Giulia’s Austrian boss once told her something no Italian manager ever had: “Giulia, it’s too long you don’t take a Friday off.” She’d been raised in a culture where you always do more than what’s asked of you. That one sentence cracked something open.
Giulia Scalaberni started as a developer, moved into data analysis, then became product manager and team lead on the same platform she used to code. Now she runs a fully remote team of almost twenty people spread across Europe and India, and she’s spent the last several years building out something she calls “humanship” — leadership that treats empathy and high standards as the same skill, not opposing ones.
Some of what we get into:
Why her team went completely silent for a week after she asked “any questions?” during onboarding, and the low-effort workshop that fixed it (three questions, zero work talk allowed).
Erin Meyer’s Culture Map, and what it actually means to build trust with people who won’t just tell you something’s unclear.
“Everything urgent, nothing urgent really” — her rule for slowing down decisions that don’t actually need to move today.
The meeting where she was the youngest person in the room, asked to speak last, and said out loud that she had nothing left to add. Why she now wants more people on her team to feel safe doing exactly that.
Ikigai, a bus driver, and why she thinks purpose doesn’t require your job title to sound impressive.
Her advice for senior leaders comes down to one line: if your dishwasher can’t make it in, your whole restaurant has a bad night. That’s basically the episode title now.
Giulia writes about all of this on her Substack, Humanship. Link’s below, along with her LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/giulia-scalaberni-665175124/
https://substack.com/@giuliascalaberni
