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
“…when you’re opting out saying, nah, I’m good. I got everything I need, you’re really doing a disservice to yourself as a manager and certainly to your team.”
“Usually the manager that opt out are the ones that need the most help because the ones that are opting in and ones that are like wanna be up to speed on latest skills and trends and be in the conversation.”
“When we don’t delegate, it creates a whole slew of problems. Disengagement. You are burning out, you’re not training people in, you know how to do the job effectively.”
“Great leaders are working every day to build their bench so that they can work themselves out of a job and up onto the next thing.”
“…hiring people who are better at this thing than you are, because that doesn’t make you look bad. It makes you look like a better leader.”
Episode highlights
Why seasoned managers are often the ones with the most disengaged teams
It feels counterintuitive: the longer you have been managing, the more likely you are to be making mistakes that quietly drain your team’s motivation. Lia opens with a direct observation. The managers with the most team disengagement are often the ones who do not realize they are doing anything wrong. Experience creates blind spots. This episode names three of the biggest ones so you can course-correct before your team starts to check out.
Mistake 1: Opting out of training because you think you do not need it
When a manager development program shows up on the calendar, seasoned managers are the most likely to skip it. Lia calls this out plainly: the managers who opt out are usually the ones who need it most. The managers who opt in are the ones who already care about getting better.
The shift that matters here is from technical skills to what Lia calls leadership skills (communication, relationship building, giving feedback). These used to be dismissed as soft. They are not soft anymore. If you are not comfortable having hard conversations or giving real feedback, opting out of training is a disservice to yourself and to your team. The fix is simple: solicit regular feedback from your team, your peers, and your own manager, and then actually engage in skill building based on what you hear.
Mistake 2: Not delegating because you can do it faster yourself
This one sneaks up on you when you are genuinely good at something. You built it. You know every corner of it. So you hold on. Lia shares a personal example: hiring someone to run a program she had built from scratch and struggling to let them do it their way. The cost of that? She was signaling distrust without meaning to, the other person could not put their own mark on the work, and ideas that would have made the program better never surfaced.
Not delegating creates a cycle of burnout for the manager and disempowerment for the team. It slides into micromanagement, where you are deep in the weeds, then suddenly absent, then back demanding an update. That whiplash is jarring. The move instead is to identify the high-impact tasks you can hand off, make sure those tasks connect to your team members’ career goals, and then genuinely trust how they solve the problem.
Mistake 3: Not building a strong bench
A strong bench means having leaders on your team who could step into your role. Great leaders are actively working to make themselves replaceable so they can move up. The mistake is holding information tightly, becoming the single point of failure for every decision, so that nothing moves without you.
The consequence is a bottleneck. Decisions stack up. No one feels empowered to act. And ironically, you stay stuck at the level you are at because you are too deep in the weeds to look up and think about what is next. The fix is pushing decision-making down, giving team members full ownership of meaningful areas (a product review, a strategy session, an approval chain), and hiring people who are better than you at specific things. That does not make you look bad. It makes you look like a stronger leader. A well-built bench drives retention because people feel like owners, not order-takers.
What you unlock when you fix all three
Lia closes by connecting the dots. When you are well trained in leadership skills, including how to communicate with a new generation entering the workforce, when you delegate in a way that signals trust, and when you build a bench that can carry the load, three things happen: your team’s sense of meaning goes up, retention improves, and you finally have room to focus on the leadership work you actually want to be doing.
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 call them leadership skills. A lot of people call them power skills, whatever. Things like communication, relationship building, dot connecting, these kinds of skills were seen as less valuable. Now, the paradigm has shifted quite a bit. And if you don’t have these skills or you don’t have comfort, having conversations, giving feedback, things like that, then you do need to be engaging in training and development. And when you’re opting out saying, nah, I’m good. I got everything I need, you’re really doing a disservice to yourself as a manager and certainly to your team.
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 up their game.
Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today we’re gonna talk about a real juicy topic. Three mistakes, seasoned managers. Now I qualified this with seasoned managers because it’s important to remember that even if you have been managing for a long time, even if you’ve been doing this for years, even if you feel like a lot of stuff’s working for you, there comes a time when engagement starts to go down, motivation starts to decline.
Maybe people start to leave your team, and it’s really important to be able to recognize, well, what are the things that I might be doing that are getting in my way to leading my team as best that I can be doing? And I also wanna say that oftentimes it’s those seasoned managers, it’s those people that have been doing it for a long time that have. Some of the most disengagement from their team because they didn’t realize that they are making these mistakes.
Now, this in no way is a knock on seasoned managers. In fact, the reason I know all of these mistakes is because I have made them myself. But in my trainings and development and work I do with managers, seeing these things come up again and again, I said, Hey. we gotta talk about these things. We gotta figure out what to do instead so we can best support our teams. So here we go. Right now we’re, we’re gonna share what these are.
