The reason you lie awake worrying about your team is not that you need a more elaborate task-tracking system. Lia introduces the Snippets Template, a lightweight weekly update tool that gives leaders a bird’s-eye view of priorities, wins, and blockers without micromanaging. This episode is especially useful for remote team leaders, small business owners, and anyone who feels perpetually out of the loop on what their team is actually doing.
This episode is part of the Team Operations, Systems & SOPs series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…this is going to be the biggest, most transformational thing, is to connect rewards and compensation back up to those priorities.”
“…when you give your team members really clear expectations, when you show them I believe in you, like I wanna give you a chance to earn more money, I wanna give you a chance to step up and be a leader. They show up.”
Episode highlights
Why owners feel like the only person who cares
You hire well, you pay fairly, and yet it still feels like some people are just there to collect a paycheck. Lia names this feeling directly and traces it to a structural gap, not a people problem. When team members cannot see how their role connects to what the business is actually trying to do, they default to the job description. They do the bare minimum and stop there. The exhaustion this creates for the owner is real, and it is one of the core things the Ops Playbook is built to solve.
Step one: set priorities that are actually specific
The first leg of the trifecta is establishing clear, concrete priorities. Lia draws a sharp line between a vision statement and a priority. “Help a billion people” is a vision. “Double our revenue this year through these three activities” is a priority. The difference is that a real priority tells someone what to do on Monday. Priorities also need to stay stable. Changing them every month or every quarter creates confusion and makes it nearly impossible for anyone to understand what they are working toward.
Step two: connect every single role to that priority
Once the priority is set, the job is to show each person specifically how their work moves that needle, even if the connection is not obvious. Lia walks through a real client example: Lisa, who runs a Med Spa and wants to grow annual memberships. On the surface, the medical assistant cleaning machines and the person ordering supplies have nothing to do with membership growth. But when you zoom in, a spotless treatment room makes people want to stay. Reliable, automated supply ordering means the experience never breaks down. Every role gets a direct line back to the priority, and suddenly everyone can see where they fit.
Step three: reward what you actually want (this is the missing piece)
Lia is direct about this: most businesses get step three completely wrong. They reward people for showing up and completing tasks, then wonder why no one goes above and beyond. If you want team members to act like they have a stake in the outcome, you have to build compensation and bonuses around the outcomes you care about. In the Med Spa example, that meant setting a membership drive every six months where every team member, regardless of role, could participate through social media, referrals, or events, and earn a bonus based on results. When people see a clear path from their effort to their paycheck, the dynamic shifts.
What changes when the trifecta clicks
Lia is direct about the deeper issue underneath the “bare minimum” feeling. When owners assume employees only want a paycheck, it creates an artificial divide. Most people want to matter. They want to know their work counts. When you show someone a clear priority, tell them exactly how their role connects to it, and give them a real opportunity to earn more by stepping up, they show up differently. The conversation about raises changes too. It is no longer about tenure or just showing up. It becomes about impact.
How to put this into practice
Lia points to the Ops Playbook as the structured way to build this out across six dimensions, including priorities, expectations, rewards, onboarding, decision making, and work tracking. But the starting move is simple: write down your top priority, then sit with each role on your team and ask what does moving that priority forward actually look like in this job? Do that, connect it to how people are rewarded, and share it with your team framed as a tool for their success, not a performance management document. That framing matters.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 230: Why your team problems are actually systems problems (and what to fix first). When your team feels chaotic, unclear, or constantly dependent on you, the culprit is almost never the people. It is the absence of simple, repeatable systems that tell everyone how to operate. Lia walks through the real cost of missing systems, two client stories with immediate results, and how to roll out new processes so your team gets bought in from day one. This episode is essential for any owner who says they hate process but secretly hates the chaos more.
- Ep 215: Why your team seems entitled (and what is really causing it). When your team feels entitled, the root cause is almost never attitude. It is a clarity gap, and the fix starts with you asking what role you played in creating the dynamic. Lia walks through two questions every owner and leader should ask before writing off a team member, and explains how operational clarity through an Ops Playbook prevents these friction points from forming in the first place. This episode is most useful for founders, small business owners, and managers who feel like they are constantly negotiating with their teams.
