Stuck in a rut as a leader? How to identify what is really going on and get unstuck

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.

From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating, and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Have you ever felt as a manager like you’re stuck in a rut, that things are just feeling a lot slower than they need to, or more frustrating than they need to, or you’re feeling more overwhelmed? Well, this is something that all of us go through from time to time as a manager, business owner.

While it’s okay and totally understandable, the problem is we are really there to keep the whole ship afloat, the whole train moving. When we’re in a rut, if we don’t deal with it in a timely manner, we’re going to start potentially sending signals to our team members that the business isn’t on track, that team goals aren’t going to be met, that we’re kind of not in a good place. That is why we want to really think about, okay, what is causing this, and address it right away?

Because we have a responsibility. We don’t have to fake it and say everything’s fine all the time. But as a leader, we have a responsibility to self-manage and figure out our own stuff so that we can put our best face forward. If you are a business owner, you’re responsible for the livelihoods of your employees. That can also kind of cause some stress that maybe puts us into a rut. As a manager in the corporate world, we’re responsible for the careers of our team members, and making sure that we are looking ahead at what their goals are and where they want to go.

Again, as they say in Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. As they say in Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. With that said, we really want to take action about this. But first, let’s paint the picture. What does it feel like to be in a rut? I know in the past when I was managing a team, I felt like I wasn’t getting all the support that I needed from my own management chain, and I felt like I had so much work to do.

I was doing managing and coaching my team members, making sure they were all in the right place. I also had a full set of work as an individual contributor. This happens a lot in corporate, where we’re kind of in that player-coach model, and we’re really doing two jobs at once. They’re getting a good deal out of us when we’re in that situation. A lot of us are paced with that. Or maybe you have a team member that’s struggling, so you’re having to do a lot more heavy lifting.

Or maybe you are short a team member. You are feeling like you’re being really crushed from both ends. For me, when I was in this situation, I felt so stressed that I actually ended up seeking out another role that was an individual contributor, was actually not being a manager, because I said, hey, if I’m not going to get the support to do this, then I’m not going to do it. It wasn’t necessarily the best move for me, because I liked being a manager.

I was good at it. I love the aspects of helping people achieve their goals and develop them and really helping them show up as their best. It was kind of a loss to take a step back from being a manager, but I hadn’t figured out the stuff that was making me feel in a rut. I hadn’t gotten the support I need, and so I took that step. I think sometimes when we’re feeling really stuck, we feel like, okay, I just got to get out of this situation.

Sometimes it helps us, but sometimes it doesn’t. That’s what I want to talk about today, because as a business owner, if you have invested years and time and money and all of your passion into this business, and you feel like, now I’m in a rut, especially with the managing stuff, then just cutting your losses and closing shop or pivoting or going in a whole different direction, that might not be the right decision to make. We definitely don’t want to make it in a moment when we’re running away from something.

Everyone always says it’s better to be running towards something than away. First we want to solve the rut, and then we can figure out, well, do I like being a manager? Do I like leading this team? Do I like leading this company? Do I want to be doing a different kind of role? That’s the place that we can answer those questions from, but not when we’re stuck. So first we got to get unstuck. It’s my favorite topic.

It’s the name of my book. We want to get unstuck so that we can think really clearly. So when you’re feeling like you’re in a rut, first it’s really helpful to identify, what’s really going on here? Am I feeling, what are the feelings that are coming up? Am I overwhelmed? Am I bored? Am I frustrated? Am I feeling like I don’t have the support I need? Am I worried about money? If I’m a business owner, am I worried about, you know, I’m not getting the things I need out of my team?

Figure out what exactly is present is going to help you figure out what path to take. And you know, if you’re feeling a little bit bored or stagnant, that obviously signals like you need more challenging work. You need to be focusing your time in a different way. You need to be investing energy in some creative projects or future thinking, really using, you know, your skills to their full capacity. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or burned out and that’s keeping you in a rut, then you need a very different solution.

And I think a lot of us put our teams in front of ourselves, our businesses in front of ourselves, and we realize we haven’t like exercised in six months, you know, eaten at lunch away from our desk. We’re getting takeout every night, whatever it is that’s kind of making us feel like, ugh, a little bit stuck. And when we’re in that space, again, we may start to make decisions like, oh, I don’t want to do this anymore.

I don’t have time for any of this. So that’s where we want to deal with it. So once you’ve identified, you know, what really is causing, what’s, what’s the rut feeling? You know, what is really, what’s there? Is it the overwhelm? Is it the burnout? Is it the this or that? You know, then we can start figuring out what we want to do about it. And, you know, first I just mentioned we a lot of times put everything else in front of ourselves.

We put the team, we put the business, we put everything else. And we haven’t invested a lot of energy in ourselves. So the, a big shift to make in this situation is to carve out time for yourself every single day. And to, to think about in advance what you’re going to use that for. And so I would say, start with 15 minutes, make a list of what you would do with 15 minutes. That’s really investing energy in yourself.

And it’s not checking emails. It’s not doing more work stuff. Okay. It’s like the other stuff. Is it taking a walk, listening to an album? Is it a podcast? Is it reading a few pages of a book? Is it meditating? Is it doing some breath work? What is that list of things that you really like to do that make you feel recharged? And I say 15 minutes because sometimes that’s all we have. And I encourage you to do that at the start of your day and at the end of your day to really bookend.

Like, I have made time for myself. Even if the kids go to bed late and you literally only have 10 minutes, do that. Okay. Because we have to be reminding ourselves that we are accountable for some of our time. People can’t take all of our time. What do issues with cashflow, revenue, hiring, marketing, and scaling all have in common? They all stem from inefficiencies and how work gets done on your team. As a business owner, you have a team so you can grow and scale.

