The real reason you keep repeating yourself is not unclear expectations, it is a lack of accountability. Lia walks through three concrete moves: working out of your task tracking system publicly, following up every single time, and communicating the “why” behind every process so your team actually buys in. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel like nothing sticks no matter how clearly they explain things.
This episode is part of the Accountability & Follow-Through series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…if you’re not tracking work and tasks, like how are you running a business? How do you have any idea what’s going on?”
“…we can’t deliver feedback if we haven’t first planted that flag of an expectation.”
“…we always track two things at least. What is the status of work and what is the overall capacity of our team members?”
Episode highlights
Why we avoid checking in (and why that backfires)
Most owners and leaders who have been micromanaged before overcorrect. They hold back from following up, tell themselves someone will speak up if something goes wrong, and wait until the next scheduled meeting. By then, a deadline has passed or a project has drifted far off course. Lia’s point is direct: the fear of being overbearing should not keep you in the dark. The goal is a middle ground, and that middle ground is built with structure, not personality.
Set clear priorities and goals every week
Without a stated priority list, your team members are quietly deciding what matters on their own. That is not a character flaw; it is what happens when no expectation exists. Lia recommends starting every week by sharing the game plan: here is what we want to accomplish, here is whether it is a heavy week or a light one, here is the big milestone we are all pointed toward.
For service-based businesses like clinics, gyms, or wellness practices, priorities can be conceptual rather than task-based. “We want to help three clients achieve a win this week” is a valid weekly priority. The point is that everyone has a shared baseline. Once that flag is planted, checking in at the end of the week is not surveillance. It is following up on something you both agreed to.
Build a work-tracking system your whole team uses
Lia is emphatic here: if you are not tracking work, you do not actually know what is happening in your business. That is especially true if you run an agency, bill clients by retainer, or have team members with dependencies on each other’s deliverables.
The system does not need to be complicated. A spreadsheet works. Asana, ClickUp, or any comparable tool works. What matters is that two things are always visible: the status of work and each person’s current capacity. Status tells you where things stand. Capacity tells you whether someone can take on more or needs support.
Two conditions make the system work. First, tasks have to be entered and kept current. A project list that was last updated in January is not a tracking system. Second, you have to actually look at it. If you never reference the tool, your team will stop updating it. When you casually mention “everything looks on track in ClickUp this week,” you signal that the system is real and that it matters.
Ask for a Friday summary from contractors and VAs
For virtual assistants, contractors, and anyone not working alongside you daily, Lia adds a third layer: a short written summary at the end of each week. This is not a crisis response. It is an onboarding expectation set from day one. The summary covers what was finished and what the person is prioritizing heading into the next week.
This one move puts the team member in the driver’s seat for communicating their own progress. It removes the need to chase people down. And it creates an automatic record of whether someone is keeping pace with what they committed to. Combine it with the Monday priority kickoff and you have a clear bookend structure: here is the plan, here is what happened.
Always explain what is in it for them
Lia’s consistent point across all three moves: when you roll out any of these systems, explain the benefit to the person doing the updating. “I track your capacity so I know when to bring in help before you hit a wall.” “I track time on work so I know we are pricing our services correctly and paying you the right amount.” “I want to see the Friday summary so I do not have to interrupt you with questions during the week.”
When people understand why the system exists and how it protects them, pushback drops dramatically. The mistake is either over-explaining with apologies or giving zero context at all. Lia’s move is clear and direct: here is how we work, here is how it benefits you, any questions, let’s go.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 216: Why your team isn’t following through (and how to actually fix it). When your team keeps missing deadlines and nothing changes, you don’t have an accountability problem, you have a follow-up problem. Lia breaks down the four-step loop of setting expectations, checking in, addressing misses, and giving feedback so that real ownership replaces passive agreement. This episode is essential for founders, owners, and managers who are tired of having the same conversation every single week.
- Ep 183: How to build a culture of accountability without micromanaging. Accountability is not blame or punishment. It is ownership, and when team members feel like owners they show up proactively, hit deadlines, and stop reopening decisions. Lia walks through a three-part framework covering the ownership mindset shift, clear expectations with psychological safety, and continual learning from missed targets. This episode is essential for any leader watching deadlines slip and conversations repeat with no resolution.
- Ep 151: The most important step of accountability you are probably skipping. Most leaders set clear expectations and stop there, but accountability lives in the follow-through, not the ask. Lia’s move is to flip who owns the reporting: instead of handing team members their numbers, require them to present the report and bring a plan. This episode is essential for any owner or manager frustrated that people agree to things and then quietly let them slide.
