It’s always exciting to talk to female CEOs who have been as successful as the guest for the next episode of the Leadership Lessons series, because their life lessons will always include wisdom they’ve had to pick up from the extra hurdles placed in their way. Comparably Co-founder & CEO Jason Nazar had a talk like that with Deb Liu, CEO of Ancestry – the largest private online genealogy platform that allows users to create virtual family trees to trace their lineage, and others who may be related to them.
With nearly 20 years in the tech business, Liu has been named one of Business Insider’s most powerful female engineers and one of PaymentSource’s most influential women in payments. She was previously a senior executive at Facebook, where she created and led Facebook Marketplace. She also led the development of Facebook’s first mobile ad product for apps and its mobile ad network, in addition to building the company’s games business and payments platform, which includes Facebook Pay. Prior to Facebook, she spent several years in product roles at PayPal and eBay, where she led integration between the two products.
Liu is not only an author (Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work), she serves on the boards of Intuit and Ancestry, and is a seed investor and advisor to several startups. Actively involved in promoting diversity in tech, Deb founded Women In Product, a nonprofit with over 30,000 members, with the goal of connecting and supporting women in the product management field. She is a member of the Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese Americans, and was named an A100 by Gold House, an honor recognizing impactful Asian Americans.
“What’s really special about Ancestry is that it’s really focused on helping people connect,” Liu tells Nazar. “We’ve gone through a couple of really tough years where we lost a million people in America to COVID, and we’ve gone through a lot of time in lockdown where people haven’t been able to see their family. But we are part of the human family, and how we can connect with one another actually takes away our differences and actually focuses on our commonalities.”
During the talk, Liu’s passion for her company and for leadership is amazing, proving that she deserves every one of the accolades she has received. Here are 10 terrific leadership lessons Liu relayed to during the hour-long conversation:
1) There’s a major dichotomy in the minds and lives of many leaders. Many successful people spend their lives shielding their families from the very things that made them successful. This is a huge dichotomy. Liu says that in the end most people wouldn’t take away their own painful, formative experiences because they know what those potholes fostered.
2) Rough seas make good sailors. Liu uses the maritime imagery to remind us that it’s the tougher economic times that really prove a leader’s strength and that of their teams. A good tide lifts all boats, but choppier seas favor the outfits that have prepared for downturns.
3) It’s never time to stop learning. If you can remain flexible and open-minded to feedback and new ideas no matter how far you’ve already come in your career, you’ll never stop growing and improving yourself. “Your role in life is so much more than just doing your job today,” Liu tells me.
4) Don’t create a dependence on the CEO for answers. A CEO is there to answer big-picture questions that only they can, but it’s not helpful in the long run if team members can’t replicate that kind of answer when you’re not around. Remember, these are the people who are spending the most time on this particular issue, and they should be the best prepared to answer big questions themselves.
5) Spend more time on staff meetings than on one-on-ones. Liu says this avoids asymmetry of information. She says staff meetings are an opportunity for everyone to share important conversations and demonstrate transparency around information. They can also break down silos, as opposed to lengthier and more frequent one-on-ones.
6) A CEO’s purview is unique. For most employees at a company, big decisions around company events and remote work plans “just happen,” but the CEO is the one who has to weigh the pros and cons of these things and eventually decide. He or she makes the choices that shape the culture, which can be a very new experience for someone new to the role.
7) Workplaces have a natural bias for extroversion. Liu told me she struggled early on with being a natural introvert, but says she learned quickly that at work those who are able to respond on a dime to a question are the ones who get asked the next questions and the next. While the introverts on staff, who may not be as comfortable talking in larger groups, will have answers in their heads that are just as good or better. So you as the leader need to find a way to access those ideas.
8) Give your staff a framework for decision-making and use meetings to synchronize efforts. Liu says her team uses a traffic light framework of “red, yellow, and green” that can be used to describe issues being faced by different teams during staff get-togethers. At first, there will be a lot of “red” issues, but Liu told me this framework quickly paves the way for more “green” lights and many issues being resolved even before a meeting begins.
9) Team members need to be present at meetings. Liu has a friend who calls out a particular strategy at meetings, where someone won’t show up with anything to add, and then proceeds to frown the entire time to drain the energy from the proceedings. Meetings often break up a day’s workflow, and if someone is being asked to be present at a meeting they need to at the very least bring their waking self and be receptive to what is being imparted.
10) When explaining things to their team, a leader should learn to frame each issue in three points. It’s a fantastic trick and a discipline both Liu and I learned and still practice to this day. The idea is to become more comfortable speaking in front of a team, and to be able to better articulate a problem. When the team asks a substantial question, start on point one and know you’re ending on a third point. Even if you don’t have three things in mind when you start speaking, you’ll get to a point where anything – even things that are made up of more than three ideas – can be pinned on this framework in a way that is reassuring to the team.
And for more from this talk with Liu, watch the full webinar here. The growing collection of episodes from our series gives readers access to the best practices of successful CEOs from the biggest brands, including Foot Locker, Heineken, GoodRx, Headspace, Zoom, Chipotle, Warby Parker, and ZipRecruiter.