When a team member says they are not motivated, that is your problem to solve, not theirs alone. Lia walks through how to identify intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, move beyond pay, and reconnect your team (and yourself) with a sense of purpose. This episode is especially useful for new managers and small business owners who feel stuck when motivation drops.
This episode is part of the The New Manager Playbook Series (book companion) series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…we often create the resource that we wish was available for ourselves.”
“…when we seem like we’re not confident, we don’t have intention. We’re like flailing. That’s what shows through.”
“…managing is hard. You deal with people and I am here to make managing your team the easiest part of your job.”
“…you don’t have to figure out alone. You don’t have to feel like no one understands how hard it is that no one gets it.”
Episode highlights
Why middle management feels like a pressure cooker
Lia opens by naming the core tension every middle manager knows: you are fielding expectations from your direct reports and demands from your own leadership at the same time. In The New Manager Playbook she describes it as being a diamond in a lump of coal, squeezed from all directions. The result is a creeping sense of “why am I even doing this?”
The real reason most people take the manager role
Most managers did not raise their hand because they love managing. Lia is honest about it: in most large companies, having a team is the implicit requirement for advancement. You manage people because you want the promotion, the growth, the pay increase, not necessarily because leading felt like a natural calling. Knowing that is not a character flaw, it is just the reality of how the path is set up.
What makes managing harder right now
Four generations in the workplace, remote and hybrid teams, misaligned time zones, and media-fueled generational stereotypes all pile on. Lia pushes back on the idea that these differences are insurmountable. Curiosity and actual conversation, getting to know people individually, is still the fastest way through. The complexity is real, but it is workable.
The moment Lia realized winging it was the problem
Lia describes the feeling of hoping a conversation goes well, saying a thing once and waiting to see if it lands. That reactive, one-shot approach is where most managers get stuck. When there is no framework, no intention, no consistent approach, team members notice. They sense the flailing. Some start thinking, “I could do this job better than my manager.” Confidence does not require having all the answers; it requires showing up with a clear approach.
Setting an intention changes everything
The first practical move Lia pulls from The New Manager Playbook is simple: decide how you want to show up as a leader before you walk into the room. Chapter one covers setting that intention. Chapter three covers trust. Skill by skill, you build a tool belt so that even when the pressure is on you have something concrete to reach for. The book is structured exactly that way, foundational pieces first, hard conversations and specific scenarios layered in after.
Why Lia wrote this book
Lia started managing under a leader who offered no support and no model worth following. She had tough conversations that did not go well, then more that did not go much better. Her response was to build the resource she wished existed. Every strategy in The New Manager Playbook came from real questions: from one-on-one coaching clients, from corporate workshop participants, from small business owners. The throughline is the same. Managing is hard, people are complicated, and nobody should have to figure it out alone.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 163: The New Manager Playbook is here: what’s inside and who it’s for. The New Manager Playbook gives overwhelmed managers a practical, action-oriented guide to leading with confidence and ease. Lia built it around the real struggles she heard repeatedly in workshops and coaching: managing former peers, never having enough time, and not knowing where to start. It is useful for first-time managers and experienced leaders alike, especially anyone stepping into a genuinely new situation.
- Ep 156: How people pleasing costs you respect as a manager (and what to do instead). Wanting your team to like you is human, but leaning on it too hard makes hard conversations impossible and quietly erodes your credibility. In The New Manager Playbook, Lia Garvin unpacks the people-pleasing trap and shows how building trust through honest, expectations-driven relationships earns you more genuine respect than being everyone’s friend ever could. This episode is especially useful for new managers who default to being fun and casual and then feel stuck when things need to get serious.
- Ep 154: The secret to building trust with your team as a new manager. Trust is the root cause of most managing problems, from micromanaging to accountability gaps, and building it comes down to consistency and relationship building rather than waiting for people to prove themselves. Lia walks through how trust flows in both directions, why assuming competence is the starting point, and the specific behaviors that make trust grow faster. This episode is essential for new managers stepping into a team for the first time.
