COO Facebook Sheryl Sandberg case study

Leadership is a very important aspect for any business to grow regardless of the industry that it lays. This paper discusses Sheryl Sandberg the chief operating officer of Facebook as a great leader and the role that she has played in ensuring the growth of the company since she started working there. The Chief Executive officer Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook back in 2004 and it was launched in February 2005. Before then, it started off as Facemash, which was a website where students got to rank their attractiveness. It was however taken down which led him to think f a new strategy and Facebook was born. This was a great year because the users increased from 12 million to 50 million. In 2008, Facebook set its international headquarters in Ireland specifically at Dublin.

At the end of 2009, Facebook had over 350 million users from different countries. This was a big win for Facebook and its popularity had increased. Everyone who had access to the internet was driven to having a Facebook account and this increased the general productivity of the business. In 2014, they claimed to buy Whatsapp for 19 billion dollars. In 2017, Facebook had created its own application called messenger that has over 1. 2 billion users. Currently, the Facebook team launched the news feed, where you get to see what family and friends are posting. This feature has been of interest to many users. She also worked with Google in advertising and sales and later moved to Facebook in 2008. She oversees the communication, human resources, public policy, business development, sales and marketing of the company.

In 2012 she became the 8th and only woman in the board of directors. On the same year, she was also pronounced as one of the most influential people in the world. She has put in a considerable amount of hard work to get where she is now and through it all, she has come out to be an influential and many looks up to her in terms of career and professionalism. To ensure that the company grows the leaders are task-oriented such that they plan on improving a specific area. For example, when complaints started o increase about abuse through Facebook, the team was able to strengthen the privacy policy and shut the accounts of the offenders. The leaders have to ensure that the users get to discover new things.

They are change oriented. Facebook was able to introduce Messenger as an independent application once it realized that people preferred direct messaging. In leadership, there are also some situational determinants that affect the overall productivity of a business. Facebook was facing competition from other social media sites like Instagram. To ensure that the number of users did not decrease, they had to come up with new and better ways of using the website (Ryan, 2011). This included teaming up with other companies that offered products that is beneficial to the company such as Oculus. Facebook also teamed up with mobile networks to make Facebook a default application on mobile phones. For any business to grow and become more productive there needs to be a strong task force that is able to make sound decisions within a fixed deadline and one which is committed towards a common goal.