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.”
“One of the most, most common reasons we feel like we’re micromanaging or that our team members think that we’re micromanaging is because we are course correcting after the fact when they’ve already gotten started doing that thing.”
“…it’s the timing of the course correction, it’s the timing of the feedback, it’s the timing of the asking for an update.”
“You can pause this show right now and be like, Ooh, I’m going to have a reset conversation with my teams right now.”
“…this timing is going to build so much trust with your team.”
Episode highlights
The real reason your team thinks you are micromanaging
The fear of being a micromanager is one of the most common things Lia hears from owners and leaders. And that fear has a cost: it stops people from delegating, setting expectations, or having hard conversations. The mantra Lia offers to cut through it is simple. Micromanaging is not about what, it is about when. The most common trigger is course correcting after someone has already gotten started, not the content of the correction itself.
Why timing creates the “leave me alone” feeling
When a leader reaches out to remind someone of a task they always complete on time, or line-edits a document while the person is still drafting it, the message the team member receives is: you do not trust me. It is not the feedback that stings. It is the moment it lands. A thousand small, poorly timed check-ins add up to the kind of environment where people want to leave.
It is never too late for a reset conversation
You do not have to wait for a new project to fix this. Lia’s move is to name a reset: “I’ve noticed I’ve been more in the weeds than I want to be, and probably more than you want me to be. Let’s reset.” That one sentence creates a new baseline. From that point forward, you are setting expectations forward, not constantly correcting backward.
What to cover in the upfront expectations conversation
Whether it is the start of a project or a mid-stream reset, Lia recommends covering four things:
– What success looks like, including how done is done and what a finished deliverable actually means – When you will check in, for example, a standing Wednesday 5 p.m. status update rather than ad-hoc reminders – What decisions the team member owns versus what needs your review or approval – How gaps get closed, meaning what support is available and what happens if something goes sideways
Leaving coaching questions open (what obstacles do you anticipate, how are you thinking about approaching this) also lets you hear the person’s reasoning and calibrate how much support they actually need.
Honoring the parameters you set
Setting the when only works if you actually respect it. If you agreed to a Wednesday 5 p.m. update, you wait until 5:05 before asking anything. You do not peek at a deck under construction and start adding comments. You give the person the benefit of the doubt that they will have what they need ready at the agreed milestone. That restraint is what builds trust and makes the few times you do need to break the pattern feel legitimate rather than controlling.
When you do have to break the pattern
Sometimes a client calls frustrated, or a VP needs an answer right now. Because you have built trust through consistent honoring of the check-in rhythm, you have currency in the relationship to call an impromptu meeting. The key is to name the reason: “I know we are not meeting until Tuesday, but the client just flagged something urgent.” That transparency preserves the trust the process has built, rather than quietly eroding it.
The shift that changes everything
Moving feedback and expectations from the back end to the front end is what takes the pressure off. Owners and leaders who feel paralyzed by the fear of micromanaging are often just lacking a clear framework for when and how to check in. Once the when is established, giving feedback at those pre-agreed moments feels like management, not surveillance.
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, and when we get the, when established upfront, and we’ve made it really clear on what the expectations are, how to be successful when we’re checking in, what decisions folks are running with versus where we need to be involved. All of that work done upfront, or like I said, done through a reset conversation, which you can have any minute. You can pause this show right now and be like, Ooh, I’m going to have a reset conversation with my teams right now.
Um, just naming it as sort of this re, this new baseline starting point is going to help shift that timeline from course correcting later to you’re putting it back up front. You’re making a new starting point and then you’re making sure everyone is clear and on the same page. Welcome to the managing mid symbol podcast. I’m Lia 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, are 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.
Let’s go. 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 realized we often complicate how work gets done more than we need to. That’s why I wrote The Unstoppable Team. It’s a playbook for easing the complexities of team management, showing you the how behind the what and why of your vision.
This book’s 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? So if you are ready to make this whole managing thing easier while scaling your business, head to Lia Garvin. com slash the book or amazon. com and get your copy of the unstoppable team today. Welcome back to the show. I just got back from sunny Palm Springs where I went to the alt summit conference and.
