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
“When a team member comes to you stuck or frustrated or feels like I don’t know what to do next, the goal isn’t to take that thing fully off their plate. It’s actually to teach them what to do so that they can work through that next time.”
“…you are not saying, oh, just give me the email. I’ll write it for you, right? Because how are they going to learn that?”
“…the more they can share to the point where they’re stuck, what they’ve tried and then open the door for you to give feedback, boom, boom, boom, the easier it’s going to be for you to help them solve whatever problem they’re solving.”
“…you’re taking a meeting that probably could have taken about an hour and you’re making it, you know, 10, 15 minutes tops, maybe even five minutes because you know exactly what to do.”
Episode highlights
Why your team goes silent instead of asking for help
The most common version of this problem sounds like: “I didn’t want to bother you.” A team member gets stuck, tries to muscle through it, and by the time you find out things have gone sideways, the problem is twice as big. Lia frames this not as a motivation issue but as a structure issue. Your team does not have a clear way to come to you efficiently, so they avoid it entirely.
The fix is not just an open-door policy. It also means proactively telling your team the kinds of problems you want to hear about, checking in before you go heads-down, and asking what you can do to show up better for them as a leader.
The three-step Problem Framing Framework
Lia introduces a framework you can share with your team right now, especially heading into busy seasons when you are harder to reach.
Step 1: State exactly where you are stuck. Not a general vent. Not “this always happens.” A specific, bottom-line statement: “I have to respond to a client question and I do not know how to communicate that we are going to miss the deadline without causing a blowup.”
Step 2: Share what you have tried or what you are proposing. This is where accountability stays in the team member’s court. Instead of “help me, I do not know what to do,” they come in with a draft, a proposed approach, or a description of what has not worked. This single step transforms the conversation from a dump to a collaboration.
Step 3: Ask a specific question. “Given where I am stuck and what I have tried, what feedback do you have?” Now you know exactly what the problem is and can give targeted guidance without starting from scratch.
Keeping accountability where it belongs
Lia is clear about what the goal is not: taking the task off the team member’s plate. The goal is to teach them how to solve this class of problem so they can handle it themselves next time. That means you make suggestions, ask clarifying questions, and coach rather than take over. “What else have you tried? What do you think here?” keeps ownership with them.
Even if a meeting runs 20 or 30 minutes, the outcome is fundamentally different from a formless hour-long problem dump. You leave having set expectations, shared context, and given targeted feedback, and the team member leaves with clear next steps and the task still in their hands.
What this looks like in practice
Lia walks through a concrete example: a team member drafting a difficult email to an executive. With the framework in place, they bring you the draft and say where it broke down. You can read it in real time, spot the issue (“the bad news is buried in paragraph three”), give a precise suggestion, and send them off to revise. You follow up with a quick email review instead of a second full meeting. Compare that to the version where the email lands in your inbox already sent, worded in a way that created friction you could have prevented.
Why this saves time over the long run
The compounding benefit is not just the shorter meeting. It is that your team learns the habit of thinking through a problem before bringing it to you, which builds their confidence and autonomy. Over time, some of those conversations never need to happen at all because the team member already knows how to think through the steps. That is the real payoff of building a culture where asking for help is structured, expected, and efficient.
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)
You know those situations where your team members say to you, Oh, I wanted to ask for help, but I didn’t think you had time. Or I wanted to come to you, but you look so busy. And then they don’t come to you. And then with everything they were stuck with, it gets worse. And you’re like, Oh my God, just come to me next time. Well, I wanted to share a really simple strategy for helping your team members frame up a problem so that they can ask you a question faster and you can get them to the results that they need faster.
Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress. Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be.
Are a new manager learning the ropes? Or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. This is something that I would suggest sharing with your team members right now, even if this isn’t a challenge because as things start to get busy, as you head into, you know, end of the year, maybe you’re in planning mode or you’re not available and your team members start kind of running with things on their own, you may find yourself in a situation where someone didn’t come to you because they didn’t want to bother you.
