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
“…managing a team is the hardest thing about running a business. And the words, because I said so, doesn’t work with children or our employees.”
“…there’s some magic behind what you do which has made you successful, that we don’t want to lose the integrity of that.”
“…they just didn’t have all the information. And so if we really want to make sure something is translated seamlessly, we have to capture a lot of that why.”
“…this step of mapping out the why is also going to tell you, is this something that is your preference because of your work style, because of what makes you comfortable? Or is it something that’s really a make or breaker for the business?”
Episode highlights
Why delegating your ‘special sauce’ is different from handing off regular tasks
Most delegation advice focuses on getting work off your plate. But when you are handing off something that has made you successful, something like your sales process, your client onboarding, your signature service, the stakes are higher. There is nuance baked into what you do, and if that context does not transfer, the results will not either. Lia draws a clear line between offloading general tasks and scaling yourself, and argues the latter requires a completely different approach.
The one question: write every step, then write why
The move is simple but almost no one does it. Take the process you want to delegate. Get granular. Write every single step. Then, next to each step, write why you do it. Not just what happens, but the reasoning, the intention, the feeling you are trying to create. This does two things at once. First, it audits your own time because you will find steps that are redundant, habitual, or totally skippable. Second, it gives a future team member the context they need to bring the right energy, not just follow a checklist.
A real example: the media training client
Lia shares the story of a client who runs a media training business for executives and entrepreneurs. The client was delivering the entire program herself and wanted to offload the introductory and onboarding pieces. Before handing anything off, she mapped out every step and asked why. What she discovered was that her real goal at each touchpoint was building confidence, in her clients, in the brand, in the process. That was the why. Once she named it, she could share it with a team member without scripting every word. The team member could bring their own style to instilling that confidence, as long as the intention was clear. Without the why, that would have been invisible and lost.
Why this is not a recipe for micromanagement
Lia anticipates the pushback. Writing down every step sounds like over-prescribing. It is not, if you use it correctly. The why separates what is a genuine business requirement from what is just your personal preference or comfort. If instilling confidence at every touchpoint is truly the make-or-break for the client experience, that is a real requirement. How someone does that is open for interpretation. You are not handing someone a script. You are handing them a north star.
How this applies in corporate management too
This is not only for founders. If you are a manager in a company and you are bringing on a team lead or distributing leadership responsibilities, the same principle applies. What have you done to build cross-functional relationships? How do you get stakeholders on board? Why do you run your 1:1s the way you do? These things feel automatic because they are, which is exactly why writing them down is so valuable. You will find patterns, themes, and transferable insight that re-energizes you and genuinely sets your team up to lead with the same intentionality you do.
When an Ops Playbook is the better tool
Lia draws a clear distinction: mapping your personal process with the why framework is the right tool when you are scaling yourself, delegating pieces of your own role. If you are opening a second location, expanding your footprint, or trying to replicate an entire operation, that calls for a full Ops Playbook. Both are about scale. They just require different tools. Knowing which one you need saves you from building the wrong thing.
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)
Lia Garvin: Getting them in that excited mode, helping them feel confident about what they’re doing. Right. She was doing a media training. It can be very intimidating to kind of face how you’re communicating externally, right? So there were certain nuances that she did every step of the way that if she had just handed these pieces off to a team member without clarifying those and just said, have an onboarding call, send a follow up form, whatever, that would have been lost.
Lia Garvin: Welcome to the Managing Midsimple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature ops playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It 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, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are 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. Lia Garvin: Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Lia Garvin: Entrepreneurs and business owners listening right now. Lia Garvin: We all started with big dreams, right? Lia Garvin: Freedom, impact, bringing our visions to life. But there’s a twist many of us didn’t see coming, that managing a team is the hardest thing about running a business.
And the words, because I said so, doesn’t work with children or our employees. Drawing on my team operations experience in big tech and with business owners, I. Lia Garvin: Realized we often complicate how work gets. Lia Garvin: Done more than we need to. That’s why I wrote the unstoppable team. Its a playbook for easing the complexities of team management, showing you the how, behind the what and why of your vision. This books about finding relief amid the chaos, injecting simplicity into tackling hard problems, and turning your team members into profit generating machines, all without burning you or them out.
