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
“Micromanaging is not about what, it’s about when. The timing is a huge piece of that.”
“…if you’re trying to create a high-end experience, details matter. Details are the most important thing.”
“…when they come up with the ideas, they are totally bought into following them.”
“…you are co-creating the set of norms. You’re all agreeing to it. You’ve had your team members share ideas, right?”
Episode highlights
Micromanaging is about timing, not standards
Lia opens with a distinction she returns to often: micromanaging is not about *what* you correct, it is about *when*. The problem usually starts when a leader skips expectation-setting upfront and then course-corrects constantly after work is already underway. That pattern feels like micromanaging because it is reactive. The fix is upstream, not in how you deliver feedback later.
Why details feel like personal preference (and how to reframe them)
One of the most common traps leaders fall into is framing high standards as personal taste. “I like it done this way” or “I am just particular” invites the team to dismiss the expectation entirely. The reframe Lia recommends: tie every detail to the experience you are trying to create. Whether it is a consistent email signature, clean presentation materials, or how the office looks when a client walks in, those details are not preferences. They are the evidence that a high-end experience is real.
Start with the experience, then work backward to the details
Lia walks through a concrete example. If you run a marketing agency charging premium rates, open a team conversation by describing the experience you want clients to have. Then ask the team: what are the details that make that experience real? What should communication look like? What about look and feel? What about in-person visits? You invite their ideas before you add your own. This is not a performance. It is the actual method that produces buy-in.
Co-create the norms so the team owns them
When team members generate the list of standards themselves, they are not being told what to do. They made the call. Lia is direct about why this works: when people come up with the ideas, they are bought in to following them. Pick one or two items from each category, test them, and let the team see how it lands. The norms become shared agreements, not top-down mandates.
Feedback becomes easy once norms are set
The payoff of this approach shows up the moment you need to follow up. If someone is not using the agreed email signature, you are not criticizing their judgment. You are pointing back to a conversation the whole team had together. “Hey, we agreed on this. We need to get consistent.” That is a completely different dynamic than “I want it done this way.” The expectation is documented, the context is shared, and the feedback practically writes itself.
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)
Micromanaging is not about what, it’s about when. The timing is a huge piece of that. Now, the reality is, is if you’re trying to create a high-end experience, details matter. Details are the most important thing. 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 in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and 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.
Welcome back to the show. So yesterday, I was facilitating my first workshop of 2025, and it was a listener who reached out and was a fan of the show and wanted to bring me in to work with their managers. Again, if you are listening, that is something totally possible for you. If you want me to dive into anything that I talk about on this show and more, please reach out. Hello at leahgarvin.com. I absolutely love working with listeners because you get my style, you know what I talk about, and we can go so deep on something that you’ve really been interested in wanting to kind of drill into more with your team.
So anyway, I was working with this team, and one of the managers asked a question of, hey, we have a really high standard at our company, and we want our team members to uphold that. And how do I strike the balance of really holding our team members to that standard and not micromanaging and not feeling nitpicky and always course correcting? And I love this question because this comes up a lot. And I know that I’ve said before, and you’ve heard I’ve done an episode on it, micromanaging is not about what, it’s about when.
The timing is a huge piece of that, right? And when I talk about that, I mean that a lot of times it feels like we’re micromanaging because we’re doing it kind of ongoing after someone started on something. We’re like, wait, wait, no, no, actually come back and do this or someone gets started and we don’t really set expectations and then we start course correcting later. So that’s where it feels like micromanaging. But we’ve already dove into that, and I urge you to check back in that episode I’ll put in the show notes.
For today, I want to talk about how to really talk about that high standard, right? How to set the context, because this really pairs with that timing conversation. And so when we talk about a high standard, I think one of the mistakes we often make is it feels like it’s our personal preference. Like, I like these things done a certain way because it’s my taste, or it’s just how I want it, or I’m particular, I’m really overbearing.
And whether or not our team members think that, that might be sort of the narrative that we’re worried that we’re going to bring to it, or our team members may feel like, well, we’re just saying this just because, like, who even cares? Like, who cares if we don’t use the same email signature? Who cares if, you know, when clients come into the office, we don’t all have the same coffee mugs? Or who cares about these little details?
Now, the reality is, is if you’re trying to create a high-end experience, details matter. Details are the most important thing. And so my agency clients listening, folks that are interacting with clients, creating a luxury, a high-end experience, which I think kind of most of us are trying to create a great experience, obviously. But especially when we are interacting with clients and customers, it becomes even more important, these small details. And then if you’re not interacting with customers or clients, maybe you’re interfacing with executives and stakeholders that were your own sort of, you know, career visibilities on the line, it matters too.
So details always matter. I think that’s where we really want to start with our team, is explaining why these things matter. So let’s say you are running a marketing agency, and you really want all of the decks to be consistent, the presentation materials, you want the email signature to be consistent. When clients come into the office, you want to use certain dishware. You really want folks to, you know, really, really dress the part. You’re charging a lot for your services.
So you kind of want everyone to be in a business casual sort of thing, whatever it is. Talking to your team members about what experience you’re trying to create for your clients first, and then having a conversation about, well, what are the details that make that up? So for example, you could have a meeting or an email, whatever you want to communicate this with your team and say, hey, we have the opportunity to create a really high-end service for our clients, and we are so excited for that.
