Lia (00:00)
we have a big team or a small team, we're managing in the corporate world, we're running our own business, this is a wild time to be a leader right now. This is probably one of the hardest times ever to be leading a team, to be motivating, to be inspiring people. And one of the things when it comes down to feeling overwhelmed and stressed and frustrated.

and depleted and maybe burned out and trying to hold it all together so that your team can hold it together. Sometimes we have a tendency to just run, run, run, go, go, go. Because as a leader, we can't really stop, right? We can't afford to slow down. But the more we go forward without kind of facing everything that's coming up, the more little issues that we create or enable or let fester.

And when I work with the highest performing teams and leaders through my ops playbook program, as a coach, a consultant, a fractional COO, whatever it is, a workshop, the difference between the leaders who are just crushing it and 10Xing it right now, and the ones that are struggling are the ones that are asking themselves this one question. And this question, what we're gonna talk about in today's episode is going to transform your life as a leader.

because it's going to get you to look inward, to not be blaming and saying everything's about your team and you're not dealing in like, and it's all everyone else's fault. It's to stop even for two seconds, okay, two minutes and ask yourself the question that's going to unlock everything. Now, what question is that? What am I avoiding right now? Ooh, hurts a little bit, right? It zings when we say that. What am I avoiding right now?

When we ask ourselves that question, we literally unlock every single answer we need. That's the kind of question I ask you when you're working with me one-on-one or as a fractional COO. That's the kind of question I empower you to be thinking about and I ask you to think about every single day when you're feeling frustrated because that is going to change the game. I'm Leah Garvin and this is the new Manager Playbook podcast where I'm on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job.

And actually, one exciting thing is starting next week, I am rebranding the show to Real Talk Leading Small Teams. Because one thing we know, we're not, whether we've been managing for five minutes or 15 years, I think the new manager concept can feel like, my job's bigger right now than simply kind of being that manager. We wanna look in terms of leadership. And this conversation today is really helping us bridge that.

and think about this in a bigger way. So the new framing for the show, Real Talk Leading Small Teams, is really how are we having these hard hitting conversations? Really looking inward, what am I avoiding right now? That's kind of the type of thing that we're gonna be talking about. So that you are getting exactly the insights, the information you need to lead your team effectively. So same thing, we're gonna be talking tools and exercises and stories and case studies, all of that.

But in the new format, I'm also gonna be adding interviews with experts, gonna be doing call-ins. So if you want live coaching on the show, my gosh, I would love to have you on. So send me an email at hello at liagarvon.com if you wanna record the live coaching session for the show. And then also, as always, I'll be including questions that you have or having them as topics for the show. So I love when you send questions. It is,

First, awesome to hear from you and know what's resonating on the show and specific questions really help me know I am answering exactly what you're wanting to hear. So again, send an email to hello at liagarva.com to send any questions. Now, I also want to encourage you to lean into the tools. One of the biggest challenges that leaders are having right now is feeling like I can't get the information from my team. I don't wanna create more process. I don't wanna be micromanaging, but like how the heck do I know what's going on?

Well, that's why I made the Snippets tool. This super simple template allows you to see what wins happened throughout the week, where folks were stuck and the top parties for next week. This is the easiest tool to implement. I'm telling you, do not call it a status report. This is really a highlights reel from the week so that your team members can share really what's working, what's not. Grab a copy of that at liagarvin.com slash snippets. And I share that because

On the show, I'm going to be giving you tools and strategies and tips, and the more you use them and the more you try them out with your team, and the more you reach out to me and share feedback of how that went, the more these things get easier. So we wanna not just be listening, we wanna be trying these things out. So again, grab that template. It takes your team members less than five minutes to fill it out. I encourage you to ask folks to fill it out every Friday before they leave for the weekend. Fill it out again.

Top three kind of wins for the week, any places they're stuck and priorities for next week. This gives you that bird's eye view that you need. So you're like, okay, folks are working on the right things. I don't need to spend all weekend spinning. And again, it's super, well, it's super easy to fill out, but it allows you to recognize wins, which is motivating and it helps people feel seen and celebrate and recognize. You gotta get that, liagarvin.com slash snippets. Now.

