When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
This episode is part of the Delegation, Bottleneck & Getting Out of the Weeds series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…if we are micromanaging, the consequence is it’s demotivating for our team members and worse, it creates a situation where they’re not stepping up.”
“…if you are in back to back meetings all the time, you never have a moment to breathe, and you have a team, that is a sign right off the bat, you’re involved in too much.”
“I only feel like an owner when I can be autonomous for making decisions.”
“…when I said I have bandwidth and I’d love to take more on, I want to be growing and they didn’t take me up on it. I was like, Oh, okay. This person doesn’t think I’m a great team member…”
Episode highlights
Why micromanaging happens even when you do not mean it
Nobody sets out to be a micromanager. But it sneaks in when pressure from above ramps up, when you do not fully trust your team to do it your way, or when a team member is doing the work you used to do and it just feels more comfortable to stay close. Whatever the cause, the consequence is the same: team members stop stepping up because they figure you will handle it anyway.
Sign one: your calendar is back to back to back
If you have a team and zero breathing room on your calendar, you are in too many things. Lia is direct: when you show up in every meeting, including ones where you have leads or managers who should be running them, you are sending the signal that you do not trust those people to fly on their own. Even if you are genuinely supportive, your presence creates pressure.
The fix is a calendar audit. Go through your meetings and mark only the ones where you are the actual decision maker, approver, or required reviewer. Everything else is a delegation opportunity. Hand it off with a clear brief: ask the person to run the meeting, check in with you on decisions made, and be open to feedback afterward. You do not have to be physically present to stay informed.
Sign two: every single decision runs across your desk
When team members stop making calls and wait for your sign-off on everything, it is often because they have learned you will weigh in anyway. That pattern quietly destroys ownership mindset. For small business owners especially, this becomes a bottleneck that slows work down and burns through budget when hourly team members sit waiting for an email reply before they can move.
Lia recommends a three-column decision audit on paper. Column one: decisions only you can make (should be two or three at most). Column two: decisions you could delegate. Column three: decisions already delegated. The goal is to move things from column one toward columns two and three. Once you delegate, set clear guardrails: tell the person what you want to review, when you want a check-in, and what a good outcome looks like. Then let them bring their own flavor to it.
Sign three: team members keep telling you they have bandwidth
This one sounds obvious but is easy to miss. When a high performer says they want to take on more, they are asking to be your number two. They want to grow, develop leadership skills, and be trusted with real work. Lia shares a personal example: she asked her manager every week if she could take more on. The manager kept saying she was fine. The manager was drowning in back-to-back meetings and making every decision, and still would not hand anything off. The message Lia received was that she was not trusted, even though she was performing at a high level.
The solve is straightforward: listen for it and take them up on it. If you still need some visibility, set expectations around how and when you want to be looped in. But then actually let go.
The real cost of staying in the weeds
For business owners, micromanaging means you are not spending time on high-income-generating activities. You are editing social copy instead of talking to clients. For corporate managers, it means checking emails at 9:30 PM because you are not sure your team will handle it. Getting out of the micromanagement zone is not just better for your team. It is a time and money decision for you.
The three-step self-check
Lia wraps it clean. Ask yourself: Is my calendar packed with meetings I do not need to attend? Am I the final word on every decision? Are team members telling me they have capacity? If any of those are true, you already have the signal. Recognize it, audit it, delegate it, and set clear expectations. Your team will step up. You will get your time back.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 233: Why you’re still the point person for everything (and how to fix it). Being stuck as the final decision-maker on everything is almost never a delegation problem. Before delegation can work, three things have to be in place: the right people, clarity on where you as the owner should focus, and simple systems that reduce noise. This episode is most useful for business owners and team leads who have already hired and communicated expectations but are still buried in the weeds.
- Ep 231: Why delegating keeps failing (and the shift that actually fixes it). Delegation fails when leaders dispatch tasks instead of handing off outcomes, keeping themselves as the bottleneck at every step. The fix is shifting from fetch-the-answer assignments to giving a team member ownership of a full result, with clear context, defined success, and agreed checkpoints. This episode is especially useful for leaders who know they should delegate more but still find everything coming back to them.
- Ep 225: How to stop being the bottleneck on every decision your team makes. When your team brings every decision to you for final sign-off, you are doing two jobs at once and your team is never building real ownership. Lia’s fix is to articulate your own decision-making process, then deliberately offload specific decisions with a simple communication system so you stay informed without staying in the weeds. This episode is especially useful for founders and team leads whose capable people are still waiting on them before moving forward.
