Sheryl Sandberg, the trail-blazing chief operating officer (COO) of Meta, is stepping down. She announced the development on her Facebook page Wednesday, after 14 years of thrilling career at the world’s largest social media platform.
Sandberg joined Facebook in 2008 when it was a startup and helped build it to the conglomerate it has become. Her role as the COO came with a mammoth of responsibilities that put her leadership and motherhood capabilities to the test.
“When I joined Facebook, I had a two-year-old son and a six-month-old daughter. I did not know if this was the right time for a new and demanding role. The messages were everywhere that women – and I – could not be both a leader and a good mother, but I wanted to give it a try,” she said.
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Besides the challenge of combining leading at work and being a mother, Sandberg was up against managing the chaos of running a huge social media startup idea that has not been largely tested before.
“When I was considering joining Facebook, my late husband, Dave, counseled me not to jump in and immediately try to resolve every substantive issue with Mark, as we would face so many over time. Instead, I should set up the right process with him.
“So, on the way in, I asked Mark for three things – that we would sit next to each other, that he would meet with me one-on-one every week, and that in those meetings he would give me honest feedback when he thought I messed something up. Mark said yes to all three but added that the feedback would have to be mutual. To this day, he has kept those promises,” she said.
After more than a decade of massive ups and downs of running Facebook, coupled with family challenges, the company has given birth to subsidiaries commanding more than two billion users worldwide and Sheryl Sandberg has become one of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.
But leaving Meta at this point where it has fresh serious challenges brings the why question. Sandberg’s era at Facebook was also marked by scandals. The social media giant came under the heat for spearheading disinformation, hate and conspiracy theories post 2016 election that ushered in former President Donald Trump to power.
Facebook was fingered as the paramount platform that enabled Russia to meddle with the US election, prompting backlash and criticism that spilled over to 2020. After Trump lost his reelection bid, Facebook again became the center of the chaos that ensued as it was accused of giving the organizers of post-election violence the platform to plan the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
In her response, Sandberg falsely claimed that the day’s events were “largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate.” This is contrary to investigation which found that Facebook played a central role in the “Stop the Steal” movement following the 2020 election after fostering far right groups like QAnon and the Proud Boys for years before taking action.
As noted by TechCrunch, that unforced error was just one of Sandberg’s recent PR blunders. But others bear heavy weight as well. They include her involvement in contracting the Republican opposition research firm Definers Public Affairs to plant negative stories about liberal billionaire George Soros and a more recent report that Sandberg leveraged the Meta communications team to kill a story about Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, her former boyfriend who is now accused of fostering a culture of sexual harassment at the gaming company.
The discovery of her involvement in the attempt to bury Kotick’s sexual harassment story appears to be the last straw for Meta. The WSJ reported also that due to the discovery, she’s facing “internal scrutiny” and an internal review at Meta.
However, it is not clear the real reason why Sandberg is stepping down. She said she will be focusing on her foundation and philanthropic works for now.
Though Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described her exit of the COO as “the end of an era,” heaping praises on her for helping him build Facebook, recent events and reports suggest that ‘Facebook’s growing political tensions and Sandberg’s handful of high profile missteps have strained the relationship between them.’
However, Sandberg will remain in Meta’s board. Zuckerberg said “I don’t plan to replace Sheryl’s role in our existing structure. I’m not sure that would be possible since she’s a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way.” But he added that Javier Olivan will become the next Chief Operating Officer since he will now lead Meta’s integrated ads and business products in addition to continuing to lead its infrastructure, integrity, analytics, marketing, corporate development and growth teams. But this role will be different from what Sheryl has done.
Having described her as “my good friend and partner,” Zuckerberg didn’t hold back from attributing Meta’s success to Sandberg’s prodigy.
“When Sheryl joined me in 2008, I was only 23 years old and I barely knew anything about running a company. We’d built a great product — the Facebook website — but we didn’t yet have a profitable business and we were struggling to transition from a small startup to a real organization.
“Sheryl architected our ads business, hired great people, forged our management culture, and taught me how to run a company. She created opportunities for millions of people around the world, and she deserves the credit for so much of what Meta is today,” he said.