This is a conference for women, business owners, entrepreneurs, and influencers all do an awesome stuff. It’s about building community, learning, collaborating, and all that. And in the conference, I was fortunate enough to be able to do a book signing for an inseparable team, which was super fun and also host some round table workshops. And in these conversations, I met with a ton of entrepreneurs and business owners to talk about how to optimize their workflow and manage with ease.
And the number one thing I heard from everybody I talked to both at the round table and at the book signing was, gosh, I want to, you know, delegate more. I want to set expectations, but I don’t want to be a micromanager. This comes up every single day. This fear, this tension between wanting to let go of stuff, wanting to empower your team, wanting to set expectations, want to want to get more clear, maybe wanting to give some tough feedback, but not wanting to come across as a micromanager and the biggest issue with this fear is that it makes us not take action to resolve things that need to happen.
Right? It makes us avoid hard conversations. It makes us avoid setting expectations. It makes us stay in the weeds where we don’t have to be. And so I want to impart on you a mantra to take with you when you are worrying about this. And that is micromanaging is not about what? It’s about when. One of the most, most common reasons we feel like we’re micromanaging or that our team members think that we’re micromanaging is because we are course correcting after the fact when they’ve already gotten started doing that thing.
Okay. And yeah, there are moments when micromanaging is a lot about the what too. But the most common situation that I see time and again is that it’s really, it’s not about the material that we’re doing. It’s not about the fixing. It’s not about the little things. It’s that we are saying them while someone’s gotten started, we’re saying it in a review, we’re actually like, we’re reaching out to someone again and again and again, when they were about to do something.
And that’s where it’s like, ah, leave me alone, get off my back. I’m going to do it. And that’s what creates so much frustration with your teams. That’s what makes them feel like you don’t trust them. It’s because of the when, it’s the timing of the course correction, it’s the timing of the feedback, it’s the timing of the asking for an update. That’s the when. And so what I want to talk about today is how to set up this in the beginning of a conversation so that it doesn’t feel like micromanaging.
Because this all comes back to setting expectations. And we want to set expectations up front. We always want to do that. And it’s never too late. It doesn’t, it also doesn’t have to be at the start of a project. So one thing that I talked about with these folks at the conference and what I typically coach folks on that are worrying about micromanaging is it’s never too late. You don’t have to say, Oh, well it’s, it’s already, the project’s already started.
I’m already micromanaging. I’m just going to stay with what I’m doing. No, you can do it at the beginning of a project, beginning of a week, beginning of a quarter. You can do it tomorrow and say, Hey team, you know, I realized I’m finding myself a little bit more in the weeds than I really want to be, that I think you probably want me to be. So let’s reset. Boom, you just set a new kind of starting point that you can frame expectations around.
Okay. And so micromanaging goes away when we are able to set the parameters about what we want to see when our team members get really, really clear on what success looks like. And we established all of that in a conversation so that we have, again, like I talk about with expectations setting, planted that flag. That goalpost, that starting point that we can then point back to with feedback when we want to course correct, when we want to check in on something.
And so what we want to do is talk about at the start of a project or in this reset conversation or up front, whatever that looks like. What is needed for this project? What is needed for this delivery? What is needed for this handoff? We want to talk about when we’re gonna check in how we’re gonna know the status of it, right? So if we say hey, um, I want to check in every Wednesday, you know I have to share something with our clients or our stakeholders whoever Thursday morning.
So please give me an update every Wednesday by 5 p. m Okay. Now you’ve said when you’re going to check in. So you don’t need to reach out to that person Wednesday at 4 p. m. Every week. Like, remember, we got to do this. We’ve set a clear parameter and we’re going to let them run with it. Okay. We also want to talk about what success looks like. What is done look like? When do you need me to make a decision versus you to go ahead with something?
Okay. So you’re going to talk about a lot of different things in the success bucket. Okay. It’s not just saying what a good job looks like, which is part of that conversation for sure. But it’s also an opportunity to talk about the autonomy that person has around making decisions along the way, what pieces you really need to review and approve versus what you can let go, what maybe needs to be shared with a broader audience. All of that’s going to come in that conversation.
And then you want to talk about, well, Here’s how we’re going to close any gaps. Here’s how I’m going to be involved to course correct or what other support do you need? And again, that’s how we avoid feeling like the project got started. We’re like, Oh, can they really handle this? I don’t know, because we haven’t had that conversation open for, okay, here’s what we talk, we have all the expectations on the table. What else have we missed?
