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
“…focusing on the how allows you as the founder, as the visionary to focus on the what. Figuring out the how. Making it easier for work to get done.”
“This is what allows you to scale. This is what allows you to move faster. This is the key to doing more with less.”
“…work tracking’s not about not trusting people. It’s so that we can really trust them to be creative and free with their time.”
Episode highlights
Why founders get stuck on the what and forget the how
As a founder or entrepreneur, your eye is naturally on the vision. You know where you are going. What gets left behind is the how: how work gets done, how decisions get made, how your team knows if they are moving in the right direction. Lia makes the case that building clarity around the how is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is the actual mechanism that lets you scale faster, keep people engaged, and stay in your zone of genius instead of answering every question yourself.
Focus area 1: Onboarding
Lia opens with a personal story. She once took a job that required her to move 800 miles from her husband, walked in on day one full of excitement, and then sat alone at her desk until 4:45 with no one checking in. By the time she drove home, she was already questioning the decision. That is what a bad onboarding does. It does not have to be elaborate. It has to be intentional. Show up. Have a buddy ready. Put a document together with links to dive into. Make the new person feel like you wanted them there, because on day one they are already deciding whether they have a future at your company.
Focus area 2: Priorities and how they are communicated
Knowing the priorities in your own head is not the same as your team knowing them. When two things compete for attention, the founder almost always knows which one wins. The team often does not. Lia recommends communicating priorities at the year, quarter, month, and even week level, and writing down how trade-offs get weighed. Until you have over-communicated, you cannot assume everyone is on the same page.
Focus area 3: Expectation setting
People cannot read minds, and team members will default to whatever their last manager expected of them. Lia frames expectation setting as answering a few key questions: How do you want information to flow? How often do you want updates? What does done look like? What does good enough look like? Sharing your style as a manager up front means your team can actually show up the way you need them to.
Focus area 4: Work tracking (and why it is not about surveillance)
Work tracking is the focus area most likely to make people uncomfortable, but Lia reframes it completely. She describes getting a design team onto an engineering work-tracking system by explaining what was in it for them: visibility with leadership, ammunition for getting more resources, proof of their output. Once people understood the benefit, resistance dropped. The real shift is this: tracking work is not about distrust. It is how you actually free your team to be creative and how you demonstrate that you trust them.
Focus area 5: Decision-making and stopping the bottleneck
If every decision runs through the founder, the company cannot scale. Lia’s recommendation is straightforward: write down which decisions you must make and which ones you can let go of. If you genuinely cannot let go of something yet, that is a signal you need to develop your bench, train someone up, or hire. Being the bottleneck for every decision is a choice, and it is one that caps your growth.
Focus area 6: Performance management for small teams
Small business owners often skip formal performance management because the team is small and conversations happen naturally. But Lia shares a story about a business owner whose employee kept asking for raises and promotions seemingly at random. The owner had never explained when reviews happen, how raises work, or how profit sharing is structured. Without that clarity, team members fill the gap with anxiety and eventually start looking elsewhere. Having one clear conversation about how performance, pay, and promotions work removes that uncertainty and protects retention.
Putting it all together as your ops playbook
These six areas (onboarding, priorities, expectation setting, work tracking, decisions, and performance management) are the foundation of what Lia calls The Ops Playbook. Document them, share them at onboarding, and revisit them as you scale. The result is a team that can move without waiting for you, and a founder who can finally focus on the vision.
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)
Focusing on the how allows you, as the founder, as the visionary to focus on the what. Figuring out the how. Making it easier for work to get done, making it clearer for how to get work done. This is what allows you to scale. This is what allows you to move faster. This is the key to doing North Less. 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.
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. As a team leader or business owner, you’re no stranger to wrestling with some of the toughest situations that come up as a manager.
But sometimes you need a little bit more support, and you don’t have the time to spend researching on the internet or taking a bunch of canned trainings. That is why I am so excited to share the Managing Made Simple Hub, your one stop shop to everything you need to be a great manager. The Hub is an interactive community offering a monthly live Q& A, ask me anything call, where you can bring up anything that’s top of mind, along with curated resources and tools, monthly challenges, exclusive discounts on my services, and conversations with experts.
Best thing is there’s no longterm commitment and you can hop in and out anytime. Sign up today at liagarvin.com/hub and I cannot wait to see you in our next live Q&A session. Welcome back to the show. I’m so excited about today’s episode because it is literally a masterclass in how to do more with less, how to increase engagement, productivity, and profit during lean times, small business owners, founders, entrepreneurs. This one is for you because I know you wanna keep growing.
