When your company mandates a return to office, your job as a leader is to get your team on board, even if you have mixed feelings yourself. Lia walks through the one pitfall to avoid (naysaying the policy alongside your team), how to make in-person time actually worthwhile, and how to prepare for the wave of exceptions that will follow. This episode is most useful for leaders navigating a hybrid or full return-to-office rollout right now.
This episode is part of the Leading Through Change & Uncertainty series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…uncertainty is the norm. Change is a constant. And as a leader, this requires you to approach it completely differently.”
“…perception shapes experience. But if we only go into changing on the experience side, we may have missed the low hanging fruit that we can adjust on the perception side.”
“…addressing the perception gets you 80% of the way there without making any adjustments to the experience…”
“The uncertainty as the norm, it’s not a moment in time. It’s the forever as far as we know.”
“…you cannot be making any broad sweeping changes without a clear communication plan.”
Episode highlights
Uncertainty is not a phase you manage through, it is the new normal
Leaders have been trained to treat change like a tunnel with light at the end. Lia’s argument is that framing no longer holds. When change is constant, showing up as though there is a clear finish line quietly gaslights your team. The shift required is moving from “we will get through this” to “here is how we operate while this is the water we swim in.”
The two things your team survey is actually telling you
When feedback comes in from your team, most leaders read it as a list of things to fix. Lia reframes this: every piece of feedback contains two signals at once. One is the actual experience (what is really happening). The other is perception (how people are interpreting what is happening). The mistake is treating every complaint as an experience problem when most of them are perception problems that can be resolved through communication alone.
The bank benefits story that makes this concrete
Lia walked a major bank through its employee survey and found one of the lowest-scoring areas was benefits. HR was baffled because the benefits were genuinely competitive. When they dug deeper, they found managers simply were not talking about what was available. Employees assumed they were getting a worse deal than peers at other firms. The fix was a manager communication plan, not a benefits overhaul. The following year, that same item was a top scorer. No money spent. Just clarity delivered.
How managers accidentally make uncertainty worse
The most common mistake middle managers and first-time leaders make during turbulent periods is commiserating with their teams. It feels like building camaraderie. It lands as instability. When a manager says “yeah, this whole situation is a mess,” the team hears that nobody is holding things together. Lia’s direction to leaders who manage managers is to coach them explicitly on how to show empathy without spiraling into group stress, and how to reinforce stability even when they do not have all the answers.
What you can actually say when you do not have answers
Lia offers a concrete communication move for uncertainty: anchor people to what is true right now. “While you are in this role, I am going to help you build skills in X, Y, Z.” “I do not know what promotions will look like, but I will advocate for you and here is how.” These statements do not require certainty about the future. They create a perception of stability and investment, and that perception shapes how someone experiences their job every single day.
Perception versus experience, knowing which lever to pull
Lia is clear that experience adjustments are sometimes necessary. A design agency client had team members obsessed with title changes. The underlying issue was feeling undervalued and invisible. Once Lia helped the owner address the perception (this is how career paths work here, this is what progression looks like), the title anxiety deflated. Then they made targeted experience improvements: steady performance review cadences and transparent processes. The sequence matters. Address the perception fire first. Then fine-tune the experience.
Communication is the highest-leverage tool you have right now
Drawing on her time as chief of staff on Bing at Microsoft, where the role combined org strategy and internal communications, Lia makes the case that no structural change lands without a communication plan built around perception and experience gaps. When people feel unrecognized, unclear, or like there is no path for them, 80 percent of the time it can be resolved through communication before a single process, budget, or role is changed. Starting with perception is faster, cheaper, and more sustainable than leading with experience fixes.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 201: What most leaders get wrong when talking about change (and how to fix it). Most leaders either go silent or commiserate with their team during change, and both approaches deepen anxiety and disengagement. The fix is a two-part move: acknowledge the frustration honestly, then share what you know or how you plan to find out. This episode is most useful for founders, executives, and managers navigating reorgs, priority shifts, or any moment when the ground is moving under their team.
