Julie Zhuo, a renowned Silicon Valley executive and management author, rose from an intern to the VP of Product Design at Facebook through her unique strength in bridging engineering and design disciplines. Now a co-founder of Sundial, she uses her management expertise to foster a strong employee culture and continues to embrace the learning journey, sharing insights with over 70,000 newsletter subscribers.

Many leadership mistakes stem from managers subtly misusing their authority over employees. Even with good intentions, this undermines employees’ productivity and performance. To change this, managers must become more aware of the unintended impacts of their power, stop relying on authority as a crutch, and build relationships based on trust.

Inflection AI has unveiled a new leadership led by co-founder Reid Hoffman. Hoffman claims that the startup has 18 months of runway left and that it will double down on building emotional intelligence within AI.

The disappointment frontier is the gap between a team's expectations and reality. This gap can grow when managers shield their teams from reality or overpromise on deliverables. Managing disappointment is a core leadership skill, so great managers acknowledge the disappointment frontier and actively work to shrink it.

Engineering teams consisting of a couple hundred people might cost $50 to $100 million a year in salary, so it is frustrating for executives when they hear that engineering is an art and that outcomes are unpredictable. The misalignment between engineering leaders and other executives often stems from a lack of flexibility - too many well-meaning engineering leaders go by the book of conventional leadership advice. Applying rules too universally turns them into anti-patterns. The key to effective leadership lies in figuring out which scenarios are worth deliberately defying conventional logic and when to simply follow the rules.