- Ep 135: How to stop repeating yourself and start holding your team accountable. The real reason you keep repeating yourself is not unclear expectations, it is a lack of accountability. Lia walks through three concrete moves: working out of your task tracking system publicly, following up every single time, and communicating the “why” behind every process so your team actually buys in. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel like nothing sticks no matter how clearly they explain things.
Want to go deeper?
The Ops Playbook. Systems and SOPs for teams that need to scale without breaking.
Full transcript (click to expand)
I strongly believe if you’re not tracking work and tasks, like how are you running a business? How do you have any idea what’s going on? Especially if you’re running an agency or you’re kind of billing clients hourly or with retainers, all these things, like how do you know you’re charging people the right amount of money if you’re not tracking work? Welcome to the Managing Made Simple 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 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. You know those times when you feel like, ah, I’m not really in touch with what’s going on in a certain project, and you want to check in, but you kind of avoid checking in because you don’t want to come across as overbearing or micromanaging? Well, there’s actually a way we can work around all those fears and make sure you stay informed on what’s going on with projects and work. And that’s what I want to talk about today, okay?
How to check in on a project without being overbearing, without falling in that micromanagement zone, while also being able to do it. Because I think what often we avoid is actually following up, of giving feedback, of checking in because we say, oh, I’m sure someone will bring it up if something’s wrong or if something’s off track. Or, oh, you know, I’ll just wait until our next meeting, and then we realize, like, actually, we really needed to know what was going on with that project way, way sooner.
But we have these fears, and it gets in the way. Now I think, you know, a lot of times we might have been in a situation in our past, in other jobs, where people were constantly breathing down our necks and constantly checking in. And that’s not what we want to do. That’s not the end goal. But today we want to talk about how to find that middle ground. And so the first thing that can really, really help us is setting clear priorities and goals for each week.
Now, without clear priorities and goals for each week, you really run the risk of having your team members kind of deciding that stuff for themselves. Not kind of, definitely deciding that for themselves. And the risk there is that they decide on things that are important that maybe aren’t as important or that they’re running through a plan that maybe you set for the quarter or the month that, well, actually, a couple things have shifted and something is a little bit actually should be focused on as opposed to something else.
And this is a really important thing to do if you’re managing virtual assistants or folks you’re not talking to every day is, hey, here’s the game plan for the week. Are we all on the same page? Here’s what we want to accomplish. And if you are in maybe more service-based business or you’re in a wellness or a clinic or a gym or something like that, then priorities or goals for the week might be more conceptual. These might be, hey, we want to help three clients achieve a win this week.
Hey, we want to make sure to land a few more memberships for our facilities, whatever. So it doesn’t all have to be something getting done. If that’s not the way your business lends itself to this kind of thing, but we want to have some sort of focus so that everyone on your team is like, boom, yes, here’s the baseline. Now these priorities and goals, these are the expectation, okay? And I always say we can’t deliver feedback if we haven’t first planted that flag of an expectation.
So by setting the priorities and goals, you’ve said, hey, this is my expectation of you by the end of the week, and now we have something to check back in on. I think sometimes we feel hesitant to check in on work because we realize, well, I didn’t really say what I wanted to get done. So now how can I tell them I don’t think it’s enough or fast enough when I didn’t even say. So around this, when you set the priorities and the goals, you can be really clear on, does this feel like the right amount of work for a week?
Or hey, it’s a really busy week. I know we’re going to be a little bit kind of really right at that threshold of capacity. I know we’re going to be working a little bit extra, that we’re all on the same page. We’re agreeing to that at the beginning of the week, again, so you don’t get to the end of the week. Like, hey, we had this huge deadline and this huge event or this huge launch, and I took it seriously, but why didn’t my team take it seriously?
So again, when we set these priorities and we set these expectations up front, now we get everyone aligned around goals, priorities. Is it a busy week or not? Are there big milestones? Things like that. Now, the second thing is all about work tracking. And I know I talked about work tracking last week. Again, this is such an important thing. I strongly believe if you’re not tracking work and tasks, like how are you running a business? How do you have any idea what’s going on?
Especially if you’re running an agency or you’re kind of billing clients hourly or with retainers, all these things. Like, how do you know you’re charging people the right amount of money if you’re not tracking work? If you run any other kind of business where there’s dependencies between team members. Okay. I worked in tech for a long time. There were huge dependencies between designers and engineers. And if we weren’t tracking work, we wouldn’t know, well, when is that person going to have that deliverable that they can move forward across the finish line?