Kind of nice, right? Lia Garvin: So if you are ready to make this whole managing thing easier while scaling. Lia Garvin: Your business, head to Leagarvin.com, thebook or Amazon.com and get your copy of the unstoppable team today. Lia Garvin: Welcome back to the show. Today I want to share a simple key to delegating or offloading something effectively, especially if you want to hand off a really big part of your work. So let’s say you are running a marketing agency and you’ve been primarily on the hook for doing the business development, the sales.
And you want to hire a second person to do that with you. Or let’s say you run a PR agency and you’re the main person coming up with the creative ideas, kind of interfacing with the clients, running a certain kind of training, perhaps. And you want to scale that. So you need to bring a second person on or someone else. Now, why this is different from delegating kind of general work and tasks is because there’s some magic behind what you do which has made you successful, that we don’t want to lose the integrity of that.
Lia Garvin: Now, this also is the case if you’re opening a second location, let’s say you have a physical presence, maybe. Maybe it’s a cafe or a gym or a med spa or a salon. And you really want to make sure that that secret sauce translates from one location to the next. Now, one way to do that is to create an ops playbook like I do with teams. To create. Well, what are those systems and lightweight processes that, you know, ensure that everyone’s on the same page around how things get done on the team.
So that’s really the case if we are replicating like a second location. And it’s really, really helpful for franchise businesses, right? So we have that consistency across the board. Lia Garvin: Um, it’s really helpful if, again, you’re open, you know, let’s say you have a salon and you want to open a second location, you really want to capture the magic from place to place. But if you are wanting to scale yourself individually, we really want to focus on this tool and that is to map out the process that you run through, even if it’s very nuanced in your mind and at every single step, write why you do that step.
Now, doing this will not only start to save you time if you continue to do this process for a while before you hire someone, because you are going to recognize redundancies when you write why. It’s like, well, because. I don’t know, because I’ve just been doing it that way. Or wait a second, why do I do that? This exercise will audit your time management and start to save you time right off the bat. It will also give someone context on what is that essence behind something and why it’s important.
Now, when we’ve handed something off and we know exactly why each step is included and we’ve pared it down to only the most important steps. Lia Garvin: Now, when you hand something off, someone doesn’t just think, oh, I’m just following a checklist, they start to get that feeling behind it. So let’s take, for example, a client of mine runs a very, very successful media training business for corporate executives, for entrepreneurs, for business owners. And in that program, she was, she mapped it out from start to finish, and she was delivering the whole thing from end to end.
And because she did this, because she wanted to really make sure the program was comprehensive, make sure she was really delivering the value, and it really suss out what was needed. Now, after running it for a few months, she realized, hey, there’s a few steps in this process that I could offload. I really want to do the in person piece, but there’s some of that introductory kind of onboarding materials. There’s some kind of creation of artifacts that she could offload to someone else.
But she didn’t want to do that until she really captured well what was the thoughtfulness, and what was she bringing to that process when she was running it end to end. Lia Garvin: So she mapped out in detail every single step of the process and why she did that, why she phrased things a certain way on that onboarding call with clients, right? Getting them in that excited mode, helping them feel confident about what they’re doing. Right.
She was doing a media training. It can be very intimidating to kind of face how you’re communicating externally. Right. So there were certain nuances that she did every step of the way that if she had just handed these pieces off to a team member without clarifying those and just said, have an onboarding call, send a follow up form, whatever, that would have been lost. And I think that’s where we go wrong. Sometimes when we offload something or delegate and we say, hey, it’s not going the way that it should.
Lia Garvin: Like, is it the team member? Is it this? No, they just didn’t have all the information. And so if we really want to make sure something is translated seamlessly, we have to capture a lot of that why? And so in doing this, she said, hey, you know, taking a step back. Immediate training is about building confidence within yourself and within your customers, around the brand. That’s really the why. Now, how do we get there?