As we're leading into Real Talk Leading Small Teams, again, that's gonna be the new show name starting next week. Let's have some Real Talk right now. What are you avoiding? If it feels like a punch in the gut, it might mean that there's some big stuff you're avoiding. But the kinds of things, when we really think about where am I feeling stuck, the kinds of things that we're typically avoiding are making a really necessary hire, okay?

What am I avoiding right now? I am overloaded. I'm doing everything. Are my team members, people are doing two or three different jobs or they're doing a job that doesn't really suit them. They're kind of covering responsibilities that aren't right. That symptom right there. We think, what am I avoiding? It's taking the leap and making a hire. And it's scary to make another hire. Hey, if you don't have head count, you've got to go in and you're a corporate manager. You've got to go advocate for that and fight for that. And it's make a whole business case and all this stuff. This can be pretty stressful and intimidating.

If you're a business owner, you've got to actually create revenue and money to cover that overhead. It is scary. But when we are avoiding hiring and instead trying to fill the gaps between you and your team members or just having responsibilities fall through the cracks, you are slowing yourself down from the growth you could achieve. You are shooting yourself in the foot. And that's why when I said this episode is about actually 10Xing yourself and...

growing your revenue and hitting your goals faster, this one right here is gonna help you get there. Because even if you're investing in a senior hire and that's gonna be a significant financial investment, the idea is that that person can really open the floodgates on revenue potential. And so I want you to think about when there's bottlenecks around bandwidth and getting work done and responsibilities falling through the cracks. And again, the big one really is when you have people that are doing a job that they're not crushing it in.

A lot of times small business owners will have someone pick up, take on a little marketing, take on a little ops, take on a little bit of this. And those people aren't experts in that and they're doing okay. But if you had that powerhouse marketing person or that powerhouse operator that could just kind of get all your systems dialed in, that would accelerate your growth. So the question there, what am I avoiding? Making the hire, taking the leap, figuring out who I wanna hire.

And if I hired someone that wasn't a fit in the past, figuring out what I learned from that, what didn't work, these are the things that we've got to face head on. And these are the kinds of questions that I help you solve when you work with me, because we have to figure out what is under that. You don't want to make that hire. That could be all different kinds of reasons. And especially if you've had some folks that didn't work out in the past, that makes you nervous, right? Rightfully so. You don't want to make the same mistake again. It's expensive. It's painful. It's stressful.

So we figure out how to really make sure, know, what worked, what didn't there, so that you don't feel like you can't make another hire. So that's all around kind of the bandwidth. What am I avoiding right now when it comes to, know, I'm, folks are working on the wrong things or I'm pulled in the weeds. We might be avoiding making a hire. Another thing that comes up, what am I avoiding right now? Having the hard conversation.

Like feedback is hard. it's the hardest. Giving feedback to someone you know will be defensive. You know will come with all this, you know, these BS things that they're saying, well, you did this and this and they're kind of like, it's just like, it sucks. Or you just don't want to hurt someone's feelings or you love your team member and you feel like, ⁓ I don't want them to feel embarrassed, whatever it is. All of that is I am avoiding being uncomfortable.

See, this is real talk, right? This is we're doing here. You're avoiding feeling uncomfortable. And when that is the challenge, now we get over that hurdle by learning how to give feedback, by being empathetic, by actually making time to have a meaningful conversation, by thinking about what is this going on with this other person right now? What might they be experiencing?

I did a workshop a couple years ago for a team of engineering managers and one person asked a question, hey, know, I like when feedback's really direct and really hard hitting, you know, like it's annoying my team members don't want that. And I said to him like, well, you know, too bad. Like the feedback isn't about how you would receive it. It's about how they would receive it. And if you're avoiding because you don't like someone's reaction, gotta think, well, this is...