- Ep 200: How to lead through fear and uncertainty without losing your team. When fear takes over, managers default to micromanaging, martyrdom, and reactive decisions that drive away the exact people they need most. Lia and leadership expert Megan Karsh lay out why gritty, honest hope outperforms false reassurance every time. This episode is essential for owners, founders, and managers who are stuck in the middle of pressure from above and anxiety from below.
- Ep 180: How to lead through uncertainty without losing your best people. When everything feels chaotic, the leaders who keep their best people are the ones who manage themselves first. Lia lays out three concrete moves: check your own clarity on expectations, proactively re-enlist your team, and watch for the confirmation bias that turns frustration into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This episode is especially useful for owners and corporate leaders who sense a gap between how hard they think their team is working and how hard their team thinks they are working.
- Ep 165: Return to office is coming: how to set your team up for success. When your company mandates a return to office, your job as a leader is to get your team on board, even if you have mixed feelings yourself. Lia walks through the one pitfall to avoid (naysaying the policy alongside your team), how to make in-person time actually worthwhile, and how to prepare for the wave of exceptions that will follow. This episode is most useful for leaders navigating a hybrid or full return-to-office rollout right now.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Remember when we used to talk about change and uncertainty like it was a thing we had to get to, like light at the end of the tunnel, we’re sprinting a marathon, we’re going to get to some thing at the end. Well, right now, uncertainty is the norm. Change is a constant. And as a leader, this requires you to approach it completely differently. Because if you act like right now we’re in the middle of something that has a clear ending, then we’re kind of lying to our teams.
We’re kind of gaslighting their feelings around, well, like, do I know what’s going to happen? Because none of us really know what’s going to happen. And so that’s what I want to talk about on the show today. How do we operate, create a sense of normalcy in a time when uncertainty is literally the norm? I’m Leah Garvin, and this is The New Manager Playbook Podcast, where I’m on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job.
And it’s not an easy time right now. Leading in uncertainty, leading through turbulence, leading through transformational times, whatever we want to call it, is the hardest thing you will be tasked to do. Right? Like, whatever hardest stuff we’ve done with the path, it pales in comparison into what so many of us are facing right now. We’re facing restructurings of our company or organizations. We’re facing, you know, inability to promote maybe as rapidly as we want to, to give folks the raises or the bonuses we’d want to, to hire the backfills we’d want to, or to staff a project with more folks.
All industries are under this squeeze. I talk about it a lot on the show, the do more with less, right? But it’s even more than that. Do more with less resources. Do more with less incentives. Do more with less uncertainty, with less sort of, you know, things to be able to create, like, okay, we’ve got this. And in that situation, as a leader, it’s really about reassessing both how we want to show up. And I know I talked about that probably two episodes back on really setting, showing up with an intention, right?
Even when it’s hard, even when every single day is hard and really how to anchor into that. And again, I mentioned in chapter two of the new manager playbook, I share an exercise for doing that. So definitely check it out and feel free to email me hello at leadgarber.com if you want that exercise. But it’s beyond and, and beyond setting that intention. Now it is about how we communicate. And when I look at teams that I work with, and I did this way back when I worked in big tech, I did a lot around looking at our company survey data for our team.
And when people fill out a survey or share their sentiments, usually you get, you know, insight, you get, you get data like, hey, we don’t, you know, here’s our frustrations about this, that, and the other. A lot of teams have frustrations around priority setting or decision-making, or maybe folks feel like they don’t have progression paths as clear. You get a ton of information. But what I always see leaders wrestle with when we get the company survey data, and this is literally my favorite, favorite kind of work to do.
So if you have a company survey and you want someone to help you make a game plan, again, email me hello at leadgarber.com because it’s my literal jam. I digress. So what we always see, and this is an insight into the way I approach it, is we get data and we could say, oh, everyone’s, you know, we got to make all these changes. We got to do all this stuff. But the truth is you have insight into two things, not just one.