Well, we need to be infusing this at every step of the way. And so she started to see more places she could share context with her team so that they could bring that same energy in what they were doing. But she maybe wouldn’t have realized because it came second nature to her. Right. Lia Garvin: If she hadn’t written it down. So after this episode, I encourage you to think about you know what is something that I really want to be able to get another person on board for it to be able to scale, that I really want to grow, that I feel very attached to because there is a lot of magic in the way that I do it and start to write down all of the steps, get really granular every single step, and start to write why in every single one.
And if one’s redundant, cross it off, consolidate. But I bet you there’s going to be some really cool things that you learn about the process that actually help you get your whole team on board on a more kind of like higher level on that, more why level of the way that we do things. And that’s going to drive more motivation in your team because everyone’s like, oh, okay, I get it now. If you’re listening, you’re thinking, ooh, this is a recipe for micromanagement.
How are you going to overly prescribe every single step of the process? What if I think every single thing’s important? And how do I make sure I’m letting my team members run with something and lead something? Well, this step of mapping out the why is also going to tell you, is this something that is your preference because of your work style, because of what makes you comfortable? Or is it something that’s really a make or breaker for the business?
Now, in my example with the media training, really taking deliberate effort to instill confidence at every step of the way, that was the why. Now, how someone does that, that’s open for interpretation. Lia Garvin: And so in that situation, she could have said, hey, we want to instill confidence in each step of the way. Here are examples of how I do that. I invite you to bring more in. You don’t have to do it exactly this way, but this is the nature of what I’m talking about.
So you see, she didn’t say, read this script when you’re on the phone with a client, but she didn’t miss that important step either. And so when we’re thinking about why it doesn’t have to be prescriptive in the sense of do this thing exactly, but we’re wanting to communicate the motivation or the reasoning behind the way we do something, we do. Okay, for example, when I do my ops playbook program with, with teams, we kick it off with a four hour deep dive.
We talk about where the business is today and where they want to be in the next six to twelve months. Lia Garvin: And then I run through each of the six sections of the Ops playbook, asking really specific questions and having a conversation around it. Now, in that conversation, that four hour deep dive, even before I’ve built out the playbook, what I found every single time is in having this conversation, the business owner finds so much more clarity about where their business is right then and there, they say, oh my gosh, I do have a way more of a handle on this than I thought, or I actually do have this figured out.
And that right there starts helping them to bring some more accountability into the way work’s happening, to start asserting themselves around, like, let’s get some more clarity here and how things are getting done. It starts driving change immediately, even again, before the Ops playbook’s created. And so I would say the magic behind that and what I am doing is listening and connecting the dots. Every single thing that person tells me in that, in that deep dive meeting so that I can be connecting dots for them and saying, well, I’m hearing that this piece is really, is really dialed in.
Have you tried this? Have you explored this? Or what are some of the things that we could look at here? And by really approaching the conversation almost as a coaching conversation, I’m able to move them further in that meeting than if I had just sent out a questionnaire, let’s say. Now, this is something that as I’m scaling, I want additional team members to be thinking about is, hey, we are. Lia Garvin: Our goal in this meeting is to bring more clarity and confidence to that business owner.
That way more things are figured out than they are thinking at the start of it. Now, we’re not tricking them into thinking that, but we are bringing to surface the things that are going well so that we’re building on it instead of starting from scratch. Because if you go into a business and you tell them, hey, everything’s a mess, you’re starting from scratch, that’s never going to work and it’s not even the case. And the Ops playbook’s not the right solution if your business is failing.
No, this is a solution for businesses that want to go from good to great. And that’s why it’s such a fun offering that I have, because it helps people see their full potential. I digress. Lia Garvin: But you get the point, right? There is a certain thing, in essence, that we bring to our work that as we scale ourselves, we don’t want to lose it. And so think about this. You know, if you are hiring, if you’re not a business owner and you’re a manager in the corporate world and you’re going to hire another person to offload some of the leadership responsibilities on the team.
You know, what are some of the things that you’ve done to build relationships with team members? What are some of the ways you’ve done? What are some of the tools that you have integrated in your workflow to have more influence in the organization or to build cross functional relationships and to get stakeholders on board with you? What are some of those things that you do and why do you do them right? And again, this can feel second nature.