And that in and of itself, I think there’s a couple things that we can do first to mitigate that, right? Setting up office hours, right, where your team member can always come ask you a question. Proactively reaching out to folks and saying, hey, going to be out for a few days and if you need anything. Sharing with your team members the kinds of things that you can help them problem-solve. So always come to me if you feel stuck with dealing with a difficult client or stakeholder or obviously if you’re having a conflict with another colleague and really giving them permission to come to you.
Also asking for feedback is really helpful. Hey, what can I do to show up better for you as a manager? Things like that really open the door to your team members coming to you. But this came up recently because I was working with a client and they said, hey, one of the biggest challenges that we have on our team is people, they get stuck with something and then they don’t want to bother their manager. And so they kind of try to muscle through it and then it takes longer for them to do that and the manager could just help them.
Now the managers are spread really thin. And so they don’t just want to have someone come to them and talking to them for an hour and dumping a problem on them either. So I said, ooh, this is a great opportunity to talk about how to frame a problem. So let me talk about this in three steps. And this is again something I encourage you to share with your team and ask of them. Say, hey, I want to make it really easy for you to come to me.
Can you try framing your problem in this way? Okay, so step number one is coming to you and sharing, okay, here’s where I’m stuck and getting really specific into the point. So saying, hey, here’s where I’m stuck. I have to reply to this challenging question this client asked or, you know, our VP asked this question that I’m not really sure how to answer it in a way. My answer is that we’re not going to get this thing done on time and I know that it could cause some frustration.
So I’m getting stuck on how to respond to this, okay? So they give you exactly where they’re stuck. They don’t come to you dumping on and kind of complaining about, oh my God, like this is always happening, I’m always late, what do I do? They come to you like bottom line, share the place that you’re stuck. So that’s step number one. If someone gets very specific with you, you know exactly what you can help them with.
Step number two is sharing, okay, here is either what I’m proposing or what I’ve tried before. So if they come to you stuck with something that, you know, that’s something that’s come up in the past, maybe they say, well, here’s what I’ve tried already, here’s where this didn’t work, or if it’s something new, right, saying, okay, here’s what I’m proposing the situation. For example, with this email to a stakeholder client or VP or something like that saying, okay, here’s the draft that I’ve started writing and I got stuck because I feel like it’s getting really long and I’m making a lot of excuses or saying, here’s the structure I’m proposing for the email saying, you know, here is what I’ve seen work for communicating with this executive in the past, right, things like that.
So the person is bringing that proactivity to the situation. They’re not just coming in and saying help me. I don’t know what to do. Like, can you take this off my plate? See ya, right? So you are maintaining that accountability in their court. When a team member comes to you stuck or frustrated or feels like I don’t know what to do next, the goal isn’t to take that thing fully off their plate. It’s actually to teach them what to do so that they can work through that next time.
That’s going to save you time and that’s going to save them time. So step two is really important where they share, you know, what they’ve already tried, what they’re proposing, or some sort of proactivity around solving this thing. Do you want some hands-on support for all of the topics I talk about on this show? Like a team expert who has worked within tech giants like Apple and Google as well as small businesses on hand to help you delegate and get out of the weeds, handle tough conversations with team members, plan your hiring strategy, and get your teams to help bring in more revenue?
Then it’s time to sign up for my Team Whisperer Consulting Sprint. For 90 days, you have me in your back pocket to help you navigate any and every issue happening on your team. DM me the word sprint on Instagram or email me at hello at leahgarvin.com and let’s build your unstoppable team. And then last, them asking, okay, with that said, with what I’m, where I’m stuck and what I’ve tried, what feedback do you have? Or what, you know, what are your thoughts here?
What are any considerations that I want to make? And so step three is about bringing you into the conversation now and you’re, you know exactly what the problem is, what they’ve tried, and you can give them a, you know, with pinpoint precision, exactly how you address this thing. And so now you’re not, you’re taking a meeting that probably could have taken about an hour and you’re making it, you know, 10, 15 minutes tops, maybe even five minutes because you know exactly what to do.
Then in all likelihood, if you hear them sharing the things they’ve tried, that’s going to start sparking things like, oh yeah, that really should work. That should be okay. Or you know, I don’t know about this because there’s some other considerations. Now in this step where you give feedback to your team members saying, okay, let’s look at that draft you’ve written on that email for our VP or the client. I like how you’ve started this. Let’s get to the point a little bit faster saying, hey, unfortunately, we’re not going to make this deadline.