- Ep 198: Why your team asked for training but still won’t show up (and how to fix it). When team members ask for development but skip the training you built, it usually comes down to three fixable problems: they feel too stretched to step away, leaders are not modeling that the training matters, and the content itself has not earned their trust yet. Lia walks through each obstacle and gives you concrete language and moves to address all three before your next training. This episode is especially useful for business owners, HR leaders, and team leads who have already invested in development and watched the room stay empty.
- Ep 177: How to stop waking up at 3am worried about your team (and what to do instead). The reason you lie awake worrying about your team is not that you need a more elaborate task-tracking system. Lia introduces the Snippets Template, a lightweight weekly update tool that gives leaders a bird’s-eye view of priorities, wins, and blockers without micromanaging. This episode is especially useful for remote team leaders, small business owners, and anyone who feels perpetually out of the loop on what their team is actually doing.
Want to go deeper?
The Ops Playbook. Systems and SOPs for teams that need to scale without breaking.
Full transcript (click to expand)
And so when we talk about what are our priorities, these are specific things that we are doing and we’re focused on in our work. This is what you gotta communicate to your team members, because if they don’t see themselves in the priority, you got nothing. Okay? Now you’re, they’re not even focused on the priorities. They go back to that job description, they do the bare minimum, and then they’re done. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast.
Where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips. Or a seasoned manager looking up their game.
Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today’s episode is for my business owners out there, my founders, my entrepreneurs who feel like they’re the only person caring about building this business, right? I am the only one who’s focused every minute of the day, a lot of times middle of the night on growing the business, on hitting our revenue goals. And this can be exhausting.
Because you bring on a great team, you try to support them, you pay them well, and it still feels like a little bit, some of the people are just there to collect a paycheck, and that’s tough because to carry that weight that you are the only one responsible for building this business, this is gonna lead you to burn out, to be working all the time, to be really, really hard to delegate, to step away. It creates all the problems that actually I work to solve in the Ops Playbook program by getting you a little bit outta the weeds.
But it also creates this sense of distance between you and your employees. So today I wanted to share this three part kind of trifecta that I think when you totally nail this, this is going to be game changing in your business. And these are three key pieces of the ops playbook that we build out so that people see. Hey, this is the connection. This is why I’m here. This is how I am successful, and this is what my role is in growing the business.
All right, you ready? This trifecta is the link between priorities, expectations, compensation. Okay. This is it. Don’t stop the episode yet, even though that was the magic part, because I wanna explain to you how all of this comes together when we are working in a company. There is more than just the roles and responsibilities, like the job description, that’s the baseline. Okay. But if we want people to really feel accountable to it, to go above and beyond or really sort of be, be a part of more than just what’s on paper, this is where we have to start with, what are the priorities for your overarching business or team?
And a lot of times this can be really unclear. I worked on a team years ago where the priority was help a billion people. Okay, this is not a priority. This is a vision statement maybe, but that doesn’t tell me anything like, how am I supposed to do that? It’s very abstract. It’s intangible, and so when we talk about what are our priorities, these are specific things that we are doing and we’re focused on in our work.
This is what you gotta communicate to your team members, because if they don’t see themselves in the priority, you got nothing. Okay? Now even they’re not even focused on the priorities. They go back to that job description. They do the bare minimum, and then they’re done. So the first, first piece of this trifecta, establishing very clear priorities and then not changing every 20 minutes, okay? There’s times when priorities will shift. You have things coming in from competitive forces or whatever, and then in that situation you go, Hey, our priority was to double our revenue this year, right?
Based on these three activities, let’s say. And now we’re seeing instead of this third activity, we’re gonna do this other thing. It’s still grounded in the overarching double the revenue theme. If instead you said, instead of doubling our revenue, we’re actually gonna try to cut it in half and do this other product. This is where you start to create thrash, especially if you do that a number of times. If you have a clear story and you have a good change management process, which we can talk about another time, it’s possible to change priorities, but you don’t wanna be doing it every month, every three months, because it becomes hard for people to understand what they’re working towards.