You wanna keep scaling even when times are tight, even if you can’t hire, and the secret to doing that is making it easier to get things done on your team and in your. Let’s set the stage. You are ready. You are bought in. Maybe you have a small team and you’re feeling like you’re on fire, but as you hire a few more people, that ease and flow used to feel well, it’s not quite there anymore. Or you’re still involved in all the decisions, which you kind like, let’s be honest.
But you also kind of thought you wouldn’t have to be, as you grew your team or you’re not totally sure what everyone’s working on and how people are spending their time and certainly aren’t sure if we’re moving at the pace we could. And maybe you’ve spent so much time on hiring, you have some great people. But with all the change and uncertainty going on, you’re worried you might lose people and how that might slow you down.
But if any of this sounds familiar, then this is the conversation for you because this is what I have been hearing from so many of the small business owners and entrepreneurs and founders that I’ve been working with over the past several months. And I’ll tell you, these are the kind of things that I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been growing my business and thinking about hiring up and scaling. What if this and what if that? And how do I know when you’re an entrepreneur or a founder or vision?
Your eye is on the what. You’ve got that vision, you’ve got that strategy, and you know what direction you’re going. But what we think about often less is the how. How are we gonna get things done? How are we gonna make sure things are clear to our teams? How do we know if we are going in the right direction? All of that is what I am here to help you with because that’s my jam. And if the word process makes you wanna barf, then you don’t have to worry about it because I eat process for lunch and I’m gonna help demystify it a little bit today and simplify it for you so that you can go back to your team and say, I am gonna make things easier for.
And the way I’m gonna do that is boil down the top things that you need to think about before growing your team into six core focuses. And these six focuses are what make up my ops playbook program or my billion dollar ops playbook for a million dollar businesses, which distills all of the learnings and findings that I had over a decade in the corporate world where my job was literally to build processes to make teams jobs.
Boiling all that down and sharing it back with entrepreneurs and business owners and and founders. Because I thought to myself, why should the corporate world be the only place that has clear processes around how to get things done? And what power would entrepreneurs have if they understood how to scale faster if they had this meat behind the how? So they could focus on the what, and that is what I’m bringing to teams in my Ops Playbook program.
That’s what I wanna talk about today. As you’re listening, take some notes, but then let’s have a conversation because I will support you hands-on and mapping out your own ops playbook so that you have an operating manual for getting things done on your team. And anytime you have a new team member, you hand them that document and they know how to get things done. And again, if you’re sharing it with an existing team, then they know, Hey, this manager of this leader is out for me and my success.
They wanna make it easier for me to be successful on this team. So let’s dive into these core six areas you wanna focus on before scaling or that you wanna fine tune as you continue to scale your business. The first one is onboarding. And to talk about onboarding, I wanna set the stage of one of my onboarding experiences that really showed me the importance of a successful onboarding. Years ago, I got a job where I had to move up the coast, okay?
800 miles away from my husband. He was still in school, so I had to go myself. I rented an apartment, I moved to a new city. I didn’t know. And then I started my first day on this job. I was so excited for the job. This was an opportunity of a lifetime, and I walked in the door and one of the amazing admins helped me find my desk and helped me get my computer set up. But then I waited all day.
Nobody else came to say hi. My manager wasn’t there. I got there around eight o’clock and I think 4:45. I said, well, I guess I better go home. And when I drove home that night, I said, why did I move here? What is this? Is there a future for me? Like what have I. and I felt terrible. And this set the worst tone. I mean, seriously, this set the worst tone for this job. And I’ll tell you, this happens so much that we get to a job, we’re excited and that our manager doesn’t show up for us.
Our team doesn’t show up for us now. We don’t need to build the best onboarding experience in the world, but we need to do better than that. And when I talk about onboard, It’s about thinking. How do you want a new team member to feel when they start working in their company, whether it’s remote, whether it’s in person, how do you want them to feel? Do you want them to feel excited, motivated, like they can hit the ground running like you want them to be there?
Then there’s certain things you need to do to show up for them. Things like being there, you know, being, if it’s remote, being there, able to answer questions. Maybe you have a coffee chat or an intro meeting or lunch. Whatever it is, setting them up with a buddy, someone to answer questions, having a document ready that has some links of things to dive into, to research, whatever, but you gotta do something when someone starts, they’re going to be deciding right away on that day if there was a future for them at that company.
And if you don’t show up for them, then the answer’s probably no. Number two is priorities. When I talk about priorities, I don’t only mean what the priorities are for the team, but how those are communicated. And I think a lot of times when we’re the visionary, when we know so, so clearly, like yes, obviously that would be the priority. When two things come up or they seem like they’re competing for attention, of course we know which one to do.