It’s just how we work. It’s automatic. And that’s why actually writing it down, looking at it and saying, okay, why do I do this? Why do I do that? Okay, looking for themes across the board. It’s an interesting exercise that re energizes you around the work, that helps you offload something and again, helps you save time because guaranteed, when you go through that checklist, you are going to find steps that can be consolidated, removed or offloaded that actually get you down to the core of what this work really is about.
Lia Garvin: And again, if you are looking at maybe opening a second location or kind of doubling your footprint, that’s where I think this checklist is not enough. I want you to think about, well, how do I really make sure systems are clear? What is the secret sauce behind working norms more the team dynamics? And that’s where something like an Ops playbook is really the better tool for it. This specifically is around you delegating pieces of your role.
Just want to draw that distinction because both of those things are about scale. They just require a different tool that allows you to scale in a different way. All right, so if you are interested in diving into the Ops playbook and kind of want to get a better sense of the lay of the land, my book, the unstoppable team spells out the framework from start to finish. So that gives you a sense of, well, what would I be creating for my team?
What would I be onboarding folks into? What does this look like? So that’s a great place to start. My book the unsoppable team. Lia Garvin: Now, if you already have an Ops manager and you have someone on the hook for mapping out the systems and implementing them, and you want that person to be more set up for success, get a little bit of training, get kind of a more methodical system behind it, I encourage you to check out my special ops accelerator.
This is a twelve week program where I teach my Ops playbook system to your Ops manager along with the critical, critical tools, communication strategies in order to implement that change. When there’s a little bit of dissent around change in most teams, right? And now this comes from my decade of implementing process and tools on teams and knowing what works and what doesn’t and building out a set of strategies that really helps drive alignment and adoption and really, folks, to be totally on board when you introduce something new on a team.
So that’s my special ops accelerator, and you can check that [email protected]. Accelerate. Either way, I encourage you to try this. Write that list down. Okay? Map out what are the special, map out those specific steps, the nuances, all the good stuff. Lia Garvin: Write why, and it’s going to be really exciting to see what comes forward. See you next time. Lia Garvin: 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 this.
Questions this episode answers
How do I delegate a core part of my business without losing what makes it special?
Map out every single step of the process you run, and next to each step write why you do it. This captures the essence and intention behind your work, not just the mechanics. When a team member understands the why, they stop treating it like a checklist and start bringing the right energy to it. You will also spot redundant steps along the way, which saves you time even before anyone new takes over. The goal is to document the reasoning so the magic of what you do can transfer without being watered down.
What is the one question to ask yourself when delegating tasks to a team member?
Ask why at every single step of your process. For each thing you do, write down why you do it that way. This one question does two things at once. It helps you identify steps that are genuinely critical versus steps that are just habit or personal preference, and it gives whoever takes over the context they need to make good decisions on their own. Without that why, a team member is just following instructions blindly, and the result rarely matches what you had in mind.
Why does delegation go wrong even when I hand over clear instructions?
Most delegation problems are not about the team member. They happen because the instructions only describe what to do, not why each step matters. When someone only has a checklist, they fill in the gaps with their own assumptions, and those assumptions may not match your intentions at all. Writing out the reasoning behind each step gives the person enough context to handle situations the checklist does not cover. The missing system is the why, not a failing on the team member's part.
How do I delegate without micromanaging every detail?
Communicating the why behind a step is not the same as scripting exactly how someone must do it. Once a team member understands the goal of a step, for example instilling confidence in a client during onboarding, they have room to bring their own style to it. You share examples of how you personally accomplish that goal, but you make clear they can find their own approach. The why sets the standard without locking someone into a rigid method, which is what separates useful context from micromanagement.
How does writing out my process help me save time even before I hire anyone?
When you write down every step and the reason behind it, you will almost always find steps you have been doing on autopilot that no longer serve a clear purpose. Some steps are redundant, some can be consolidated, and some can be removed entirely. That audit alone trims wasted time from your workflow right away. And once you do bring someone on, they ramp up faster because the context is already documented, so you spend less time re-explaining and course-correcting.