What do you need? What’s feeling uncomfortable? How will you approach this? You leave all of it open with these kind of iterative, big picture questions using these coaching questions, right? The what’s in the house to get that person sharing how they’re going to approach it, what they’re thinking about, what obstacles they might anticipate. So you can both hear their thinking, see how they’re kind of reasoning through things and recognize like, Oh, this Is this a project that’s going to need a little bit more handholding or is this person super dialed in and they know where to go with it?
Now the biggest piece after that, which is also what prevents us from micromanaging is legitimately letting go and taking that step back. And once we’ve handed that thing off, letting it be handed off. And letting go and honoring these parameters we set. We said, we’re going to check in. We’re going to wait for that status update Wednesdays at five. So we wait till Wednesdays at five Oh five until we ask, where the hell is this? Okay.
We don’t say Wednesday morning. Remember I need this by five. Because these little things become these thousand paper cuts that makes someone want to get the hell out of working on your team because it’s like, ah, leave me alone. Okay. If we’ve talked about, let’s say framing of communication to clients or stakeholders or to whoever, then we don’t go in and we, we don’t line edit their document while they’re working on it. Okay. Cause that’s the kind of thing that’s like, well, give me a chance to get this right.
Okay. So I think it’s, it’s the granularity. As well as the timing, right? And when we’re kind of imposing some of these course corrections. Now, because we’ve established when we’re going to check in with the when, okay, now when it is that review, let’s say we said, okay, we’re going to have a check in meeting for this project every Tuesday at noon. That’s where we give the feedback. We wait till we have these pre established moments, unless obviously unforeseen circumstances or something major comes up, but we’re going to constrain our feedback as much as we can to these times that we’ve already decided because we don’t know.
Maybe that person was, their approach. Was to, you know, let’s say they’re making a big presentation and you start peeking in those slides and you’re like, Oh my gosh, like this presentation’s on Friday and they have like three slides designed, or, you know, they haven’t done this yet, or this formatting is all messed up and we start going rogue on our micromanaging and we’re like adding comments left and right. What’s this, where’s this. And we didn’t realize our team members process is to make an outline.
They have an offline copy. They’re doing it somewhere else. They’re kind of brainstorm. We, we can’t just assume that because something’s not in some place that it’s wrong or missing. So that’s why honoring those pre established times is going to be really important. At that Tuesday meeting, maybe they will have the deck ready. I hope they do. That’s what we want to rely on. And then we see, well, where’s this thing really at? Because we gave the person the benefit of the doubt that by that meeting, they’d have everything ready to share with us.
Now, if you’ve reached these milestones and you see someone’s not, you know, stepping up and they’re not living up to the kind of parameters you’ve set, and there’s some gaps there, well then you give feedback. Then we say, okay, what got in the way? What is the more support you needed? Was it kind of, were we not clear enough on the scope or what the expectations were for these review meetings? How done it should be? What the even kind of agenda for it would be for these, these conversations?
That’s where we can course correct, but we want to have some data points. We want to have some evidence that course correcting is even needed. And again, I think that’s where it feels like micromanaging is. And I’ve heard this from folks time and again is, is a team member saying they didn’t even know if I was going to do this thing or not before they started checking in or I’ve heard my manager is reminding me of stuff.
Of course I’m going to do. I have never dropped the ball on that thing once. Why are they asking me if I’m going to send the meeting notes when I always do it? I always do it right on time. Why are they asking me to remember to send that follow up invite when I always do it? I know that’s part of my job. They’ve never had her mind me and yet they do it every week. These are the things that make our team members feel like they don’t, that we don’t trust them.
And again, it’s the, when it’s because we didn’t say upfront, Hey, here’s the parameters. Here’s what I check in. Here’s what I need to know. We just got nervous potentially, or forgot. And we start reminding people. And this timing is going to build so much trust with your team. And because you’ve established that trust, if there’s moments where you have to break outside of these pre designated times. Then we’ve built that we’ve put that currency in the relationship bank to be able to do that.