Our team members don’t always know what to do, and this can create a real disconnect. And I’ve been on countless teams where the priorities kind of seem like one thing and then it sort of shifted, or some competitive need was in a different place and we had to shift. And it was in the manager, in the leader’s mind of how to go and how to move forward. But it wasn’t clear to us until you have over-communicated what are the priorities?
What are the priorities for that year, that quarter, maybe that month, maybe that week, until you have communicated at that granular of a level, you can’t totally be sure that everybody’s on the same page. You wanna write that down? You wanna map that out. You wanna talk? Well, how do you weigh and assess trade offs? All of this stuff kind of encompasses that process around how priorities are set, and that’s gonna help make sure people are on the same page and can make decisions on their own if that comes up.
Number three, expectation setting. We all know, you know, people can’t read our minds, but as a founder’s entrepreneur, we are busy, we are on the go, and we don’t always have the chance to set expect. We don’t expectations. People don’t know what success looks like. They don’t know what we want from them. They don’t know what we need to communicate up the chain. Setting expectations really means how do you want information to flow through your company?
How do you wanna be kept informed? What does success look like? What does done look like? What does good enough look like? All of these things are important to share with your team because it’s different for everyone. And I think a big part of this is communicating what is your style as a manager so that people can show up and meet you around those expectations. Hey, I like to be hands-on. I wanna be updated at this interval, or, you know, I wanna let you run with it, and you just tell.
Done. Those expectations are completely different and our team members are probably gonna bring in whatever they had before from their manager. So we wanna be really clear on what we expect as a manager so that our team members can show up for us in that way. Number four is work tracking. Now work tracking is probably the biggest one that makes people wanna bar if, when I talk about process because. People feel like, oh, if I’m tracking my work, I’m being monitored, or I feel like a cog in a machine, or, you know, I just wanna use the system I use.
It’s often a post-its, or you know, a list on a notepad or whatever. This is not a tracking system that allows you to have insight into how time’s being spent and when you’re talking about communicating a process for work tracking. I will tell you, because I have been there so many times, this is really foundational in the work that I did in program management, we have to explain. What is the why behind it? What is in it for the people using the system?
And I remember one time I was getting a design team onboarded onto a work tracking system that the engineering team was using. This wasn’t a tech team. And getting designers to use an engineering tracking system is a pretty big lift. I’m just gonna tell you that if you’re not familiar. Now this is people who, when they see the user interface of a engineering tracking system, that makes them wanna barf because it’s often function over user experience.
So like literally entering the tasks and is, is a whole other beast. And how I got people to use the system was to explain to them why it benefits them. That, hey, when you enter your work in, this helps me get your work seen in front of leadership. This helps make sure I can get more resources if we’re short-staffed. This makes sure that you are getting visibility for your work. All of these things were reasons that benefited them, so they were incentivized to use this tracking system.
This went from being the bane of my existence to something that I love to onboard teams on. Because tracking our work and having insight into how our time is being spent, this is actually liberating. It allows us to really free ourselves up from all the angst of, how long does this take? Can I get it done? Can I do more? and, and it allows us to really demonstrate that we trust our team members. So the shift really here becomes work tracking’s not about not trusting people.
It’s so that we can really trust them to be creative and free with their time. Number five, making decisions as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, if you are involved in every single decision, well, you’re not able to scale like plain and simple and a lot of. When all the ideas in our heads, then we have to make the decisions. And as the person at the helm of the ship, yes, there are a lot of decisions that we should be making, but there’s a lot of decisions that we don’t have to be making.
And this step in the process mapping is about writing down and thinking through what decisions do you absolutely have to make. and which ones can you let go of? This might take a little bit of mindset work to to remember that you could let go of a lot more than you maybe realized. And if you can’t yet, this is a reminder that you need to build up that bench. You need to build up your leaders so that you can offload things.
Maybe it means you have to hire someone else, or you have to be training someone more, or coaching someone more, but making sure that you. Only the bottleneck for all decisions that is going to help you move faster. Last but not least, performance management. And if you’re thinking, well, performance management, I don’t need a performance reveal tool. I only have four employees. This is about all of the things that come together when we’re talking about career and performance.
This is where pay comes into play. When do I get a raise? When do I get a bonus? This is where we know what’s my future. Can I have a different title? How do I know that I’m even doing a good. Performance management, I think is one of those that we forget about as entrepreneurs or small business owners because we have a small team, because we talk to our team members a lot. We already feel like we’ve told them the process there, but oftentimes we haven’t.
This came up recently when I was talking to a business owner who shared one of her employees. We’re always asking, Hey, You know, I did this project, can I get a promotion? I, I finished this thing, can I get a raise? And she was asking her this question all the time and she said like, what am I supposed to do? Like it’s, yes, no, you’re not gonna get a raise every single week. And I said to her, well, have you had a conversation about, really at the macro, how performance management works?