And when they’re not set up for success with the right game plan and systems, well, it starts working against you. That’s why I developed the Ops Playbook, a program including a roadmap and implementation support to get everyone on your team on the same page around how to work in your business, reducing communication issues, inefficiencies, and most of all, stress. Not only that, you’ll save an average of 30 hours a month. That’s time you can reinvest into your business without doing any extra work.

So if you are ready to enter 2024 with your team firing on all cylinders, schedule your free scale-up strategy call today at liagarbon.com. Let’s do this. And when we get some of that back, we can re-energize ourselves going into the next day. And I think we also find that when we’re able to carve out that 10 or 15 minutes at the start and end of the day, maybe there’s pockets of time that we can reinvest in ourselves in other moments.

And again, this is not the solution for burnout and being overworked and not having the resources you need. Taking a 10-minute walk. I am not saying that. But when we feel like, ah, I can’t even stand up for my desk, I can’t even go to the bathroom without having something, that is when we have given too much of our time away to other things. Because we can set some boundaries. We can say, hey, I am going to take a 30-minute break in the middle of the day.

I’m going to do that. I’m going to carve that out. I’m going to do that every day. We can do that. We can decide, okay, I’m going to wake up 10 minutes earlier and I’m going to meditate. We can. And to try to find these pockets where you find that activity, that thing that really helps recharge you, that’s going to go so far. Now, the other shift, right, if we’re feeling like we’re in a rut because, you know, we’re just, we’re overworked, we’re burned out, we’re focusing on everything, I got to say, we have to invest in the help that we need.

And I was working with a business owner who felt really, really overwhelmed. She was worried about, stayed up all night worrying about the team, worrying about the business. There was all these details to figure out. The team was short-staffed. People were pinch-hitting for each other, but the work wasn’t getting done in the right way. And we really recognized, hey, there is a role missing. She needed an office manager. It was really, really important. And as we kind of identified that need, her first fear was, well, I can’t hire another team member.

I’m already worried about money. That’s already keeping me up at night. I don’t think I can do that. And a couple weeks went by and we said, okay, well, let’s look at, well, what does that work look like and, you know, who is doing it and what’s being missed? And she kept noticing there’s just such a clear need. There is all of this work that’s not getting done, that people are not taking on, or she doesn’t have the bandwidth to take on, that was keeping her up at night.

And so she made the decision, I’m going to hire someone. And before she did that, we mapped out, okay, what, what exactly do you need this person to do? It’s got to be really clear because we really have to make sure it’s solving the goal of really capturing all of these different activities that are needed in the business. But they were very different. We needed someone who was really, really proactive, someone that saw a problem and looked at the bigger picture.

They didn’t just solve that one thing, but they looked at it as a system. We needed someone that was going to be able to operate with very little direction because the business owner didn’t have time. And so we painted the picture of the ideal candidate and then we created the job description and then she started looking for folks. And I have to say, because she had all of that clarity, she was able to find someone that was like beyond the dream candidate, beyond the dream hire.

And the person literally within the first week, she started and she mapped out all these different opportunities for the business, kind of some things she observed. She was talking with the other employees, getting to know people. She was so proactive, such a self-starter, went so above and beyond that this business owner literally could finally sleep through the night, which she hadn’t done in like five years. She realized that, man, I wish I invested in this hire so much sooner instead of just feeling stuck, like I don’t have a way to solve this.

And the change that she felt, not only could she sleep through the night, but she had someone there who was looking out for all the things she was worried about, someone that was looking beyond what she already knew and had identified and saw the bigger picture. And so this immediately alleviated so much stress and so much time for that business owner that she could then reinvest in focusing on, well, where, you know, strategic things, projects, where does she want to take the business?

Because all of that cognitive energy wasn’t spent on worrying. And so this is the kind of thing that can actually take your business and team in a whole different direction. When you invest in the help you need and you get yourself out of that stuck place, you kind of have a fresh start to fully apply your skills and knowledge in a whole different place. And this was so game changing for that business owner because once that whole thing was covered, now she had an employee not only that was doing, crushing it in their work, they were setting the tone for other employees on how we want to work, that we want everybody to be proactive.

We want everyone to treat the work like owners. We want everyone to really step up in this way. And so by having someone modeling that, that also saved her time on having to explain that to people and saying, hey, I want you to do this. It’s like, hey, watch this awesome person that’s bringing all this exciting energy into the business. This is really modeling where we want to go. And so investing in the help you need, getting that support you need.

It might look like hiring another team member. It might look like hiring an intern, getting a contractor, getting a virtual assistant. It might look like getting a mentor or coach might look like hiring a team operations expert to streamline your team operations with an ops playbook, which happy to help. It might look like a number of things. The real question though, again, is to identify what is causing that stuckness, that rut feeling so that you solve the problem in the right way.

I think what we don’t want to do when we’re feeling overwhelmed is just hire a bunch of people and create a new problem where we are nervous about payroll and we’re nervous about, you know, the headcount situation. We first really want to diagnose it. And that is why we always start by asking ourself, what is causing this feeling? Am I focusing on the wrong things? Am I short staffed? Do I have a real gap here? Is it that I don’t have a skill that I need?

And then really diving deep and investing in that area. So I hope that this helped you get out of that rut and head into the rest of the year feeling really energized. If you need help, you know where to go. Send me an email at helloatleahgarver.com. We can dive into where things are stuck in your team, where things aren’t operating as efficiently as they could be, and find ways to save you 30 hours every single month by streamlining your team operations.

If you want to learn more, send me that email. If you want just a couple of quick tools, tips, strategies, like stuff I talk about in the show, also happy to do that. So send me that email and let’s dive in. Can’t wait to talk next time. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.