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Jun 13 2017

Being your authentic self at Facebook, Vanessa F., Sales Director Northern Europe

By Meta Careers
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Tell us about your background and what you did prior to joining Facebook

When I was still in school my parents wanted me to go to university, they wanted me to have a good steady job; my dad was dying for me to work in the bank. However, the thought of that gave me hives. I knew back then that banking did not appeal to me as a dynamic and exciting environment.
I’ve always worked in the ad industry. Prior to Facebook I worked in a sales company for 28 radio stations across Ireland; it was quite challenging to have 28 radio stations as a complex customer set. But that's where I really cut my teeth working with the ad agencies and where I built my negotiation skills. I enjoyed working in such a fast-paced environment.
I realised early on that my values are what guide me; one of my values is loyalty and the other is around fun. Doing something I enjoy has been a really important driver for me and has helped guide my decisions throughout my career.

What led you to Facebook?

There were a few motivating factors, on a personal level I had worked in the media industry for such a long time and after maternity leave I wanted a change. I was interested in the digital industry and I hadn’t yet worked for a multinational company. Above all else, everything Facebook stood for excited me and once I met the team I wanted to get started immediately.

You’ve been at Facebook for 6 years, what roles have you had and what do you work on today?

At Facebook, we talk about your career as a jungle gym which for me has meant a number of varied and interesting opportunities. The teams I’ve been a part of include, Southern Europe and new markets; I looked after SMB business across EMEA for a year and then I ran the UK travel business and now I have a remit across Northern Europe. What I like in our philosophy is that we don’t keep stretching people to have bigger and bigger teams but we really focus on having a small number of direct reports and being able to work in a really focused way, to drive the biggest impact for the business. An example in the travel business is working directly with the product teams to evolve the travel solutions in the most effective way possible for our clients. It is like a swat team; globally we are five people working on solutions that will drive impact which will resonate right across the globe.

What does it mean to be a sales leader at Facebook and what is unique about it?

Driving results for clients and having their best interests at heart has always been a priority for me. I also care a lot about my team and what motivates them. I want to help promote my team by surfacing their great work and helping their careers to flourish under my guidance and support.
A big part of being an employee at Facebook is being our authentic selves, internally we are very open and transparent in the way we work together.
I just love that concept and we have some incredibly inspiring female leaders within our organisation that help you feel comfortable about being your authentic self. For example, if it is important to me that I leave work early to go to my daughter’s ballet class, I feel supported to do so.

Why is it an exciting time to be a female leader in Facebook?

One of the formal trainings I have done is called ‘Lead’ which is designed specifically for female leaders at Facebook. It is designed to give you a different voice in an environment with other female leaders. As part of the programme, you connect with a coach and discuss the challenges we are facing as women in business and tech and how best we can work together to continue to grow in our careers.
I’m passionate about supporting female colleagues and helping them grow to senior leadership level. One of the ways we do this as a company is a Women@ Facebook group, which as the title suggests is a group to support women in their careers at Facebook, we also welcome our male colleagues, as allies. We host events such as International Women’s Week and we have an annual company-wide event called 'Women@ Leadership Day'. This is a day of learning, community building and inspiration for all women working at Facebook, irrespective of their role. Each year, the event builds on the three key pillars of Women@ Facebook: Connect (Facebook mission), Empower (professional and personal growth), Innovate (leveraging cognitive diversity to build innovative products).

There are some incredible leaders at Facebook, what opportunities do you have to work alongside them and learn from them?