I see that challenge coming in third paragraph and they may not even know what we’re talking about. They may not even read at that point. So now you’re bringing in that extra amount of feedback or context. But again, you are not saying, oh, just give me the email. I’ll write it for you, right? Because how are they going to learn that? So this is the time when you can teach, you can coach, you can advise them on really how to solve this challenge while still keeping the accountability in their court.
So you want to make suggestions, ask them more clarifying questions. Okay. Well, what else have you tried? What do you think here? What are some of the considerations we want to factor in so that you’re maintaining that accountability with this person? Now, again, this is still a time saver. Even if these questions and they don’t quite know what to go, even if this, you know, takes, let’s say not 10, 15, 30 minutes to get through, the fact that you are teaching this person how to come to you with a clear ask while having already thought through what to do, where you can give them very, very targeted feedback, that is going to save you time in the end because you haven’t taken this thing on.
You haven’t taken an hour to get to the point of what’s actually going on here. And the best part is your team member takes whatever you talk about this meeting and they can run with it. Maybe you say, okay, here’s my feedback for, you know, how to restructure this email, go write a new draft and send me, I feel like we’re in good shape. Just send me an email when you have it ready to go and I’ll take a quick look at it.
Right? Think about how much easier that is for you now that you’ve talked about the considerations, you’ve had a chance to set expectations, right? You’ve had an opportunity to share some context and you’re still keeping that task in your team member’s court. So this is my problem framing framework that is going to help save you so much time and always keep that door open to your team members coming to you because it’s not that you don’t want them to come to you, but when you’re really busy and you’re spread thin and you have no time, them coming to you and not even knowing where they’re stuck and not even knowing what their problem is, that’s not going to help either of you.
Okay, so the more they can share to the point where they’re stuck, what they’ve tried and then open the door for you to give feedback, boom, boom, boom, the easier it’s going to be for you to help them solve whatever problem they’re solving, stay accountable to having the solution and go about their way. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I get my team to ask for help without dumping the whole problem on me?
Teach your team a simple three-step framework before problems pile up. First, they share exactly where they are stuck, specific and to the point. Second, they tell you what they have already tried or what they are proposing as a solution. Third, they ask for your feedback. This structure means you walk into the conversation knowing the problem, what has been attempted, and what kind of input is actually needed. A conversation that could take an hour gets done in ten to fifteen minutes.
Why do employees avoid asking their manager for help and what can I do about it?
Team members often hold back because they think you are too busy or they do not want to bother you. You can open that door proactively by setting up office hours, reaching out before you go heads-down on a big project, and telling your team the specific kinds of problems you want them to bring to you. Asking them directly what you can do to show up better as their leader also signals that coming to you is welcome, not an imposition.
How do I help a team member who is stuck without just taking the task off their plate?
The goal when someone comes to you stuck is to coach them through the problem, not to solve it for them. Ask them what they have tried, review any draft or proposal they bring, and give targeted feedback on how to move forward. Then send them back to do the next step themselves. This keeps accountability in their court, teaches them how to handle similar situations next time, and saves you from owning a task that was never yours to begin with.
What should a team member say when asking their manager for help so it does not take forever?
Come to your leader with three things ready. One, name exactly where you are stuck, not a general complaint but the specific decision or task that has you blocked. Two, share what you have already tried or outline the approach you are proposing. Three, ask a clear question: what feedback do you have, or what considerations am I missing? Showing up this way respects your leader's time, shows you have already thought it through, and gets you to an answer far faster than an open-ended 'I don't know what to do.'
How do I make it easier for my team to come to me when I am really busy?
The key is giving your team a clear structure for how to ask, so when they do come to you it does not cost you an hour. Share the problem-framing approach: here is where I am stuck, here is what I have tried, here is my question for you. Pair that with proactive signals like office hours or a quick heads-up before a busy stretch. When your team knows how to ask well, asking feels less like a burden on you, so you stay genuinely approachable even when time is tight.