Once you set your priorities, let’s say it’s doubling the revenue. Now we go to step two of the trifecta setting crystal clear expectations for every single role. Okay, so let’s say you got a customer service person, a marketing person, um, uh, an executive assistant and ops person, okay? All, all working on very different things. What is each person’s specific tasks and responsibilities they can do to help double the revenue? And I believe that when that’s your priority, every single job should have some connection back to it.
So the customer service that might be about retaining clients as opposed to getting new ones, the marketing person might be about getting new clients. The ops person is about giving a seamless experience so that people don’t leave, right? These are all specifically tied to that overarching priority, and you can give really clear expectations for how everybody is a part of that picture. So now we see, okay, I get the priorities and I know how, me personally in my role as the social media manager in my role as the ops person, in my role as the customer service person, in my role as the executive assistant, I see exactly how I fit into the picture.
But those two things alone, they’re not gonna get people to be working on doubling that revenue unless you do part three of the trifecta. And I gotta tell you, this is where most jobs I’ve ever been in get it completely wrong. Most team members, most people I’ve ever interacted with, like e everywhere, everywhere. This is a missing step. And this is going to be the biggest, most transformational thing, is to connect rewards and compensation back up to those priorities.
Because a lot of times we reward people on just doing the job description, on just the basics, just the tasks. And we forget that we’ve actually asked them to take a more holistic responsibility. If we want them responsible for helping to grow the business, we gotta reward and compensate them based on revenue targets on these, you know, other metric things, like we said, memberships or growth or whatever it is. And so setting really clear targets based on what the priorities were.
This is going to show someone that, hey, when I move the needle on this priority, I am rewarded for it. I don’t just get paid whatever or get a raise, whatever, because I showed up to work today. Okay. I get more when I do more, and this is just gonna be tr game changing. I’m telling you, for any kind of situation where you’re feeling like people kind of come in, they do the bare minimum, they leave, they’re like asking when the raise is.
This changes that whole conversation because you go, oh, Here’s the priorities, here’s expectations, and this is how you’re rewarded for that. Now sometimes, you know, you don’t need everybody focusing on like, kind of pedal to the metal on all these different things, but when you want people to go above and beyond, you wanna make a really clear case for, okay, you know, here’s some goals that we have. Here’s some bonus opportunities. Potentially, when you help grow the business by this amount, I’m gonna be giving out, you know, annual bonuses based on these different metrics.
So this dot connecting, this is gonna be a lever that you have to pull when you really want to help encourage people to go above and beyond. Let me give you an example to bring this to life. So Lisa, one of my clients, she runs in Med Spa and she feels like the only person that’s really staying up at night, figuring out how to grow this business, how to grow the memberships. And we talked about really how to connect the dots across these three things.
And so we said, okay. One of the biggest, biggest priorities for the year is to grow the amount of annual memberships. That was the biggest priority. And just saying that alone, you know, there was too many jobs that felt disconnected from that. Like, for example, the medical assistant who’s cleaning off the machines, okay. Or the person that’s ordering the supplies. So we said, okay, we gotta connect the dots between, you know, how to grow these memberships and these individual roles that maybe feel disconnected.
We said, okay, well, for the medical technician that’s cleaning the machines, growing memberships, looks like every single time I walk into a room it is immaculate and I know this place is somewhere that I want to be. For the nurses, it meant calling clients after visits and checking in, seeing how they’re going. It meant for the folks ordering the supplies. They’re looking and researching like, what are better versions of these supplies? How do we make sure that we’re never out without anything?
How do we get things automated? Okay. There were specific expectations and responsibilities we could assign to people that really laddered up to this goal of improving the membership rate, even if it felt disconnected before. Now everybody could see their role in growing the memberships. So that’s how we connected. Priorities. Expectations. And then when it came to rewards, we said, okay. So we want everybody to be growing the memberships. Now we gotta give them specific goals and targets.
So every six months we’re gonna have a drive for memberships and everybody has an opportunity to participate. So this meant people could launch their own social media campaigns, do referral drives, be showing up at events, all marketing the business to try to get that bonus. And even if their job felt slightly disconnected from that membership student before, now they had a real opportunity to dive in and be a part of hitting that priority. And this is just one example of how you can bring together priorities, expectations, and rewards, and give your team members really specific ways that they can grow, they can earn more money, and how they see themselves within the bigger picture.