And it’s kind of a privilege, because this allows us to really reach for the stars with the experiences that we create. We have bigger budgets, so we can help them accomplish their goals faster or get more ambitious with it. And with those higher budgets, there’s an expectation that they’re going to come to us with, and that looks like little details. And it’s in those details that they feel really taken care of and supported. So what does that look like?
And then you ask your team members for their inputs. And if they come up with whatever, and there’s a list missing, you say, well, let’s talk about, or you could invite them actually to first share. Let’s talk about communication. Let’s talk about look and feel. Let’s talk about when they’re in the office, and then invite them to share ideas. I think that’s actually a pretty helpful approach. And so you say, OK, well, how about that email signature?
What do we do with that? And then you say, OK, awesome. Well, how about the presentation materials? What do we do with that? And then we say, OK, well, how about when they come into the office and your team members start suggesting these details? And these become the expectations of how people operate that your team co-created with you. It’s so awesome, right? Because they can come up with it. And when they come up with the ideas, they are totally bought into following them.
And so you say, OK, let’s try one or two things from each of these different areas. Let’s test them out, implement it, and then we’ll see how it goes. Now you’ve set an expectation and a team norm that you can follow up on. So if some of your team members are using that email signature, and some aren’t, you can say, hey, we had the conversation. We agreed on this. We all have to get consistent. And remember, it’s because we’re creating this high-end experience.
Or if you have clients coming in, and it’s kind of a mess, and folks have stuff on their desks, and you really wanted to have a really clean kind of curated experience, say, hey, we agreed that as a team, as a company, when clients come in to the office, that we’ll really tidy up. And we’ll take our part in that, right? Because we’re creating this high-end experience. Let’s say it’s not client-facing. If you’re really just trying to really show up great for your stakeholders, saying, hey, you know, we have a lot of material to cover.
We’re trying to get approval on resources, and budget, and all these things. And when the deck isn’t kind of polished, they’re going to focus on those details, and we’re not going to get to the answers we want. This is for our own benefit. So setting expectations in the context of the context, this is what’s going to get your team members bought in. And it doesn’t feel like micromanaging at all. What about anything I’ve said feels like micromanaging?
Nothing, right? Because you are co-creating the set of norms. You’re all agreeing to it. You’ve had your team members share ideas, right? So they’re feeding examples. And then that’s something that you’ve planted that seed that you can follow up on. And now you can give feedback on that. When someone isn’t doing something, hey, we agree to this, right? It’s an expectation set. It’s very easy to give feedback on that. You remember the conversation that you had, and you can go back to it.
All right? So this one is a really, really practical one. I really encourage you to try that, to have that meeting with your team. Talk about these norms, co-create those, and then let me know how it goes. Please reach out, hello at leadgarment.com. Share how this one goes. I’m so curious to hear if you’re able to shift into really raising the bar without feeling like micromanaging. And if you are a listener and you want to dive into any of this more in your team, I am so excited to support you.
Again, reach out. We can design something custom or dig into any of the topics I talk about this show. 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
How do I hold my team to a high standard without coming across as a micromanager?
The key is to co-create the standards with your team instead of handing them down from above. Start by explaining the experience you are trying to create for clients or stakeholders, then invite your team to name the details that make that experience real. When team members generate the ideas themselves, they are bought in from the start. Following up on norms the team agreed to together never feels like micromanaging because you can point back to a shared conversation and a shared commitment.
Why do small details like email signatures or office presentation actually matter?
If you are creating a high-end experience for clients, details are everything. Clients paying premium rates arrive with a high expectation, and it is the small, consistent details that make them feel taken care of. Even if your team is not client-facing, polished presentation materials and consistent standards signal credibility to executives and stakeholders whose approval you need. The details are not personal preference, they are the thing that earns trust and gets results.
What is the best way to introduce team standards so people actually follow them?
Hold a meeting where you first share the context, what experience you are trying to create and why it matters, then open it up and ask your team for their ideas. Go through areas like communication, look and feel, and in-person interactions, and let them suggest the specifics. Pick one or two ideas from each area to test and implement. Because the team helped build the list, following up later is straightforward. You are not enforcing your preferences, you are holding everyone to an agreement you made together.
How do I give feedback when a team member is not following a standard we set together?
When a standard was co-created by the team, feedback becomes much simpler and less personal. You can say, 'Hey, we had this conversation and agreed on this as a team, so let's get consistent.' You are not criticizing their judgment or taste, you are pointing back to a shared commitment. That context removes the defensiveness that usually makes feedback hard, and it keeps the focus on the experience you are all working to create together rather than on any one person's behavior.
How is micromanaging about timing rather than the standard itself?
Micromanaging usually feels that way because a leader jumps in to correct someone mid-task, after work has already started, without having set clear expectations upfront. It is not the standard that creates the micromanaging feeling, it is stepping in late and repeatedly redirecting. When you set expectations at the beginning, before work starts, and involve the team in defining those expectations, the follow-up feels natural rather than controlling. Getting the timing right is what separates holding a high bar from hovering over people.