There are a lot of things Sheryl Sandberg wishes she could tell her 20-year-old self.
But she'd start with this: Don't be afraid to speak up at work.
"I have had so many moments in my career where I was so upset about something or so worried about something, and part of it was about learning to speak up earlier," the former COO of Meta and founder of LeanIn.org tells CNBC Make It.
Sandberg left Meta in August 2022 after 14 years at the company. Reflecting on her time at the tech giant, Sandberg acknowledges that "there were things that I was able to say, because I was the COO and because I had Mark [Zuckerberg]," referring to Meta's longtime CEO. "But when I think about the things I didn't say 10 years before, I wish I had said them then."
After graduating from Harvard University in 1991, Sandberg worked at the World Bank for a year. She then returned to Harvard to get an MBA and spent a year at the global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. after finishing her degree in 1995.
Sandberg's tech career didn't take off until 2001 when she joined Google as general manager of its business unit. She left Google in 2008 to become Meta's COO.
As part of the advice she'd give to her younger self, Sandberg, now 53, has also stressed the importance of being open to creative, nonlinear career routes, as the need to know exactly where you are going in your career can often lead to missed opportunities for growth.
"There is no straight path to where you are going," she wrote in a Q&A for Quora in 2015. "If you try to draw that line you will not just get it wrong, but you will miss big opportunities."
In the same interview, Sandberg encouraged people to have both an ambitious, long-term vision for what they want to do, as well as a more reasonable, practical, actionable 18-month plan.
One of the reasons Sandberg says she left Meta was to devote more time to LeanIn.org and its initiatives, including Lean In Girls, a new program for girls ages 11-15 that aims to encourage girls to set leadership goals, navigate risk, and identify and challenge bias.
"I wanted my new chapter to be able to really make a difference," she tells CNBC Make It. "We've been in development on this since I was at Meta, but being able to have the time to put into [this launch] and to really be ... a bigger part of this has meant a lot to me."
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