Leadership as a kid: being the person who started everyone’s lanyards at camp.

Leadership as a professional: a title change? A pay bump? A convenient way to off-load tasks to a direct report?

You can’t become a great leader without knowing what exactly you’re working toward—and there are a lot of misconceptions about what leadership actually means.

So let’s dispel a few common myths about leadership:

Myth #1: Good leaders always know what to do. Vulnerability can be really useful as a leader. It’s okay to say “I don’t know” or “I need to think about this for a sec” during an all-team meeting.

• By being transparent and creating a safe space, you can enable your team to bring their whole selves to the table too.

Dive deeper: Check out Brené Brown’s TED Talk on the power of vulnerability.

Myth #2: Management is the only way to progress in your career. The career ladder typically requires workers to become skilled in a certain area in order to get promoted out of that skill set and into management positions. But that’s not the case for everyone.

• Especially in fields like IT, engineering, and journalism, where there are many technical employees, there’s often a built-in nonmanagerial career track for expert operators to follow.

Myth #3: Great teams are always on the same page. Groupthink is real, people! A lack of disagreement or conflict may indicate that a team is uncomfortable sharing their opinions or that everyone thinks similarly.

• Diversity of thought can help team members see a problem from multiple perspectives, boost growth, and prevent snafus.

And the final myth? That all leaders get a 20% discount at Staples with code MICROMANAGE. We’re pretty sure this is fake, but worth a shot at least?—KL & CS

Last week, CNBC ran a profile of Airbnb’s official party pooper—otherwise known as the head of trust and safety. Naba Banerjee is tasked with upholding the company’s worldwide ban on parties and has spent the past three years sniffing out potential ragers.

• Beyond typical solutions like heightened scrutiny during holiday weekends, Banerjee has also come up with an “anti-party AI system.”
• The algorithm pulls in unique factors—like the proximity between a guest’s birthday and the reservation date or whether the guest is booking near where they currently live—to prevent parties before the invite text chain even goes out.
• The system launched this spring and it’s already blocked or redirected over 320,000 guests who *definitely* just wanted a quiet night in.

We might not all get to find high-tech ways to be the younger sibling narc, but we all have problems at work that could use creative solutions.

Enter: brainstorms, the OG of idea-generation tactics. Brainstorms can help jump-start the creative process, but usually they’re drier than saltines. Try adding some structure to help surface unique ideas:

Decide on the challenge you’re going to brainstorm.

Give everyone 10 minutes of quiet, individual writing time. Write down any and all ideas that address the opportunity or challenge.

Once time is up, everyone reviews their scribblings and highlights their best ideas. Then share: Everyone offers one idea.

• Get those up on the board. We’re talking about a literal whiteboard, but a shared document can work too.

Choose a few ideas on the board to dive into—and then form small groups, each taking on one idea. Spend 30 minutes discussing the following:

• What do you not like about this idea?
• Why would the idea work?
• Why would it not work?
• What other ideas does this spark?

Finally, come back to the larger group and report what you discussed.

Once this brainstorm round is over, schedule a separate meeting to discuss which ideas, if any, have merit and are worthy of next steps. If you’re lucky, you’ll have figured out how to stop the next Project X before it happens.

Awkward moments you may face as a new manager:

• You call an all-team meeting and realize it’s silent because you’re supposed to be running the show
• Your new direct report keeps pinging you after-hours with work questions, and you’re unsure how to be supportive while setting boundaries
• Your boss asks how a project is going but you don’t know because you didn’t ask for updates

The possibilities for discomfort are endless (hooray).

But you can save yourself the Pepto and take the Brew’s New Manager Bootcamp instead—it’s the virtual, one-week course designed to get you up to speed on management.

The live cohort starts on Monday, Oct. 9.

And if you’d rather learn on your own time, we’ve got a best-selling on-demand version too.

Grab your spot today.

After a long day staring at your computer screen, nothing’s better than coming home and watching TV on your personal screen while scrolling TikToks on your even smaller screen. But no one’s immune to blue-light headaches forever, which means sometimes we have to go old-school and pick up a book.

You’re in luck: Here are the best new biz books to occupy your free time this fall.

Going Infinite by Michael Lewis. Thought you were free from crypto drama? Not a chance. But the good news is that at least we’re hearing it from the author of The Big Short and Moneyball. Dive into the rise and fall of crypto’s hero-not-hero Sam Bankman-Fried and the massive blowup of FTX.

Glossy by Marisa Meltzer. Finally, the goss we’ve been waiting for: the secrets behind the success of DTC cosmetics darling Glossier—as well as its return to earth as just another skin care brand. And don’t think you won’t get the deets on Glossier founder Emily Weiss, who turned her blog “Into the Gloss” into the startup brand once valued at over $1 billion.

Walk Through Fire by Sheila Johnson. The co-founder of BET and first female African American billionaire shares the trials and tribulations of her journey to the top—including her most recent venture founding the No. 1 luxury hotel brand, the Salamander Collection.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Twitter, X, Tesla, SpaceX—here’s the scoop on all the Elon controversies by the acclaimed biographer of Steve Jobs and The Innovators, who’s been shadowing the visionary/man-child (depending on who you ask) for the past two years.

When McKinsey Comes to Town by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe. An exposé on the prestige and ruthlessness of consulting culture? Sign us up.

Bonus: Build the Life You Want by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. Don’t say we never did anything nice for you. Here are the practical tools you need to draft a blueprint for a better, happier life.

Read: The dark side of having big goals.

Listen: How to be a “category pirate.”

Scrub: Work trip delayed? Don’t sleep on the airport shower.

🪜 Ladder up: The argument for ditching the perfect career plan.

Shop: Last call for the Brew’s “Don’t ask me about my weekend” tee, which is 90% off until it sells out. It’s your best shot for avoiding the Monday AM small talk when you’re just trying to get the coffee creamer from the fridge.