You have people’s experience, right? That’s what they’re telling us. I don’t, you know, I don’t like this, that, or the other. But you, and you get insight into a perception. And this is the part we don’t address enough. And this is the part that we can be addressing on our teams every single day. Because perception shapes experience. But if we only go into changing on the experience side, we may have missed the low hanging fruit that we can adjust on the perception side.
And this is getting a little bit out there. So I want to be very, very tactical with what I mean. Example. Okay. I was working with a team in one of the kind of top banks out there, right? One of the, you know, like a JPMorgan Bank of America, Goldman Sachs type bank, right? That size. And they had their company survey data. And one of the pieces of information or one of the low scoring areas was folks felt like, you know, we don’t have benefits that are comparable to others out there.
And HR looked at this and was like, we have great benefits. Like, what is this about? And as we dug under the surface, we found that actually managers weren’t talking about what the benefits were. So people perceived that they were not, you know, at par with other banks. They perceived, you know, Chase or Bank of America or whoever else was out there was having a better deal than them. And they thought they were getting screwed. Now, the experience was like, I don’t know how to use the benefits, but it was actually a perception issue.
If we went and changed the benefits because we thought, oh, we got to have better benefits, they would have spent millions and millions of dollars on a problem that actually didn’t exist. This was a manager communication issue. It was a perception because actually the benefits were fine. And when we built out a communications plan for those managers to communicate what the benefits are and how to research them and how to utilize them, that lowest scoring item changed the following year.
It was a high scoring item because people realized like, okay, yeah, we do have good benefits and I can tap into those. So I share that example because it’s a super tactical one to explain what this looks like on your teams. You’re going to have feedback, you’re going to have frustrations, and you’re going to be hearing things from your team. And it is always critically important to understand, is this something we can address through communications, the perception side, or we have to actually change something on the experience.
And that’s what I help you do, is kind of figure out where it is and what to do and how to balance both of those. Now, why am I talking about this in terms of uncertainty being the constant? I’ll explain. Because when people feel unsettled, when your team members feel like they don’t know where things are going and if their job is at stake, or if AI is going to replace them, if there’s going to be layoffs, all of these things, these are perceptions that are influencing the day-to-day experience.
And what did I say we do when it comes to perception, frustrations, and challenges? We address it through communication, through how are we talking about this? How are we talking about, hey, while we’re here, okay, we don’t know what’s going to happen in three or five years, but while you’re in this job today, I’m going to help you build the skills around X, Y, Z. Hey, we’ve talked about your career aspirations. While we are in this role, while we are here, I am going to help you achieve this goal.
I don’t know if we’re going to have promotions in the future, but if you build up these skills, I know that this is going to serve you in a bigger way, and I’m going to be that advocate for you. All of those conversations are helping folks form a more positive perception of their experience, even when there is still uncertainty. It also comes to holding our leaders accountable, right? Right now, a lot of, if you’re managing managers, folks are scrambling, they don’t know what to say, they’re asking questions they can’t answer, and it’s starting to trickle down, right?
What’s the number one mistake managers make? I’ve talked about on the show, they start commiserating. Ah, there’s so much thrash, there’s so much change, I’m frustrated. Your middle managers especially, first-time managers, we’ve all done it, they want to build, so show camaraderie with their team members, so they start to commiserate and say, yeah, this sucks. The man is out to get us, even though that’s not their role. Their role is to create a sense of stability.
You address that challenge through teaching, upskilling your managers, talking to them, hey, how do we need to be communicating when it comes to this? How do we show empathy without commiserating? How do we build that camaraderie without having it spiral, like, and people think, well, nobody here is holding, you know, this whole thing together. We can get our managers to make sure that they are addressing the perception side and not fueling the negative perception. All of the while, we haven’t done anything about experience because we actually don’t really know what to change until we’ve addressed perception.