Our philosophy is to be open in the way we operate as a business and we are lucky to have the opportunity to see our senior leaders in action. If I look at EMEA, Nicola Mendelsohn who heads up our EMEA region has a quarterly face-to-face meeting with her team so I get together with Nicola and my colleagues from other countries to talk about the future of Facebook and to share how we are doing. Steve Hatch, who is my direct manager also checks in with me, not just about business results, but also about work-life balance to ensure I am achieving a balance that works for me.
Every year David Fischer, who heads up the global sales team, has a leadership meeting where he brings the global sales leadership team together. This is an opportunity for us to look at what is coming down the track as a business and to stay connected as a small group of people across the globe. On a more local level and day-to-day basis, I have been lucky with the managers I've worked with as they have been hugely supportive of me developing my career. An example of this in action is around the board table; I had a naturally quieter voice than some of my colleagues, Steve and my previous manager noticed this and both encouraged me to have a voice at the table by inviting me to express my opinions, that brought me very much into my comfort zone over time and now they can’t stop me talking! I've always been grateful to have that level of support which enables me to flourish.

How is Facebook different now to when you started?

It’s the same in terms of how committed we are to our mission to make the world more open and connected. In other ways, it’s very different. When I joined, we were just the Facebook app and since then we have grown in size as a company and added Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus to the family of apps. These new additions to our family give us new opportunities to grow and keep us nimble and to continue to think like a startup. We talk about being only 1% finished and that we have a lot still to do for our many communities – users, SMBs, advertisers and so on. While I think we have achieved a huge amount I also think the opportunities continue to grow and I’m excited for what we will be able to deliver over the next five to ten years.

What will be different about Facebook and yourself in the next ten years?

The opportunity in front of us is still so huge and fairly untapped, take AI and VR for example! What Facebook will look like in 5-10 years I’m not entirely certain, however I am certain that we will have an incredible opportunity to grab it by the horns and make sure we are doing the best we can possibly do. We have a whole family of apps and services and there is still so much runway for us on how we evolve those businesses.
What will be different about me in the next five to ten years is that I hope as the business continues to grow that my opportunities will continue to evolve. This is an incredibly exciting time to be with Facebook as it feels like we are at the start of the next iteration of what is possible on our platforms.

You are Head of Social Good in the Dublin office, what does that mean to you?

Build Social Value is everything from how we think about our products and building things like Safety Check to how we as individual offices give back to the communities around us. Leading our social good efforts in the Dublin office has been an important part of being a leader at Facebook. It allows me to focus on my strengths and to build a strategy on how we can give back to our community as a team. Last year was the first year we implemented the strategy and it’s been hugely successful. We’ve raised a lot of money for local charities and employees in Dublin have given over 2000 hours of their time for social good projects including a sleep-out to raise money for Focus Ireland, a charity dedicated to helping the homeless in Ireland, a 5 km fun run in aid of a children's charity and ELI mentoring programme in which over 50 employees volunteer their time to help young students develop skills required for the professional world.

Outside of the office what do you get up to?

I spend a huge of time with my kids, that’s my favourite thing to do. I have two daughters, Eva who’s 8 and Pippa who’s 5. Each evening when I get home we have a game of chasing, they are big into chasing and we love doing that. My husband and I take them swimming and sailing, we are a big sailing family and we go sailing as often as we can, right throughout the year even when it’s freezing cold in January, so we spend a lot of time on the water.
One of the things we do at Facebook, which I just love, is we write vision statements which involves reflecting on the year. For 2017, I imagine it’s the 31st December 2017, I’m reflecting on the year and I see myself running and doing Pilates; so I now run twice a week with a good friend and I do Pilates three times a week. Doing these things not only give me the head space to unwind and switch off from everything around me but also ensures I have the right energy for both inside the office and with friends and family.

What do your daughters think of you working at Facebook, are they more engaged with technology because you are?

My kids are really proud of me working at Facebook and they love that I give them a sense of what is going on in different countries, it opens their minds to the possibilities for their own careers when they grow up. They get very excited about notebooks and pencils from Facebook, recently they made paper laptops for each other and have been playing with them a lot which I think is sweet - bringing old ideas into new technologies, I love that. They are aware of technology but they are still very young so they don't use it a whole lot. However, I do always talk to them about being coding princesses so that they can code their own programs and make their own games online, they love this and I can’t wait until they are old enough to be able to start CoderDojo.

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