone’s questions. It’s a get-together every two weeks no matter what. . . As you know, confidence is consistency over time and you can’t replace either of those things.
Ironically, the most important thing to me is having a strong work-life balance. I have three daughters and it’s very important for me to make sure I’m there for them as much as I am here for LinkedIn. So I will always take my girls to school. I will always be home for dinner. These things are not negotiable. And I think more than anything, it keeps me grounded and balanced. Because if I don’t have those things in place, it’s very easy to get busy answering what’s going on here all day.
Roslansky describes himself as an “adaptive” leader. “You can practically decide that you’ll adapt as a leader, or you can stay who you are,” he explains. But when challenges arise, he’d rather make “little axes” than “saws” — bobbing away in a new direction, only to have to back off later.
This is one reason why it has avoided making statements about when people should return to its offices. (LinkedIn has not laid down the law on how often it expects employees to come in, saying it trusts them to decide whether to choose in-person, remote or hybrid work.) The people in these companies are around.”
There is one place where the adaptation and hubs don’t seem to pay off. In May, LinkedIn shut down its jobs app for Chinese users and cut more than 700 jobs, in the face of fierce competition and regulatory scrutiny. The Financial Times described the first phase of its withdrawal from China — shutting down its homegrown social media site in 2021 — as the end of an unsustainable compromise between profit and morality.
“I was constantly trying to figure out ways we could make LinkedIn work in China,” Roslansky admits. He says he remains optimistic about the opportunities offered by the country’s huge working population, even though he has yet to find a sustainable work situation.
LinkedIn keeps its options open by allowing Chinese companies to hire via its global platform, he notes, but “one of the worst things you can do . . . is keep something that is just kind of working and thinking that next year will be the year that works This is already in it. We’ve been experimenting with it for 10 years.”
Roslansky’s definition of adaptive leadership also means trying to “play” instead of holding back, or looking for opportunities that a situation presents rather than giving in to the fear that the worst will happen.
He was named to LinkedIn’s top job in February 2020, weeks before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, and took over in June when a sudden freeze in hiring and advertising choked off the company’s two main revenue streams. He made a big early bet that LinkedIn could find new growth by rolling out tools to users who were out of work, pushing skill-building content to job contractors engaged in what he called the “big reshuffling,” and helping employees formerly attached to the office transition to transition. Distance working.
“I’m putting all my eggs in a basket. We’re going to transform LinkedIn to help the world learn when they can’t meet in person, sell when you can’t go and meet a client, and hire when you can to meet someone in person.” As companies began hiring and advertising again, revenue jumped from $8 billion to $10.3 billion in the year ending June 2021. It is expected to exceed $15 billion for the year ending June 2023.
Along the way, Roslansky has been perfecting the platform he helped create. With over 725,000 followers, he’s become one of LinkedIn’s “top voices,” and is part of a group of corporate influencers that includes Bill Gates, Ariana Huffington, and Nadella. And I note that the videos he posts regularly on the site, in which he interviews other CEOs about their career paths, also makes him a contender for journalists who write about leadership.
“I’m excited to talk to you because I’m excited to see how you do it,” he replied with a tone. In other words, he has 46 skills, but he’s still looking to add to it.