So in a moment of so much uncertainty, you are going to be always having to look at, okay, this perception and this experience side, both of those, what are we doing? And the biggest tool that you have is bringing clarity into communication. Hey, I didn’t get the team whisperer name for nothing. It’s because I look across a team and I say, hey, where are their gaps in communication? And where can we translate that and show people they’re really on the same page?
It’s addressing these perception gaps and creating a very clear and simple communication structure so everyone understands it. And when there are things happening in your team, when people are frustrated and unmotivated and they feel like I’m not appreciated and there’s no path for me, I’m telling you 80% of the time, maybe more, it’s addressed through perception. If someone truly does not have any possible path to growth, yeah, maybe it’s not the right job for them, but it’s pretty unusual that someone has no possibility of growth, even if it’s just taking on a little bit of different kinds of projects, learning a new skill, getting a mentor, things that don’t cost you any money.
There’s typically more someone can be doing. So the perception of there’s nothing there for me or the feeling that there’s nothing there for me, that’s perception that can be addressed through communication. The actual experience of, okay, we’ve weighed all our options. There’s truly nothing for me. That’s in the minority of the time. Okay, then you coach someone into, hey, what is out there for you? I’ll help you kind of find your next thing. Maybe they’ve done a great job and you can refer them or make recommendations.
Okay? But when we are dealing with this right now, the uncertainty as the normal, as leaders, we have to understand, really get on the surface, what are the perceptions? It’s not just, ah, I’m worried my job’s going to be replaced by AI. That’s kind of at the top, but what’s the day-to-day? What is this in the moment? I feel like I don’t know how to stay relevant. I don’t really understand how to utilize AI when it comes to my job.
Maybe you’re managing managers, again, I don’t know how to explain this to my team. I don’t know how to answer questions or have conversations when I’m going to get questions thrown at me. These are the perception things that we can be addressing and coaching folks through and upskilling folks through. The uncertainty as the norm, it’s not a moment in time. It’s the forever as far as we know. So the way that we lead requires us to have our radar out and be operating from these two domains.
I know it may sound a little bit abstract, a little bit complicated, but when you bring it down to figuring out what questions you need to be asking, what is the communication strategy you have to define? And again, that is what are you saying to people? What are you committing to? How are you connecting their job to the bigger vision? This is all communication tools. And then making those experiential adjustments where needed. Give an example of an experience adjustment.
So I have a client, I think I talked about this on the show in the past, that all of their team members, they worked in a design agency. Folks kept asking about their title. They wanted to have their title changed and revisited. And the CEO of the agency was like, what is this about? Everyone’s obsessed with their titles. They just want to get paid more every single day. And I said, okay, wait. Perception versus experience. When I started to talk to the team members, I realized, oh, they’re feeling undervalued.
They’re feeling like their expertise from before doesn’t count. So the perception issue was, I don’t matter. And they wanted to solve it through a title change. Once we talked to them about, hey, this is how career paths work. This is how we are making sure to show value. This is what progression looks like. This is how we’re going to reformat titles so that it’s really super clear. We addressed that. We had to change nothing else. And then on the experience side, actually, sorry.
What we changed on the experience side is we had those conversations. We started to set up the performance reviews, making sure that there was a really steady cadence. That there was a lot of transparency with the process. So that then they were able to see, okay, I’m not worried over here. And you’re backing it up with clear actions. So we actually did do some experience things. I want to be clear about that. You address the kind of big fire out there.
And then you fine tune small things. There’s going to be moments when, yeah, the perceptions are dead on. And people are like, hey, the priorities are shifting every single day. This feels like I don’t really know what’s going on. And then as leaders, it’s like, okay, what are some systems we can put in place to create some clarity? This is the way that we’re going to have to be operating. Okay. And it can be a lot if you’re a newer manager listening, you’re like, I don’t even know where to start with this.