- Ep 221: Clients keep asking for you by name. How do you hand off work without losing their trust?. When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
I would ask my manager every week and she had fallen into both traps already. So we were like three strikes into the micromanagement zone. I saw she was back to back meetings. She was making all decisions. And I was like, Hey, I got bandwidth. And she was saying, yeah, I’ll let you know, you know, I think I’m okay. And the person wasn’t okay because they were in freaking meetings every second of the day. And they were talking about how they were so underwater.
Welcome to the managing made simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips, or a seasoned manager looking to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.
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Welcome back to the show. There comes a time in every manager’s career, maybe kind of every six months or so, when we ask ourselves, Oh shit, am I a micromanager? And when does this come up? Well, if team members are feeling maybe disengaged, aren’t really taking things on, are seeming a little bit agitated, um, are, are feeling a little bit frustrated, we can start to sense, Am I holding on a little bit too tight? And sometimes we don’t ask ourselves the question and today I’m going to ask you to ask yourself the question when you’re recognizing these three signs.
So today I’m going to talk about three signs that, well, yeah, you are a little bit micromanagy and what to do about it. And I don’t think any of us intentionally micromanages, like we’re not like, Oh, I’m going to do everything myself. But we can fall into this situation for a number of reasons. Maybe we’re getting a lot of pressure from our own boss or our own clients or our stakeholders and we feel like, okay, I got to know what’s going on everywhere.
Maybe we don’t quite trust our team members. We say we do. We want to let them grow. We want to let them really figure things out themselves, but we kind of think our way is better and so we don’t create boundaries. We don’t step back. And I’ll talk about delegating in a whole. Very much in depth in another episode. So let’s just say that’s one of the reasons and we’ll talk about delegating later how to do that effectively.
Um, another reason might be that we like the work that a team member is doing. And this is what I see a lot is that, you know, we’re the tasks that a team member is doing are more comfortable for us. Maybe that’s what we used to do. And now we’ve stepped into the role of a manager or a business owner and. We’re outside our comfort zone all the time, so we’re getting a little micromanaging because the other person’s doing the stuff that we find a lot easier.
Whatever it is, if we are micromanaging, the consequence is it’s demotivating for our team members and worse, it creates a situation where they’re not stepping up. They’re like, okay, just go ahead do it yourself. So we don’t want to do this, but the question is, well, how do I know if I’m micromanaging? Sometimes I don’t realize I think I’m just doing my thing and then Am I micromanaging? So here are the three signals. First, if you are in back to back meetings all the time, you never have a moment to breathe, and you have a team, that is a sign right off the bat, you’re involved in too much.
You got hands and fingers and too many pies. Okay, because we should be able to delegate meetings to our team members. We should be able to take a step back. People should be able to run with stuff and communicate to us what happened. And so if we are in every single meeting and you look at your counter, it’s back to back to back to back, especially things that you have other people that, you know, managers in.
So if you’re managing managers or you have leads and you’re also in those meetings, lots of sign you’re, you’re in too deep. Our solve for this is to take a look at your calendar. I know I’ve shared this tip before, but it’s really, really important to take a look at your calendar and circle like, what are the meetings you absolutely have to be in? Because you’re the decision maker, maybe you’re the approver, you have to do a creative review, what are those?
And then start to look at where you can delegate the rest. And where you can delegate, this is an opportunity to ask someone else to step up as a leader. Hey, can you run this meeting and we’ll check in after and share what the decisions were and I’d love to give feedback. But it doesn’t mean you have to be physically present. Because when you are in every single meeting, it starts to put a little bit of pressure on your team members.
They feel like maybe you don’t trust them to fly on their own. And it can create a sense of, Oh, the walls are caving in for team members. And I’ve been in this situation and it’s been with the manager that I really, really liked. We, we were, um, kind of, we were friends and she was my manager, which was very, very supportive of me, but she had to be in every conversation and it wasn’t like I wasn’t able to still share my ideas.
She was actually very supportive of my ideas, but the fact that she was in every conversation, I didn’t feel like I could fully kind of grow and express myself. I didn’t get to get that one on one relationship with our leaders. That was her boss. I didn’t get to build a relationship. You know, if, if you’re in a small business, maybe that person doesn’t get to build a relationship with the client and the client’s always going through you to get to your team member because they don’t realize they can go directly.