- Ep 152: How to motivate your team when they just are not feeling it. When a team member says they are not motivated, that is your problem to solve, not theirs alone. Lia walks through how to identify intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, move beyond pay, and reconnect your team (and yourself) with a sense of purpose. This episode is especially useful for new managers and small business owners who feel stuck when motivation drops.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
0:00
Welcome back to the show and the next edition of Inside the New Manager Playbook. This is your guide to managing with confidence and ease. I am so excited for you to check out this book because it has come together based on so many questions that I got over the years from managers, from people managing managers, from leaders about their managers. And it also came together from my personal experience as a people manager and wrestling with, you know, the ups and downs and the frustrations that come up all the time.
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 Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant for this show am I 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. Most of all, stress doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realize that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be.
Are a new manager learning the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing. Kind of hate it and everything in between. Let’s go. and that’s actually what I wanted to talk about today was, kind of some of the, some of the feelings that we have as a manager, especially a middle manager in the corporate world, that we have to wrestle with, like we’re caught between these two worlds of are the expectations of our own team members, our employees, our folks that we’re overseeing, and then all of the demands and expectations of our managers in the book, I say it’s like we’re, you know, a diamond in a lump of coal being being squeezed from all directions.
That in of itself is very overwhelming. That in of itself can feel like, why am I doing this? Typically, middle managers don’t get paid any more than if you’re an individual contributor. So like, why are you doing it? And I think one of the reasons that we take on the role, you know, I talk about it already and I’ve said in the past, the two reasons people are asked to be managers is past success in a role and tenure in a team.
So that’s why we’re given that opportunity. But I think for us, when we want to be a manager or we seek it out or even agree to it is because we think that it is a path to growth in our company and especially in all the large companies I have worked at and worked with. You do have to be a manager. You know, it’s kind of implicit that you have to have a team in order to rise the ranks.
You have to be overseeing more and more people. So we do it even if we don’t really want to, because we think, well, there’s no other options. So if that’s where you’re at and you’re listening to this, you’re like, well, I’ve got to do it because I do want to get that promotion. I do want to grow on my career. I do want to earn more money, but I’m struggling because it’s harder than I ever thought it would be.
You are absolutely not alone. You’re not alone at all. I think that is where most of us are sitting as managers in the corporate world. We’re thinking, this is really hard and it’s only getting harder, right? We have four generations in the workplace. We have, you know, all with very different ways of looking at things time, money, responsibility to work, relationships with. You know, there’s so much stuff that we have to navigate. And a lot of we also have a lot more in common, generally generationally.
Well, we have a lot more in common. And I think we see the the generalizations in TikTok and in the media and we think like, I don’t I can’t relate to that person or I can’t be managing this person. And we actually haven’t even tried to find that common ground. So I want to say that’s a complexity, but it is definitely something I think we can for sure work through by being curious and having conversations with people, getting to know them.
That’s always how you can break through these kinds of things. But it is complicated where managing over more time zones and distances. Maybe you have a hybrid team or you have a lot of folks working remote and maybe they’re working. You know, your morning is their night and it’s really hard to find meeting times. Another really difficult challenge that we’ve got to wrestle with as managers. And so when we feel like we got to figure all this stuff alone, that’s where I feel like for me, it felt like the walls were closing in, like, okay, I have to just kind of like, hope this meeting goes well or I have one conversation and then see if I said, this thing gets through to them, and next time this will know that that’s where I think we’re actually getting it wrong.
And that’s why I wrote this book, because I wanted to give folks a tool, a starting point for here’s some of the foundational things. Here’s how to have some of these hard conversations. Here’s how to deal with some of these scenarios. Here’s some things to practice and try so that we keep building confidence. And we come in. We come back to the situation better each time when we’re just winging it. The problem we run into is our team members.
They can tell they they’re like this person, I should be the manager. And I got to be honest, a lot of folks that I’ve coached one on one are sharing about that talk about their manager that they’re frustrated with, feel like, why is this person getting paid more than me? I could do their job better than them. Now that’s a subjective for sure, but when we seem like we’re not confident, we don’t have intention. We’re like flailing.