You know when raises come, when bonuses hit and she realized, no, I hadn’t. So we talked about taking a step back and having conversation with the whole team about, Hey, here’s, when we do performance reviews annually, we’re gonna have a conversation about how you’re doing. Promotions will be talked about in that conversation. Any adjustments we need to make, here’s when we do raises, here’s how we do profit sharing, so that people didn’t have to wonder and be waiting to find out.
I think when your team members are waiting to find out when they’re gonna get more money. Or when they’re gonna get a bonus, or if they might eventually start looking for another job. Because all that uncertainty can make us feel like, well, do I really have a future here? We wanna make sure we’re having that conversation up front and really part of that onboarding process. Number one, the onboarding process probably should include all of these elements.
It’s sharing this playbook that you’ll be mapping out, and then all these elements of, Hey, how do we set expectations? What does success look like? How do we track work? How does performance management work? How are decisions made? How priority set? All of this is the conversation that we wanna have with teams, either at the outset or at regular intervals so that we make sure people are clear on how to get things. . Now. I said it at the beginning of the conversation and I’ll say it again.
Focusing on the how allows you as the founder, as the visionary to focus on the what? Figuring out the how. Making it easier for work to get done. Making it clearer for how to get work done. This is what allows you to scale. This is what allows you to move faster. This is the key to doing more with less. So if you’re thinking, well, I kind of have some of this stuff, or it’s good enough, okay, maybe for a little bit of time, but I will assure you when you are trying to get to that next level, when you’re trying to go from seven figures to eight figures or eight figures to nine figures, or even beyond, this is gonna come up.
These questions are gonna come up and you are going to want to be ready with all of this documented so that you can hand it to someone and say, here, go for it. Hit the ground running. Now you know how to be successful in this company. And that’s what I’m so excited to support you with in my program. Billion Dollar Ops Playbook for Million Dollar Businesses because across six conversations, we will dive into each of these different areas, talking about what really applies authentically and uniquely to your business.
And then behind the scenes, I will document. What are your key processes across these areas? At the end of the program, you will come away with a completed team operations playbook and a strategy for implementing on your team, enabling you to get out of the weeds back into your zone of genius and keep you in a state of flow, efficiency, and profitability. Even during these lean times ready to get started. Email me at [email protected] and let’s chat.
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
How do I scale my small business without hiring more people?
The key is focusing on the how, not just the what. When you document how work gets done, how priorities are set, how decisions get made, and how performance is managed, your existing team can move faster and operate more independently. You stop being the bottleneck for every question and decision. Building an operations playbook across six areas, onboarding, priorities, expectation setting, work tracking, decision making, and performance management, gives your team a clear guide so you can stay in your zone of genius instead of the weeds.
What should I include in onboarding for a new employee at a small business?
At minimum, show up for them on day one. Whether remote or in person, be available, schedule an intro meeting or coffee chat, and assign a buddy they can ask questions. Have a document ready with links or resources to dive into. New team members decide very quickly whether they have a future at your company, and if nobody shows up for them on that first day, the answer they land on is probably no. Onboarding should also cover how priorities are set, how performance management works, and how decisions get made, so people have the full picture from the start.
How do I get my team to actually use a work tracking system without them feeling micromanaged?
Explain what is in it for them. When team members understand that tracking their work helps leadership see their contributions, makes the case for more resources when they are stretched thin, and gives them visibility for their efforts, they have a real reason to use it. Work tracking is not about monitoring people. It is about trusting them with their time and having the data to back them up. Lead with that benefit, and the system stops feeling like surveillance and starts feeling like a tool that works in their favor.
How do I stop my team from constantly asking me for raises or promotions?
The missing piece is usually a clear, communicated performance management process. If your team does not know when reviews happen, when raises are considered, or how promotions are decided, they will keep asking because they have no other way to find out. Take a step back and have a direct conversation with the whole team: here is when we do annual performance reviews, here is how raises and bonuses work, here is how promotions get discussed. Once people have that roadmap, the constant one-off requests tend to stop because the uncertainty that was driving them is gone.
How do I stop being involved in every decision so my business can grow faster?
Start by writing down which decisions actually require you and which ones do not. As a founder, a lot of decisions can and should be made by your team, but if you have never mapped that out, everything defaults back to you. Once you identify what you can let go of, you may need to invest in coaching your leaders or training someone to take on more ownership. Being the bottleneck for every decision is one of the clearest signs that your business cannot scale yet, and building that decision making clarity into your operations is what changes that.