So when we’re micromanaging in this way that we’re in all the meetings, we’re putting a wall between that employee and potentially being able to spread their wings. Even if we are totally doing it just FYI, I just want to be a fly on the wall. It can put pressure. That’s the first thing we want to do. We want to recognize we’re in so many meetings and start to let go. Our second sign that, yeah, we’re micromanaging is when every single decision comes to us, and this is related to the first about the meetings, but this means that every single approval decision thing runs over our desk.
We have to give it a thumbs up. We have to sign off. And oftentimes we don’t actually ask for all the decisions to come to us, but our team members start to see that whenever they make a decision, we still want to weigh in. So they end up just deferring to us anyway. And think about that. If our team members are deferring to us to make every single decision, that means they don’t feel empowered or they think you want to make all the decisions.
So they don’t even bother. And this is really what chips away at having that sense of an ownership mindset. Because. I only feel like an owner when I can be autonomous for making decisions. So it’s going to prevent people from being proactive. It’s going to make you feel overworked because you’re having to dive into the weeds and do everything. And I’ve seen this happen a lot with small business owners, especially that they’re the idea person. They do have awareness of everything that’s going on.
They want to be in the details because it’s their baby they’re creating. And yet they don’t have the bandwidth. So they become a real bottleneck. And then it slows work down and then they’re frustrated because work isn’t going fast enough or they’re leaving money on the table or you’re having people wait. And if you’re having team members wait for you to get to your emails and they’re getting paid hourly, you’re actually burning through money at a faster rate than you have to because people are sitting waiting for you to find time to open that email, make a decision and move forward.
Our solve for this is to do an audit of all the decisions that have to be made in our business. And I love to share with folks to do this in three buckets. Grab a piece of paper. And make it into three columns and say decisions that I absolutely, absolutely have to make and list those out. And I’m going to tell you right now, it should not be more than like two or three a day, a week, whatever, because we want to be moving everything into these next two buckets.
Second, decisions that I could delegate. So now we want to be moving things, I think most things are going to be in the second bucket. Looking at what am I doing now that I could delegate. And then the third bucket is what are the things that I’m already delegating? And we want to be moving things from bucket one to two and to three. And the more things that we can be delegating, that’s time that we get back and that’s empowering for our team members.
So after this episode, take it, take a moment and do this audit and you’re going to start to get a lot of insight into, well, where am I way too far in the weeds and where can I take a step back and then have a conversation with your team members around what is, what are the norms around delegated decision? You don’t have to just delegate something and never hear about it again. No, we can set very clear expectations around, Hey, I’d love you to run with this decision.
I’d love you to run with, you know, managing this client meeting or running this executive review. Here are the moments when I want to review the content and let’s check in after to talk about how it went. You can set actually very, very clear guardrails on delegating. But you want to do that within also letting go and empowering someone to bring their own flavor to it. So, for example, let’s say they’re running an executive reviewer client meeting, asking them what, you know, what are ideas that you have to run this meeting effectively?
You know, really making sure they’re adding in their own spin so that they feel like that owner. Third, tell that you are micromanaging and this one’s obvious, but we don’t always catch the signal. Is when our team members are coming to us continually and saying, Hey, I have bandwidth, like, I’d love to take more work on. And I have been in the situation where literally I would ask my manager every week and she had fallen into both traps already.
So we were like three strikes into the micromanagement zone. I saw she was back to back meetings. She was making all decisions. And I was like, Hey, I got bandwidth and she was saying, yeah, I’ll let you know. You know, I’m, I think I’m okay. And the person wasn’t okay because they were in freaking meetings every second of the day. And they were talking about how they were so underwater. And when I said I have bandwidth and I’d love to take more on, I want to be growing and they didn’t take me up on it.
I was like, Oh, okay. This person doesn’t think I’m a great team member, even though I’m freaking 10 X and get like, where’s the trust. So this can be really demoralizing for a team member when you don’t take them up on the fact that they said they have bandwidth. Or you ask them to take on a really small thing or very tactical thing when they’re a high performer and they, and they have a lot of capacity to do more because it looks like, Oh, I’m not letting go of control over here.