We gotta figure out how to get through to that person because it's not about how you would respond. It's about how they would respond. If you're avoiding because you're scared someone's gonna quit, the question is that person a fit? If there's critical feedback they need and you're worried they're gonna quit when they hear it, well, what are you settling for? What are you allowing to continue? What are you showing your other team members is okay? So these kinds of things again, and we worked through this, that...

understanding, gosh, I'm avoiding being uncomfortable. And I'm avoiding, I'm empathetic and I'm avoiding seeing someone else uncomfortable because I don't want to be not liked. I don't want the person to leave. I don't want all these things. We're avoiding having that hard conversation. It's uncomfortable and we're avoiding giving that person an opportunity to actually have a great reaction, have a positive reaction, actually have a tough reaction and then come back around and say, hey, I really needed that. Thank you.

So that's a huge one too. The third one am I avoiding right now? And there's infinite number of them. So we could talk about this again on the show is I'm avoiding actually leading my team. So when I talk to leaders and they're saying, don't wanna, I shouldn't have to have these conversations. I shouldn't have to give the feedback and I shouldn't have to be assigning the work and people should just know, they should just, you know, they should get it. I hired good people. I want them to be self starters.

when we are just assuming everyone should, should, should, should, should, we're avoiding taking responsibility for being a leader in the first place. And I'm not saying that to throw shade. I'm saying that that it's actually really, when you realize that you're like, okay. Like there's a little bit of foundations that I can do. I can set some expectations. I can give some feedback. I can make sure we have clear systems and SOPs. So we're tracking work and folks know what's going on. I can communicate the priorities better. When we realize that

Oh, I'm actually avoiding the leadership foundations. Well, now it's actually very straightforward of what we got to do. Have some one-on-ones, make sure folks kind of have a sense of their career paths, right? That's going to really be driving engagement motivation. When we realize we've been avoiding leading, we can turn that around very quickly. And I would say that one, I think, is a big, it can feel big and ambiguous, hazy. It's like, well, what do mean leading in general? Like, I thought I was doing that.

but we think, okay, what are some of the essentials? And those are the things that I talk about on the show, feedback and delegating and setting quotations and following up and follow through and recognition and all of the tracking work, right? All of these kind of team operations, management essentials, when we aren't doing those or we don't have anybody on our team doing that, so maybe we're the CEO, but we don't have managers that are actually performing those functions, then it is on us.

people need to know where they stand. They have to know what the expectations are, what a good job looks like, where their career's going for them to feel motivated and for them to do a good job. So if we're feeling like someone else should be doing this or why isn't this happening, us leaning into the leadership essentials, maybe it's on the way to hiring a manager to oversee everybody, that's totally fine. But when we aren't getting what we want out of our teams, that's what we gotta come back to, getting back into leadership.

foundation so that folks have management on the team. So this was a big topic today, right? What am I avoiding? Am I avoiding making a hire? Am I avoiding having that hard conversation? Cause I'm avoiding being uncomfortable. Or am I avoiding stepping into some of these management responsibilities? And this is truly why I am changing the name of the show. Cause this is not stuff for new managers. This is stuff for anybody leading people, even if folks do not report directly up to you.

These are leadership and influence skills. And when we figure these things out, we can scale ourselves so much better answering these three questions and facing these things head on. This will at least 10X your impact literally overnight. And it's going to grow your business. It puts it on a rocket ship because you have so much clarity and people have the answers they need to be most effective. All right, see you next week. See you on Real Talk Leading Teams.

And oh, I am doing a contest for new reviews. So if you add a review of the show, I greatly appreciate it. If you're loving the show, please add a review and send me a screenshot of your review and I will enter you in for a free coaching 30 minute Ask Me Anything session. So if you're looking for some help kind of answering wrestling with some of these questions, post a review, send me a screenshot and you'll be entered to win an Ask Me Anything session. All right.

send that over to hello at liagarvin.com. Do not forget to get your snippets template, liagarvin.com slash snippets. And I can't wait to see you on Real Talk Leading Small Teams. See you next time.