I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager. I just don’t know the steps. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too. Even when I had been managing people for a while, because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time. So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet.
Head to LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager. This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it steps to motivate your team and get better results. There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard or write freaking out LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard. So the second thing around checking on work is you got to have someone to check in on it. That’s not asking that person.
Okay. If our system is, well, I check in with Leah when I want to know where the status of our projects are. This is, you create so many problems. You make this Leah person, whoever that is, a single point of failure. If that person doesn’t come to work or quits abruptly, like I talked about last week or get sick or you know, whatever wins the lottery. That’s everyone’s favorite example for why someone doesn’t come back to work.
If that happens and the only way you know what’s going on with work is by asking that person, no, like that’s not running a business. Okay. Let’s be real. So instead you have to have a place, whatever it is, could be a spreadsheet, could be a more robust tracking system, Asana or ClickUp or whatever, where you can look at what the status of things are without asking people. Now what does that require? Well, it requires people to have entered in their tasks and keep it up to date.
So it doesn’t matter if this Leah character entered all our tasks in, in the beginning of Q1 and hasn’t updated it since, you know, it’s like March 15th and she hasn’t updated it since January 2nd. Okay. That doesn’t help anybody. So you got to enter that information and then you have to keep it updated. So as a team, you really want to talk about, well, what’s the frequency of updates that we expect? Is it on a weekly basis?
Is it on a daily basis? Whatever it is. And as I always say, and this is a huge part about when we talk about work tracking in the Ops Playbook program is I suggest we always track two things at least. What is the status of work and what is the overall capacity of our team members? I think that gives us enough to really understand, Hey, who’s working on what, how things are moving through the company and the team, through the workflow and like, can we take on more work?
Okay. Those two things, status and capacity, that’s going to always be the most important things. And again, this is what I can help you figure out in the Ops Playbook program because we will figure out, well, what is the right tool to do that? How do we get people on board to understand that piece? Okay. So now you have a place, it’s a tool, it’s a spreadsheet, whatever it is. And you know that, Hey, every Tuesday and every Thursday folks are updating it.
I can always look there. So just knowing that, well, that’s a way to know what the status of work is without being overbearing because, because you can look passively without asking someone and because you are looking at it and maybe you have a question about something that’s going to create an accountability loop. Okay. If we never look at the task tracking system or we never look at where the work tracking is, then people are going to think, well, you know, why do I have to enter?
It doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t make a difference. So you actually want to continually refer back to it and say, Hey, I noticed this, or it looks like, you know, everything looks great in ClickUp this week. Yeah. It really, really feels like we’re, we’re making a good pace. Even if it’s all positive, you want to kind of plant that seed that, yeah, I am looking at this thing. Okay. Third thing. And again, I think this is really, really helpful if you are working with vendors or virtual assistants or, you know, whoever, or contractors, folks that are not full-time employees, folks that might be working on a number of projects, not just with your team and company is to ask for a summary at the end of each week of what was accomplished.
Okay. And I wouldn’t ask for this summary. Like once you feel like stuff’s going off the rails, I would in your onboarding really early on set the expectation, like, Hey, Monday, we set the priorities for the week, or maybe Friday afternoon, you send an email, whatever it is Sunday, Sunday, whatever works for you. And then on Friday, before you wrap up for the day or before the end of that person’s a week, whatever day that is, you send a summary email of like, Hey, what got finished in maybe like looking ahead at next week, what’s on that person’s mind for the top priorities or top focused areas.
And you know, this alleviates us having to chase things down, us asking, what was the status of that thing? Like, I don’t even know what happened here. Right. It puts that person in the driver’s seat for proactively communicating about what they’re doing and understanding what finished looks like. Okay. So this is really, really helpful to kind of make sure you’re feeling like you’re getting what you needed. Obviously you have your goals in the beginning, you have what happened at the end.
So it’s very, very clear if someone is not keeping up at the pace that they’ve committed to or not delivering on their promises really for what they said they were going to accomplish. So with those three things, you know, that’s how we can track work and really feel like we have a solid handle on projects without being overbearing. And again, this is really for folks that work with virtual assistants or folks that work with a lot of contractors and consultants.
This is a really, really helpful, simple expectation to set goals at the beginning of the week. So here’s where we put that stuff and just share where you’re at by the end of the week. Really, really lightweight so that we feel comfortable with it. And then when we set the expectation of this upfront, I always say this when I talk about setting expectations. We say that upfront, Hey, here’s how we work here. Here’s how we do business.