Just going to be candid. They can see right through it. So if people are coming to you or let’s say you haven’t even thought about it, are people coming to me, start to listen. Over the next week, listen out for when your team members say they have bandwidth, especially those high performers who are crushing it. They are asking to be able to be your number two, to learn the things that you’re doing, to be able to develop their leadership skills.
So when they’re asking you to take more on, and that is literally the solve is to take them up on it, to listen for it and to take them up on it. And again, if you’re feeling like you still need to be a little bit in the know or you want to have a little bit more control, then set clear expectations about what you expect to see when you want to be kept in the loop, how you want the thing to go, but then let go.
Let that person have the opportunity because when we are managers and we are controlling every single piece of the work or we feel worried that, well, if I hand off this thing, what’s my job about? If that’s a real fear we have deep down. It’s important to acknowledge it and that’s a fear a lot of us have from time to time. So there’s no shame in that, but the problem is it starts to demonstrate to our team members we don’t trust them.
So here we’re having a fear that’s about our own stuff and our team members think we don’t value them. So we don’t want to send that signal. And if we do have a bit of a learning curve with a team member or we’re still building trust, then that’s where setting really clear expectations comes in because that’ll really help build trust. And that’s where building a habit of giving recognition and giving feedback and really building that relationship with your team member, that’s also going to build trust.
So there we have it. Those are our three signs that we are micromanaging. One, we are involved in every little single thing. Our calendar is back to back to back. Two, we are making every decision. And three, our team members are coming to us all the time and telling us they have bandwidth. Those are our three signs and what to do about it. We want to self reflect, recognize it’s happening. Listen out for these things. Be self aware and then make that shift and you are going to see your team members step up so much more proactively that you have more time and space in your day and your week.
If you’re a business owner, you are able to focus on other things, building your business. You are able to talk to more clients and deliver more services. So this is a real money saving thing too. Because you can be reinvesting your time in those high, high income generating activities. Wouldn’t you rather be focusing on that anyway than proving social media copy? So when we talk about getting out of that micromanager zone, this is about optimizing our time, saving time and money, making more money, making more time for ourselves.
If you’re in the corporate world, wouldn’t it be awesome to not have to check emails every night at 9. 30 PM because you’re just not quite sure your team member is going to handle it? Yeah, it would be. And this is the freedom that you can get by doing these three strategies and taking a step back. 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.
I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at LiaGarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I know if I'm micromanaging my team?
There are three clear signs to look for. First, your calendar is back to back with meetings even though you have a team who could handle some of them. Second, every decision, approval, or sign-off runs through you, meaning your team waits on you before moving forward. Third, your team members keep telling you they have bandwidth and want to take on more work, but you keep putting them off. If any of these sound familiar, it is worth pausing and making a deliberate shift.
What should I do if I'm in too many meetings as a manager or business owner?
Audit your calendar and identify the meetings where you are truly needed as the decision maker or approver. Everything else is an opportunity to delegate. Ask a team member to run the meeting, then check in afterward to hear what was decided and offer feedback. Being physically present at every meeting signals to your team that you do not trust them to handle things on their own, and it puts a wall between them and the growth they need to develop as leaders.
How do I stop being the bottleneck for every decision in my business?
Do a quick audit by dividing decisions into three buckets: decisions only you can make, decisions you could delegate, and decisions you are already delegating. The goal is to move as many things as possible out of that first bucket. Then set clear expectations with your team member around when you want to be kept in the loop and how you want updates, but genuinely let them run with it. Waiting for you to open an email and approve something costs real time and money, especially when team members are paid hourly.
Why does it feel demotivating to my team when I do not give them more responsibility?
When a high-performing team member says they have bandwidth and you brush it off or hand them only small tactical tasks, they read that as a signal that you do not trust them or value their abilities. Even if your hesitation is about your own discomfort with letting go, your team member experiences it as a lack of confidence in them. That feeling chips away at motivation and kills the ownership mindset you actually want them to have. Taking team members up on their offer to do more is one of the fastest ways to re-engage them.
What is the real cost of micromanaging for a small business owner?
Micromanaging costs you time and money in two directions. When team members sit waiting for your approval before they can move forward, you are paying for idle time. And every hour you spend in the weeds reviewing decisions or attending meetings someone else could run is an hour you are not spending on high-income activities like bringing in new clients or delivering services. Getting out of micromanager mode is not just a team morale issue, it is a financial one.