That’s what shows through. So we can be learning. We can be struggling, we can be working through our own stuff, and we can still have a sense of stability, like, hey, I’m learning. I figured this out and I have value here. And here’s my approach to managing this team. So that’s something I talk about in the book that’s actually in the first chapter, right? Is setting an intention or chapter to but setting an intention around how how you’re approaching management, actually thinking about it, saying, this is how I want to show up as a leader and then doing those things right.
This is why we build a relationship with our teams so that trust is established. That’s chapter three with the importance of trust. And so we start to build skill by skill and we start to realize, oh, even though it’s hard, I’m still under this pressure cooker. I still am getting asks from all angles. I actually have some of the skills under my belt that I can do or in my tool belt or whatever. So to deal with this.
So that’s what the book’s about, and it is a book that I wish I had because when I started managing, I had to I had a manager that wasn’t very supportive and I couldn’t really, you know, I didn’t know I wasn’t going to follow his lead. And so I just kind of had some conversations. It didn’t go well. The next time. It wasn’t very good either. And it was it was just like, where is the playbook?
Where the hell is up? My luck, someone give it to me. That’s what you got right here. Okay, so that’s why I put it together. Was, you know, we often create the resource that we wish was available for ourselves. And in my case, it’s also the resource that my clients and my workshops and manager trainings from corporate workshops all the way to small business owners have been asking for. So that’s why I made this for you.
Because you don’t have to figure out alone. You don’t have to feel like no one understands how hard it is that no one gets it. And when you read the stories, you’re gonna be like, oh, she gets it. She’s been there. It’s been hard. So I like to say managing is hard. You deal with people and I am here to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. That is my mission. That is why I wrote the book.
So I cannot wait for you to check it out. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why do middle managers feel squeezed from all sides?
Middle managers are caught between two competing sets of demands: the needs and expectations of the people they oversee, and the demands coming down from their own leaders above them. Lia describes it as being like a diamond in a lump of coal, squeezed from every direction. Add in the pressure of managing across generations, time zones, and hybrid or remote setups, and it can feel like the walls are closing in. The problem is most managers are expected to figure all of this out on their own, with no real playbook to follow.
Why do people become managers even when they find it really hard?
Most people become managers not because they desperately want to lead a team, but because it feels like the only path to growth, promotion, and higher pay, especially in large corporate environments. In many companies it is just assumed that rising through the ranks means overseeing more and more people. So managers often take on the role even when they are not sure they want it, because they see no other option. That gap between why they took the job and how hard the job actually is creates a lot of the frustration and self-doubt that managers carry.
How can a manager still look credible when they are clearly still learning?
The key is projecting stability and intention even while you are still figuring things out. Team members notice when a leader is flailing and has no clear approach, and that is when they lose confidence in the person above them. But you can be learning and struggling internally while still showing up with a clear sense of how you want to lead. Lia recommends starting by setting a genuine intention around your management style, actually naming how you want to show up, and then building foundational skills like trust one step at a time so you have something solid to stand on.
What is the biggest mistake managers make when they are overwhelmed?
The biggest mistake is trying to wing it, hoping a single conversation lands the right way or that things just work themselves out over time. Lia says this approach shows through to your team, who can sense when there is no real confidence or intentional strategy behind your decisions. Instead of winging it, managers need a starting point: a set of foundational tools and approaches for hard conversations, tricky scenarios, and building trust, so they come back to each situation a little stronger than the last time rather than repeating the same uncertain pattern.
How do you manage a team with very different generational expectations?
Lia acknowledges that four generations in the same workplace, each with different views on time, money, responsibility, and work relationships, is genuinely complex. But she points out that the generalizations we see in media and social platforms often stop managers from even trying to find common ground. Her recommendation is to get curious, have real conversations, and actually get to know the individuals on your team. That is almost always how you break through generational tension, because in her experience people have far more in common than the stereotypes suggest.