So for example, let’s say a client calls you really frustrated about something and you’re like, Oh God, I got to find this out right away. We go to our team and we say, Hey, I know we’re not meeting about this till Tuesday, but it’s Friday morning. We got to check in on this. The client just asked, can we, can we have a quick impromptu meeting? Okay. You’re honoring the expectation set. You’re honoring this thing and you’re in, you’re asking to check in based on this bigger context.
Same thing if you’re working in corporate, Hey, this stakeholder, they just came to me. Our VP said, I got to find out where this is right now. Let’s have a meeting right now. You know, we can skip the Tuesday one because we’re pre meeting now. Here’s why. Okay. And this is going to allow you to have a little bit of a shake up in the flow, but you’ve built that understanding that in general, we’re working through this process and this is how we’re going to be running this project.
So that is what I have for you today. Micromanaging is not about what, it’s about when. And when we get the when established upfront and we’ve made it really clear on what the expectations are, how to be successful, when we’re checking in, what decisions folks are running with versus where we need to be involved, all of that work done upfront, or like I said, done through a reset conversation, which you can have. Any minute, you can pause this show right now and be like, Ooh, I’m going to have a reset conversation with my teams right now.
Just naming it as sort of this re, this new baseline starting point is going to help shift that timeline from course correcting later to you’re putting it back up front, you’re making a new starting point, and then you’re making sure everyone is clear and on the same page. Micromanaging is not about what it’s about when, and sometimes it’s a little bit of what, but it’s a way worse situation. When you have, you’re doing it and you’re in this habit of doing it all the time in the details, in the weeds, every time they send an email, like you’re right in there and kind of quickly responding, right?
We want to establish how someone can have some predictability and communicating with us. And the predictability comes from having a lot of clarity around that when. Okay, give this a try. I promise you this will be game changing. This is a strategy I have imparted on all of the business owners that I’m working with, all of the managers that I support, all the folks that I train. Because this little shift takes the pressure off us of feeling like we can’t manage expectations, or we can’t set expectations, or we can’t give feedback.
No, we totally can. It’s the timing and the framing and then that’s where it’s all smooth sailing. 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
Why does micromanaging happen even when I have good intentions as a leader?
Micromanaging usually happens because of timing, not content. When you jump in to course correct after someone has already started a task, ask for updates before a deadline you both agreed on, or leave comments on a document while someone is still working, it signals that you don't trust them. The problem isn't that you care about quality. It's that you're inserting yourself at the wrong moment. Setting clear expectations before work begins shifts that correction to the front of the process, where it belongs, and removes the tension entirely.
How do I stop micromanaging my team without losing visibility into the work?
Set the parameters upfront. At the start of a project, or in a reset conversation any time, agree on when check-ins happen, what done looks like, which decisions the team member owns versus which ones need your sign-off, and how gaps will be handled. Then honor those agreements. If you said you'd get a status update every Wednesday by 5 p.m., wait until 5:05 before asking. Establishing predictable check-in moments gives you the visibility you need without hovering, and it shows the team you trust them to follow through.
Is it too late to stop micromanaging if a project has already started?
It is never too late. You can have a reset conversation at the start of a project, at the beginning of a week, or literally tomorrow. Name it directly: tell your team you have been more in the weeds than you want to be and you want to set a new baseline together. That reframe creates a fresh starting point. From there you establish expectations, check-in timing, and decision-making boundaries just as you would at a project kickoff. The reset conversation works at any stage.
What should I cover in an expectations conversation to avoid micromanaging later?
Cover four things. First, what success looks like for the deliverable. Second, when you will check in and what format those updates should take. Third, which decisions the team member can make independently and which ones need your involvement. Fourth, how you will close gaps if something goes off track. Leaving space for open questions, like what obstacles they anticipate or what support they need, also helps you understand how they think and calibrate how much guidance the project actually requires.
How do I remind a team member about a deadline without sounding like I don't trust them?
If you have already set a clear expectation about when something is due, the most trust-building move is to not remind them at all until that deadline passes. Reminding someone of a task they always complete on time sends the message that you doubt them, even if you don't. The pattern of constant reminders is one of the things team members find most frustrating. Reserve check-ins for the moments you already agreed on, and save unplanned outreach for genuinely urgent situations where you explain the context, like a client escalation or a stakeholder request.