Three Leadership Lessons From YouTube’s Late CEO, Susan Wojcicki
Randi Braun is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, where this post was first published on Forbes.com. Randi is the CEO of Something Major and the Wall Street Journal Bestselling author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work.
Earlier this year, Silicon Valley lost one of its most inspiring and prolific leaders: Susan Wojcicki, who was just 56 years old.
One of the most successful women—let alone working mothers—in Big Tech, Wojcicki was employee #16 at Google and the CEO of YouTube. Here are three leadership lessons all women can learn from her exquisite life and career.
1. Fight for your ideas.
It’s worth remembering that Wojcicki, who began as employee #16 at Google, was the driving force of some of its most revolutionary ideas—especially before they were seen as revolutionary. While it’s hard to believe in a contemporary culture where video reigns supreme across platforms like TikTok, Instagram and, of course, YouTube, video had a pretty slow start at Google as compared to the other services that made it viral (like best-in-class search and email).
But Wojcicki believed “video was the next TV,” launching Google Video in 2005 and overseeing a $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube (described by Variety as “a then-fledgling rival video-upload website”) before serving as YouTube’s CEO from 2014 to 2023. Under her leadership, video—once the red-headed stepchild of Google’s core business—became one of Google’s ultimate moneymakers, with subscription revenue alone topping $15 billion in 2023.
Wojcicki would also be a driving force for one of Google’s other biggest moneymakers: the ad business. In fact, between her contributions through the video and advertising business lines, Forbes reported that in 2010 she was personally responsible for a whopping 96% of Google’s revenue.
2. Ask for what you need (you’re probably not the only one who needs it).
Whether it’s maternity leave or an accommodation to work more flexibly, so many women don’t ask for what they need at work—and it’s not our fault: Many of us fear being viewed as less reliable or less committed, a systemic bias called the motherhood penalty that leads working moms to lower wages and fewer promotions than our male counterparts.
Wojcicki, however, modeled the power of how a single person can help break this cycle inside an organization. As she recalled in the Wall Street Journal in 2014:
“I was Google’s first employee to go on maternity leave. In 1999, I joined the startup that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had recently started in my garage. I was four months pregnant. At the time the company had no revenue and only 15 employees, almost all of whom were male. Joining a startup pregnant with my first child was risky, but Larry and Sergey assured me I’d have their support.”
In the op-ed published on the eve of her 5th maternity leave, she recalled how making a personal request for her family led to institutionalizing a 12-week maternity leave policy at the nascent startup.
But Wojcicki didn’t stop there: Seeing how effective the policy was for retention, in 2007 she was a driving force in increasing paid maternity leave to 18 weeks (and increasing paternity leave from seven weeks to 12 weeks). As Google unveiled the policy Wojcicki stated what, today we take for granted as the obvious organizational benefits of paid leave policies, but what was then almost revolutionary:
“Mothers were able to take the time they needed to bond with their babies and return to their jobs feeling confident and ready. And it’s much better for Google’s bottom line—to avoid costly turnover, and to retain the valued expertise, skills and perspective of our employees who are mothers.”
Knowing how many companies have been inspired to create programs like Google’s since Wojcicki first asked for her own maternity leave back in 1999, one has to wonder: How many women have we retained in the workforce because Wojcicki was an advocate for her own first maternity leave?
3. Leverage motherhood as your superpower.
Yes, we have a narrative in our culture that motherhood will slow us down at work (see above the very real motherhood penalty). As a high-powered executive leader and mother of five, however, Wojcicki rewrote the script, recalling that “each baby brings a good era of opportunity.” As journalist, author and Wojcicki’s friend Adam Lashinsky explained in a remembrance he published for the Washington Post:
“She told me beforehand that she could track her career at Google with the birth of each of her five children. It seemed that every time she became pregnant, she explained, she found herself in a new role at the company ... She was pregnant with her eldest, she said, when she joined Google in 1999. The second corresponded with her role in helping build Google’s advertising business, the third with its acquisition of YouTube and the fourth with its purchase of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company. She became CEO of YouTube, her fifth and final career change at Google.”
It is just biology that women’s childbearing years correspond with our ladder-climbing ones. Wojcicki’s career trajectory reminds us that we shouldn’t buy into the narrative that motherhood doesn’t have to slow us down, but can make us even more ambitious, successful and effective. As she shared before having her fifth child while CEO of YouTube, back in 2014, “Mothers come back to the workforce with new insights. I know from experience that being a mother gave me a broader sense of purpose, more compassion and a better ability to prioritize and get things done efficiently.”
Put Wojcicki's lessons into practice.
The best part of Wojcicki's advice is that the things she inspires us to do are so achievable. Sure, we won't all be the CEO of YouTube or an early hire at one of the world's most iconic startups. But I know in my life, I have always won when I fought for my ideas. In 2019, when I quit my corporate job with two kids under three to take my coaching business full-time, I believed in what I was doing. As I approach my fifth anniversary mark, while on maternity leave with a third child, I'm so glad I was willing to stand up for the ultimate act of fighting for my ideas: betting on myself. And nobody modeled that better than Wojcicki.
Randi Braun is a certified executive coach and the author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work. Get in touch with Randi via email or social (below). Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.