Here’s how we plan each week. Then when you’re following up and you’re saying, Hey, let’s do those priorities for the week. Hey, what’s the status of works Friday afternoon. When you follow up on that, now it doesn’t feel like micromanaging or pushing or, or again, like, you know, hanging on too tightly because that’s just how we do things and everybody’s totally aligned around it. Okay. So work tracking this one can be, I think the keys here again, simple is better.
Okay. We want to be tracking status and capacity. If there’s other things you need to track, then, you know, really make sure that you’ve simplified and this is something I can help you with. Of course, figure out like what is that right level of detail for folks? What do we want to track? How do we want to track it without making people feel like, you know, they’re being overly monitored or it’s overly complicated to enter in updates, right?
Things like that. And the key there, the secret, and you know, I’ve said it before, is always, always, always articulating what’s in it for them. Okay. We’re tracking our work this way so I don’t have to bug you so I can see it in the system at a moment’s notice. And I feel like, whew, okay, we’re okay. We’re tracking the work in this way. So I know when you’re over capacity and I can bring someone in to help you or I can take some of that on, whatever.
So that we know how long things take so that we know we are pricing the right way with our services. So I know I’m paying you the right amount so that I can manage my own expectations around projects. All of those are the reasons that are in it for that person. And when we say that, we get so much less pushback. I think a lot of times we overly explain or justify or, you know, we’re worried someone’s going to say something so we don’t even really explain like, we’re just doing it this way.
Like, sorry. No. Okay. Here’s how we’re doing this. Here’s how it benefits you. Here’s how it helps us run this business better. Boom, boom, boom. Any questions, any feedback? Let’s go. All right. So this is something that is going to really help you with worries and overwhelm and concerns around, Hey, do I really know where things are at? This is something that business owners share with me all the time that they feel like they just don’t have the right pulse on stuff.
So try these three things. Send me an email or a message if you have any questions, if any of this stuff’s confusing and honestly, getting people bought into a work tracking system is literally my superpower. I’ve done this across many, many large tech companies where people were really not on board with doing it. And I was able to really get people kind of shift that perspective, get people bought in by doing this stuff I’m talking about.
So if this is feeling hard, if it’s stressful, it is very hard and I’m here to help you. So do not hesitate to reach out, schedule an SOS call at leahgarvin.com slash SOS. Or if it feels like, yeah, I think the whole playbook would be the right solution for me where we map out not only work tracking, but some of these things we talked about like expectations and onboarding, well then reach out and we’ll talk about the office playbook.
So I cannot wait to support you. I think you’ve got a great handle on this. Know that you’re not alone and I’ll 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 check in on project status without coming across as a micromanager?
The key is building systems so you never have to ask. Set clear priorities and goals at the start of each week so everyone knows the expectation. Use a shared tracking tool, whether a spreadsheet or something like Asana or ClickUp, where status and capacity are updated regularly. Then ask for a brief summary from your team at the end of each week. When these habits are established upfront as just how you operate, following up on them never feels like micromanaging because everyone agreed to it from the start.
What should I track to know if my team's projects are on track?
At minimum, track two things: the status of each piece of work and the capacity of each team member. Status tells you where things are in the workflow. Capacity tells you whether someone is overwhelmed or has room to take on more. Together, those two data points give you a clear enough picture to make decisions without having to chase people down for updates. Keep it simple. The more complicated the system, the less likely people are to keep it updated.
How do I get my team to actually update a work tracking system without nagging them?
Explain what is in it for them, specifically and clearly. Tell your team the tracking system means you can see capacity and step in with help before someone burns out. It means you can price your services correctly so no one is underpaid or overworked. It means you are not constantly asking for status updates. When people understand the tracking protects them, not just monitors them, you get far less resistance. Also, actually reference the system regularly so your team sees that you look at it and that updating it matters.
How often should my team members send project status updates?
A practical rhythm is goals set at the start of the week and a short summary sent at the end of the week covering what got finished and what is coming up next. This works especially well with virtual assistants, contractors, or anyone not in daily contact with you. It puts the team member in charge of communicating their own progress, so you are not chasing them down. Set this expectation during onboarding so it is simply how your team operates, not something that feels like extra scrutiny.
Why do I feel anxious about not knowing where my projects stand?
Usually the anxiety is not a people problem, it is a missing system problem. If you have not clearly stated weekly priorities, you cannot know whether your team is working on the right things. If there is no shared place to see task status, the only way to know what is happening is to ask someone directly, which creates a single point of failure and feels intrusive. Building a simple tracking habit with clear weekly goals and end-of-week summaries removes the guesswork and the anxiety because you always have a place to look.