Because let’s be honest, all of us just wanna be seen. All of us just wanna know that we matter. Okay? It’s not a great feeling just to show up and, and punch the clock and collect a paycheck. So when we start to believe that’s all our employees want, I think it can create an artificial divide between us and them that doesn’t have to be there. And when you give your team members really clear expectations, when you show them I believe in you, like I wanna give you a chance to earn more money, I wanna give you a chance to step up and be a leader.
They show up. They will show up so much more than you might have thought when you give them the opportunity. So I encourage you to think about it. How can you connect the dots across these three things? Or gimme a call because this is my favorite thing when we can solve this. The connection between priorities, expectations, reward. When we get this really, really clear on paper. And we show your team how they can continue to grow, no matter what role they’re in, how they have a critical role in building this business.
That’s where all this comes together. That’s where you get outta the weeds as a business owner. That’s where people start to really step up and it transforms their business. So this is really just one example of what we can create through putting together your ops playbook. It’s a four hour meeting where we dive into where we are today and where you wanna go across six dimensions, including priorities, expectations, rewards, also onboarding, decision making, work tracking. And then behind the scenes, I create your ops playbook ready to implement.
And then I hold your hand through the whole implementation because the messaging is so important, reminding your team members that this is for them. This is a tool for them to be successful. Sharing examples like the one I just talked about, Hey, this is what we mean when we say priorities. Expectations and rewards are one thing, okay? And that’s really where the magic comes together. When your team sees, wow, it’s so much easier to get work done in this company.
Now I’m so much clearer and I have a future here. So that’s what I want to help you create with your team, with the ops playbook. And I am so excited for you to try out what we talked about today, make that connection between priorities, expectations, and reward. Send me an email, let me know how it goes. And if you’re ready to get rolling with the Ops playbook, I have two more slots this month. Send me a text to 4 1 5 2 3 4 5 7 1 6.Text the word playbook and let’s do this.
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. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why do my employees seem like they only care about collecting a paycheck and not growing the business?
The problem usually isn't the people, it's a missing system. When team members don't have clear priorities, specific expectations tied to those priorities, and compensation connected to business results, they default to the job description and do the bare minimum. It's not that they don't care. They just haven't been given a clear picture of how their role connects to the bigger goal, or any real reason to go beyond what's on paper. Fix the system and most people will show up very differently.
How do I get every employee invested in a business goal when their job seems unrelated to it?
Every role can connect to an overarching priority if you look closely enough. For example, if your goal is growing memberships, the person cleaning rooms is contributing by keeping the space immaculate so clients want to come back. The person ordering supplies is contributing by making sure nothing runs out and researching better options. The key is sitting down and identifying the specific tasks for each role that ladder up to the priority, so every team member can see exactly how they fit into the bigger picture.
What is the trifecta for getting a team aligned and motivated to hit business goals?
The trifecta is priorities, expectations, and rewards. First, set clear and specific priorities for the business, not vague vision statements. Second, define crystal clear expectations for every role that tie directly back to those priorities. Third, connect compensation and rewards to hitting those priorities. Most founders get the first two partly right but skip the third, which means team members have no direct incentive to go above and beyond. All three pieces together are what shift people from punching the clock to genuinely caring about results.
How should I structure bonuses or rewards so my team is motivated to hit revenue or growth targets?
Set specific, measurable targets tied to your business priorities and create bonus opportunities that anyone on the team can earn by contributing to those targets. For example, if your priority is growing memberships, run a membership drive every six months where team members can participate through referral campaigns, social media, or showing up at events. When people can see that moving the needle on a real priority puts more money in their pocket, it changes the whole conversation from 'when do I get a raise' to 'how do I help us get there.'
How often should I change business priorities without losing my team's focus?
Changing priorities too often, every month or every quarter, creates confusion and makes it hard for people to understand what they're actually working toward. When a priority does need to shift, keep it grounded in the same overarching theme. For example, if your goal is doubling revenue and one of your three strategies isn't working, swap that strategy while keeping the revenue goal intact. That kind of adjustment is manageable. Scrapping the core goal entirely and starting over repeatedly is what causes the team to disengage and stop trusting the direction.