Trust is the root cause of most managing problems, from micromanaging to accountability gaps, and building it comes down to consistency and relationship building rather than waiting for people to prove themselves. Lia walks through how trust flows in both directions, why assuming competence is the starting point, and the specific behaviors that make trust grow faster. This episode is essential for new managers stepping into a team for the first time.
This episode is part of the The New Manager Playbook Series (book companion) series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…when our team members aren’t feeling motivated, it is our problem. And that is why we have to do something about it.”
“…paying people well, that’s the cost of doing business. We’re not underpaying people and then trying to motivate them with little scraps of money here and there.”
“…not only do you have to motivate your team, you got to motivate yourself.”
“…if your team members feel unmotivated, it is your problem. You got to deal with it.”
Episode highlights
When a team member says they are not feeling it
It is one of the most disorienting moments in management: someone on your team tells you they are just not motivated. Lia’s first move is to stop the spiral. Instead of treating it as a crisis thrown at you, treat it as an opportunity to help your team member reconnect with what actually drives them.
Why their lack of motivation is your problem
Lia is direct: “If your team members feel unmotivated, it is your problem. You got to deal with it.” You cannot force motivation out of anyone, but you can absolutely create the conditions for it. Deciding there is nothing you can do is not a neutral choice. It is a choice to let performance and engagement slide.
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivators (and why pay is just the floor)
Paying people fairly is the cost of doing business. Underpaying and then trying to spark engagement with small perks does not work. But as a manager, especially in a corporate setting, you often have limited control over compensation. What you do control is a lot: understanding someone’s career goals, knowing their aspirations, helping them feel like they belong, and connecting them to the meaning behind the work. Lia references a conversation with storytelling coach Alex Street to make the point that a sense of purpose is available no matter what the work is.
Understanding people as whole people
The chapter from The New Manager Playbook that this episode previews pushes managers to go deeper than job descriptions. When you understand what someone actually wants from their career and from their life at work, you can show them how their role connects to that. That connection is what sustains motivation when the novelty of a job wears off.
Do not forget to motivate yourself
Lia turns the lens inward. What made you want to lead in the first place? For Lia, it was the mentorship and coaching side of management. When a team member is disengaged, that is exactly the kind of situation a good coach helps someone work through. Reconnecting with your own reason for being a leader builds the resilience you need when things get hard. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and you cannot inspire a team when you have lost your own thread.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 163: The New Manager Playbook is here: what’s inside and who it’s for. The New Manager Playbook gives overwhelmed managers a practical, action-oriented guide to leading with confidence and ease. Lia built it around the real struggles she heard repeatedly in workshops and coaching: managing former peers, never having enough time, and not knowing where to start. It is useful for first-time managers and experienced leaders alike, especially anyone stepping into a genuinely new situation.
- Ep 160: How to stop feeling squeezed from all sides as a middle manager. Middle managers feel pressure from every direction because they are caught between their team’s needs and leadership’s demands, with no playbook to guide them. The key move is setting a clear intention for how you want to show up as a leader, then building trust skill by skill so your team sees stability even while you are still learning. This episode is most useful for new and mid-career managers in corporate environments who feel like they are winging it.
- Ep 156: How people pleasing costs you respect as a manager (and what to do instead). Wanting your team to like you is human, but leaning on it too hard makes hard conversations impossible and quietly erodes your credibility. In The New Manager Playbook, Lia Garvin unpacks the people-pleasing trap and shows how building trust through honest, expectations-driven relationships earns you more genuine respect than being everyone’s friend ever could. This episode is especially useful for new managers who default to being fun and casual and then feel stuck when things need to get serious.
- Ep 154: The secret to building trust with your team as a new manager. Trust is the root cause of most managing problems, from micromanaging to accountability gaps, and building it comes down to consistency and relationship building rather than waiting for people to prove themselves. Lia walks through how trust flows in both directions, why assuming competence is the starting point, and the specific behaviors that make trust grow faster. This episode is essential for new managers stepping into a team for the first time.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Welcome back to the show and episode two of Inside The New Manager Playbook. And this one is all about motivation. And if you are managing your team, and they’re coming in saying, I’m just not motivated, or I’m just not feeling it, this is something that as a manager, you’re like, what am I supposed to do about that? Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less.
I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations and some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, most of all stress. 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. Are a new manager learning 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. You think I’m feeling motivated this time of year? I’m under so much pressure. I am feeling all the heat. I got my own deadlines from my boss. I got to deal with all you people. And it can be really, really fricking frustrating when your team members come to you with this.
And that’s why I wanted to make this a chapter in the new manager playbook to talk about what do you do when your team member comes to you feeling unmotivated? They’re not really into the work. They’re not really sure if they want to keep doing this. As a manager, that’s kind of scary because you got this person, they signed up for this job, they knew what they’re getting into, and you need them to deliver on the work.
And so it can be really like, uh-oh, what are we going to do about this? And I would say instead of kind of reacting and feeling like, oh gosh, another problem thrown at me, what am I going to do? And kind of spiraling in that sense to stop and think, okay, this is an opportunity to help my team member really reconnect with their own motivators and their own sense of purpose and their own, what the magic is they bring to the role.