And for newer managers tuning in now you can avoid making these mistakes later in your career. The first mistake is not getting the training they need. And what I see so often is managers that have been doing it for a long time, when a manager training comes up or some kind of conversation about manager development, they opt. They say, I don’t need this. Okay, I’m good. And to be honest, I’m gonna just call it like it is.
Usually the manager that opt out are the ones that need the most help because the ones that are opting in and ones that are like wanna be up to speed on latest skills and trends and be in the conversation. They’re the ones who actually care. So if you are finding yourself thinking, yeah, I don’t really need this, I’m opting out, there might be more going on with your team and it might be an really important opportunity to look in the mirror and say, Hey, is this something I should be making time for?
And the answer is, yes, you should be making more time for learning and development. And what are the kinds of things that come up in trainings? Things like building skills around coaching. I think a long time ago, right? Or maybe not even that long ago, but more technical skills really job super, super on the job. Specific technical skills were valued way over what’s deemed as softer skills. I call them leadership skills. A lot of people call them power skills, whatever.
Things like communication, relationship building, dot connecting, these kinds of skills were seen as less valuable. Now, the paradigm has shifted quite. And if you don’t have these skills or you don’t have comfort, having conversations, giving feedback, things like that, then you do need to be engaging in training and development. And when you’re opting out saying, nah, I’m good. I got everything I need, you’re really doing a disservice to yourself as a manager and certainly to your team.
So that is the first mistake, is not getting the training that you need opting out. And so instead, it’s really important to be soliciting feedback from your team on a continual basis. And from your peers and coworkers and from your managers, really getting that 360 view so that you know what kinds of things to be developing and focusing on, and then engaging in either training or coaching or or whatever skill building on a regular basis. That’s how you solve that one, and don’t fall into that.
Mistake number two. The second biggest mistake seasoned managers make is not delegating or trying to do everything the. Now, this kind of mistake often comes up when you’re really good at the thing you’re doing. You can do it with your eyes closed. You can do it basically sleeping. And so you feel like, well, it’s easier if you just do it. It’s faster if you just do it. But the problem is, and why this is a mistake, is it doesn’t allow you to let your team members step up as owners.
It often demonstrates to your team members that you don’t trust them, even if that’s not your in. because when you’re holding onto everything, people feel like, well, if they trusted me, they would let go of a little bit, right? They wouldn’t be so tight with everything. This kind of mistake often results in managers feeling burned out and our team members feeling like disempowered, and so there’s really no win out of not delegating. Or trying to do everything yourself.
This mistake came up for me when I had to hire someone to support me to run a program that I had built from the ground up. And because I had built it, I knew what worked. I knew what was getting people on board with it. I knew what didn’t work, and it was really hard for me to figure out what pieces to let go of and not want to have the person do everything my way. But a course, there was a number of problems with this.
First, I wasn’t letting the other person put their unique mark. So I was believing that my way was the only way that was gonna work. Instead, remembering that I had hired this awesome person because of their skills and the unique perspective they brought. When I started to take a step back and say, Hey, how would you solve this problem? What do you think here? I started to see that there were so many ideas that I hadn’t thought of that ended up making the program so much better.
When we don’t delegate, it creates a whole slew of problems. Disengagement. You are burning out, you’re not training people in, you know how to do the job effectively. You’re probably not setting clear expectations, maybe haven’t painted a picture of what success looks. When you’re trying to do everything yourself, it’s really a recipe for a disaster on your team and everybody loses. I’ve already said that and I say it again because this is something that is one of the biggest signals of micromanaging when you’re trying to do everything yourself, because you sort of become really, really deep in the weeds.
Maybe you become a helicopter manager, really detailed, and then you’re gone because you have other things to do and then you come back and you’re wanting an update right away immediately. And that’s really jarring for a team. So instead we wanna be delegating, we wanna be making sure we are aware of what are those high impact tasks that we can offload to a team member, that we can get other people to step up and step. And making sure people see that the things that we’re delegating are things that are meaningful, that help them achieve their own career goals.
And last, like I shared in my example, delegating and not doing everything ourselves allows us to learn as managers. And that’s why this is important for seasoned managers to remember. We don’t have all the answers. We don’t know all the perfect ways to solve a problem, and this was a tough lesson for me to learn, but it ended up making my work so much better by trusting in my team member and how they would solve the problem.
All right. We have covered two of the three mistakes, and if you are sitting here thinking, yep, that’s me. I need a little bit more support, then my manager development program, micro to macro is for you. . In this program I cover three critical areas of manager development, building a relationship with our teams to inspire trust and build psychological safety, how to deliver feedback effectively. So here I cover things like recognition and praise, along with talking about difficult feedback and how to delegate to empower.
