“It gives people a place to be very explicit about ambition,” she says. That’s why Lean In Circles are more than just groups of friends. “Mentorship is when you give advice and support and encouragement to go after something that you want to go after.” “My peers thought Google and Facebook were fabulous ideas.”īut if you take out the management experience, what’s the difference between a friend and a mentor? “Friendship is where you trust someone and confide in them and they can be there for the ups and downs of your life,” she explains. “My mentors didn’t really understand what Google was or why I would go to Facebook,” she says. Sandberg says her own peers helped her at “very important inflection points” in her own career. But younger women, she says, can fill in the gaps. “There aren’t enough senior women to go around to mentor all the young women,” Sandberg says, adding that she also encourages senior men to mentor young women. It’s also a clever solution to a practical problem. Leaning In now means advocating for the women around you as much as you would advocate for yourself. If anything, the broader messaging shift may be more more revolutionary than any of the individual suggestions: Sandberg is trying to transform individual ambition into a sense of collective achievement. Many of them aren’t terribly new- challenging the “likability penalty,” for example, is has been debated for years and was discussed in the original Lean In.

The tips for mentoring other women are available on LinkedIn, and include strategies like interrupting men who interrupt women (by saying something like “Hey, I’d like to hear what Kelly has to say”), actively celebrating other women’s accomplishments, and being a role model for young girls. The new initiative, she says, is all about finding ways to “help women help other women.” They’ve put together some tips to help guide peer mentors: “How do you interrupt the interrupter, how do you make sure women get credit, how do you help girls to raise their voices, both in the classroom and at home with their friends?” she says. Facebook offers four months of paid family leave to both moms and dads. Every time we get a woman into a senior job, we know we are more likely to get better policies.” Paid family leave for both parents, she says, is the single most important workplace policy that would help more women succeed. “When we interrupt the interrupter and get more women to the table and get more women’s voices heard, we are both working on the individual problem and the structural problem. “People like to trade one off against each other, but you’re actually working on both,” she said in an exclusive interview with TIME.

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