And everyone has their own motivators, intrinsic and extrinsic. And I always say, paying people well, that’s the cost of doing business. We’re not underpaying people and then trying to motivate them with little scraps of money here and there. No, I think you need to have a baseline of paying people fairly, otherwise they’re going to be motivated to look for another job constantly. But this is what can we do outside of pay? Because frankly, as a middle manager, or if you’re managing middle managers, they don’t have a lot of control over pay.
And so it’s like, well, if that’s already fixed by our company and figured out, well, what else do we have? And so that is what I talk about in this chapter of the New Manager Playbook is we have the ability to really understand people’s career goals. We have the ability to understand what their aspirations are, understand them as whole people, so that we can make them feel included and like they belong, and like they’re really connected to the work.
And you can feel connected to the work, whether you are out there ending world hunger, or I share an example from an episode from the podcast where I interview Alex Street, a storytelling coach and speaking coach. And he talks about, we can bring people into the kind of sense of purpose, no matter what we’re doing. And I think it’s really important for us as managers to not just decide, well, there’s nothing I can do about it.
It’s not on me to motivate people. Because frankly, with our teams, no, we can’t force it out of them. No. But when our team members aren’t feeling motivated, it is our problem. And that is why we have to do something about it. Okay. So this chapter, we’ll get into, you know, what we do again, how to really understand what does motivate our team members, so that we can help them see that, you know, we are going to help support them in getting that in their role.
And again, it’s reminding you that there’s a lot of things outside of money that we do have control over, if we don’t have control over the finances, which we often don’t in a corporate setting as a new manager. And I just want to help you think about too, I don’t really talk about this in the book, but as a manager, you know, what motivates you? What motivates you to be here every day? What motivates you to want to be a leader?
And to connect back with, you know, what was your intention? What did you set out to do as a leader? What is your bigger vision for yourself? Because that’s going to help you build resilience for when stuff gets hard. Now, for me, when I was managing folks, like I really liked the kind of mentorship and coaching aspect of it. I think a lot of us get into managing because we like that sense of it. And so to not lose sight of that and say, hey, if my team was really feeling down and unmotivated, that’s the same kind of thing people actually go to a coach for, a leadership coach, right?
And well, can we tap into some of those skills and really lean into, oh, I’m actually really good at helping someone get unstuck. When I take away my fight or flight of like, oh God, this person’s not going to finish their work and I’m going to be screwed, right? We kind of put that aside and we put our coaching hat on and we see, I’m actually really equipped to handle this situation. So if what motivates you is to help lead a vision or really be kind of setting the tone around a product design or around, you really love dealing with the clients, like whatever it is, figure, okay, that’s really why I’m here.
And how can I really connect back to that thing that’s important to me? Because stuff is going to get hard. And not only do you have to motivate your team, you got to motivate yourself. All right. So that is about motivating your team. This is a chapter I cover in the new manager playbook. And it is one that we always got to be looking at two sides, have to end with saying, if your team members feel unmotivated, it is your problem.
You got to deal with it. And so that’s why I talk about it in the book. All right. 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.
Questions this episode answers
What do I do when a team member says they're not motivated anymore?
Don't panic or treat it as just another problem. Treat it as an opportunity to help that person reconnect with what actually drives them. Every team member has their own motivators, and your job as their leader is to understand what those are, then show them how their role connects to those things. When you take the fight-or-flight reaction off the table and put your coaching hat on, you'll find you're actually well-equipped to help someone get unstuck.
How do I motivate my team if I have no control over pay or bonuses?
Pay is the cost of doing business, and people should be paid fairly as a baseline. But beyond that, there is a lot you can influence even without controlling compensation. You can take the time to understand your team members' career goals and aspirations, help them feel genuinely included, and connect them to a sense of purpose in their work. That sense of belonging and growth matters more than most leaders realize, and it is squarely within your control as a team lead.
Is it really my responsibility as a manager to fix my employee's motivation?
Yes. You cannot force motivation out of someone, but when a team member is not feeling it, that is your problem to address, not theirs to solve alone. Deciding there is nothing you can do and moving on is not an option if you want a functioning team. The good news is that leaders have more tools than they think, from understanding what drives each person to helping them see how their role connects to something meaningful.
How do I stay motivated as a leader when my team is struggling?
Get clear on why you became a leader in the first place. Whether it is mentoring people, shaping a product, or working closely with clients, reconnect with that original intention. When things get hard and your team is in a tough spot, that personal anchor is what builds your resilience. You cannot pour from an empty cup, so knowing what keeps you going is just as important as figuring out what keeps your team going.
Can employees find a sense of purpose in their work even if the job is not glamorous?
Absolutely. A sense of purpose is not reserved for people curing diseases or changing the world in obvious ways. Any leader can bring their team into a shared sense of meaning around the work they do together. The key is not the industry or the role itself, it is how you frame the work, connect it to something bigger, and help each person see the value they specifically contribute. That connection is what makes people show up.