So I go really, really deep into that last topic we just talked about, and especially for you seasoned managers, this helps you really reset on some of those core skills that you can inspire your teams drive higher motivation. in set up your teams for success to be able to do more with less, which is such a big theme right now. To learn more and sign up, reach out at [email protected] or hop onto my at liagarvin.com. Now the third mistake that season managers make is not developing a strong bench.
So a strong bench is having, you know, a team of leads and direct reports that could replace you one day. Great leaders are working every day to build their bench so that they can work themselves out of a job and up onto the next thing. And a big mistake that leaders can make is holding onto tightly to that control and not really offloading, kind of using information as currency. And not offloading enough to their team members, so none of their team members can really step into that.
And the consequence of that is, again, it, it leads to a lot of micromanagement because everyone’s coming to you for all the information. It’s a bottleneck with decision making because again, you are really the only decider. People are not empowered to make calls. It feels like, well, you know, if you don’t have a strong bench, no one really can make the call because you have all the information, you have all the oversight. So instead of being that single point of failure, you wanna make sure you are pushing decision making down your chain, that you are empowering your whole leadership team with the ability to make decisions, to step in for you when you’re out, when you’re on leave to ta offload some of those approvals, maybe run a whole kind of piece of the.
For example, if you have a series of product reviews or business reviews or or strategy reviews, maybe you delegate to one of your leaders to take on one of those areas so that they’re fully owning that, and that’s what’s gonna build your bench up. And as you build your bench, you start to see you have more retention because people feel like owners like, okay, I got this. I am really seen here as a leader. And you then start to feel less overloaded, and then you can look at what’s next for.
Another big consequence of of not having your strong benches. You are only looking downward, but you can be looking up and out and what’s next and what’s next for your team, and how do you collaborate across the company, and how do you forge new ideas when you aren’t so deep into the weeds. This is, again, it’s a win-win, just like delegating. This is a win-win for you and your team members. Is to develop a strong bench, to be offloading responsibilities, to believe in your team, to be hiring people who are better at this thing than you are, because that doesn’t make you look bad.
It makes you look like a better leader. Again, these are the three mistakes seasoned managers make, not getting the training they need, not delegating and not developing a strong bench. And the flip side of this, When we are well trained in leadership skills and giving feedback and communication and understanding generational differences, that’s something we gotta figure out, right? We have a new generation entering the workforce, Gen Z, and we have to understand how to communicate effectively.
This is new for a lot of us. When we’re able to delegate and empower and, and offload responsibilities and have people see, you know, oh, okay, I’m able to volunteer for things and I can, you know, really offload for my manager. This starts to make us feel like we’re trusted, that we’re valuable, gives us a higher sense of meaning. Again, retention, and then developing that strong bench that allows you to grow in your career, to explore what’s next for you.
To be really leaning into that leadership role that you really, really wanna own and be and see in yourself. That’s what we can do when we avoid these three. 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
Why do experienced managers struggle more with team disengagement than newer managers?
Seasoned managers often stop questioning their own habits because things feel like they're working. But over time, engagement drops, motivation declines, and people start leaving, and the manager doesn't connect it to their own behavior. The three most common culprits are opting out of training, holding onto work instead of delegating, and never building a strong bench of capable people who can lead without them. The longer these habits go unchecked, the deeper the disengagement gets.
How do I know if I need manager training if I've been leading a team for years?
If your first instinct when a training comes up is 'I don't need this,' that's actually a signal worth paying attention to. The managers who opt out are often the ones who need it most, while the ones who show up are already invested in getting better. A more useful habit is to regularly collect feedback from your team, your peers, and your own leader to get a clear picture of where your gaps are, and then seek out coaching or skill building to close them.
What's wrong with just doing tasks myself if I can do them faster than my team?
Doing everything yourself feels efficient, but it signals to your team that you don't trust them, even if that's not your intention. It leads to burnout for you and disempowerment for them. When you hold everything tightly, no one gets to develop real ownership, and you end up micromanaging without realizing it. Delegating meaningful work lets team members grow, brings in ideas you wouldn't have thought of, and frees you up to focus on higher-level leadership.
What does it mean to build a strong bench as a manager, and why does it matter?
Building a strong bench means developing your direct reports and leads so that they could step into your role or run key pieces of the work without you. When you keep all the information and all the decisions to yourself, you become a bottleneck and a single point of failure. Pushing decision making down, giving leaders ownership of real areas like strategy reviews or whole project streams, creates retention because people feel trusted and valuable. It also frees you to look forward and grow your own career.
How can seasoned managers avoid micromanaging their team?
Micromanaging usually shows up when a leader is too deep in the weeds, doing work their team could own, and using information as a way to stay in control. The fix is intentional delegation. Identify high-impact tasks you can hand off, make sure those tasks connect to the team member's career goals, and then actually let them solve the problem their way. Trusting your team to bring their own perspective, rather than expecting them to do it exactly how you would, is what breaks the micromanagement cycle.