If you’re managing managers, I encourage you to be having these conversations, to be bringing in a facilitator if it’s something that you really want to outside perspective on, to be asking these questions of folks like, hey, how are you addressing these two sides of the coin? Because it’s incredibly important. It’s a time saver, and it’s going to save you so much money and energy and having people spinning and solving problems where they could have been course corrected with a little bit more clarity around the communication.
It’s interesting, at Microsoft, when I worked there, the chief of staff role was also the internal comms manager. And it was an interesting dynamic where once you are involved and you’re the person that’s helping the VP shape the org and drive all of the structural things, you’re also the person that shapes the communication. And I thought this was incredibly powerful. And that’s where I learned this. This is where I first started to do this was chief of staff on Bing, I started to see, okay, when we are communicating a big change, we need all of this supplemental communication, or we’re making a big change, we need all of this supplemental communication to reinforce it so that every single level of the organization understands it.
Right. And so you cannot be making any broad sweeping changes without a clear communication plan. And it always started with addressing the perception and the experience and figuring out where do you have the gap, where do you need to fill in on either side. And it’s game changing. So if again, it can be complicated. If you want to dive into this one a little bit more deeply, or you have questions about this, shoot me an email, Leah Garvin, that was a semi personal one out.
Hello at LeahGarvin.com. Okay. And, and we’ll talk through it. Because I’m telling you, addressing the perception gets you 80% of the way there without making any adjustments to the experience, right? And the experience side, that can be the costlier side. And when we address perception, people perceive they feel more confident, they feel more stable, they feel more motivated. So why the hell wouldn’t we start there? Okay, my friends, let’s start there. Address the perception. Uncertainty is the normal, is the norm, it’s the constant.
So we got to be dealing with this. All right. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why does my team still feel lost even though I keep communicating with them?
Most of the time, team frustration is a perception problem, not just an experience problem. When people feel uncertain, their day-to-day experience is shaped by what they believe is true, not just what is actually happening. If you are only making structural changes and not actively shaping how people perceive their situation, their growth, and their value, the unease stays. Start by asking what your team believes is true, then build a clear, consistent communication strategy that directly addresses those beliefs before spending time and money changing anything else.
How do I lead my team through constant uncertainty when I don't have answers?
Stop framing uncertainty as a phase you are all getting through together. Right now, uncertainty is the permanent condition, and pretending otherwise erodes trust. Instead, anchor conversations in what you can commit to today. Tell your team member what skills you will help them build while they are in this role, what goals you will advocate for, and what you are doing to keep their growth moving. You do not need answers about the future to give people a sense of stability in the present. Clarity about right now is enough.
How do I stop my managers from venting to their teams about company changes?
First-time and middle managers often commiserate with their teams to build camaraderie, but this creates the impression that nobody is holding things together. The fix is upskilling those managers on the difference between showing empathy and fueling negative perception. Coach them on specific language: how to acknowledge frustration without amplifying it, and how to redirect conversations toward what the team can control. This is a communication coaching issue, not a character flaw. Give them the tools and the language, and the behavior changes.
What is the difference between a perception problem and an experience problem on my team?
A perception problem is when someone believes something negative that is not fully accurate, and that belief is shaping how they feel about their job. An experience problem is when the negative thing is actually true and needs a real structural fix. For example, a team believing their benefits are worse than competitors is a perception problem solved by better communication. A team with genuinely no path to promotion is an experience problem that needs a real solution. Lia says roughly 80 percent of team frustrations are perception problems, meaning communication can resolve them without costly changes.
How do I respond when my team members say there is no growth path for them?
Before assuming they are right, treat it as a perception issue first. Most of the time, some form of growth is available, whether that is taking on different types of projects, building a new skill, or gaining a mentor. None of those cost money. The feeling that there is nothing there is often a communication gap, not a reality. Have a direct conversation about what progression actually looks like on your team, what you are committing to advocate for, and what steps are available right now. If after all that there truly is no path, then you help them figure out what is next for them.