How to tell if your team members are actually thriving (not just fine)

Let’s just call it, there is a big gap between how we think our team members are doing or we want to acknowledge how they’re doing and how they’re actually feeling. 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. So I wasn’t even going to record an episode today. Okay? I was doing something else. I was doing some research for my new book, which is going to be a playbook for first time managers. And I came across a stat that said 89% of managers report that they think their team members are thriving. And yet only 24% of employees report that they’re thriving. I saw this stat. There’s a 65% difference between how managers think folks are doing and how they’re actually doing.

And I got out my microphone and I started talking as I am right now. I mean, holy shit, how are we so out of touch? Like come on, what are we doing? And I will acknowledge that maybe this stat, people are inflating, right? Like saying, yeah, I think everything’s fine because if they say, well, I don’t really think everything’s fine, then it means you have to do something about it. So maybe it’s not really 89%, right?

What we really think, but let’s just call it, there is a big gap between how we think our team members are doing, or we want to acknowledge how they’re doing and how they’re actually feeling. Now, where did this stat come from? This was shared by the, I think it’s the society for human resource management. Yes. So it’s the SHRM organization. This consists of like hundreds of thousands of HR professionals. They do huge studies and different reports all the time.

So it’s a credible source. I will share that and I will include the link in the show notes. Now, how are we so freaking out of touch? This is what I want to talk about today because when we think things are fine and our team members don’t, let’s just call it. First thing on the list is people are looking for new jobs and we’ve talked about it already. There’s nothing more expensive than turnover. The cost of having a gap where someone is not performing a task, right?

So there’s a productivity loss. If that person was performing whatever that task is, that’s not happening. So if they were doing sales, that’s less sales. If they were writing code, that’s less code, right? Whatever that is, is a cost when you don’t have that person. The cost of recruiting, of interviewing, of onboarding, of training for you, your team members, everyone added up together is so freaking expensive. That is the most important, the most expensive cost we can incur as a business owner, as a corporate leader.

It doesn’t matter. It is the most expensive from a time, money, and productivity standpoint. So that’s the first problem. When our team members are not feeling good and they look around, they say like, this person thinks everything’s fine. Like, whoa, wake up. And we don’t do anything about it. That person is likely already looking for a job. And while they’re looking for another job, because maybe they haven’t found one because there’s not open roles in their space, or they’re getting paid pretty well, and they’re not really quite sure if they’re ready to make a move, or they have a lot going on personally and they don’t have the energy to invest in a job search.

If someone’s feeling burned out and they, then their productivity is likely to be lower. Some of us, when we’re feeling bad, we focus all our energy in work. And that’s just how we are. It’s not everybody. It’s not most of us. Okay. Most of us, when we’re feeling burned out, we’re feeling depleted. And when we’re like, gosh, I am not doing well. That starts to impact our job performance. Like, that’s one of the first places we can tell that our team members are not doing well.

So how is it that we are so out of touch with our team members not feeling well and feeling like, I’m not thriving. I’m not doing well. I’m feeling burned out. And leadership having no idea, but I want us to just think about for a moment, close your eyes. If you’re driving, keep those eyes open. Just look off into the distance and think to yourself, like, do I really feel with confidence? I have a strong pulse on how my team members are doing and how would we have a strong pulse on that?

We’ve talked to them within the last few days or week. We’ve had a conversation that is a little bit more in-depth, a little bit more vulnerable, a little more open than just asking about the status of projects. We’ve just had a conversation that I want us to think to ourselves, have I listened on a deeper level? Have I read between the lines or noticed any shift in their tone and their enthusiasm about something and the way they’re talking about something?

Have I noticed any dip in productivity? Just start to think about how can I tune into this so that I know more clearly if there’s a signal up. So this is the first question. Just to think about like, have I checked in? Am I in tune with this? If yes, then assess like on a scale from one to five, is this person thriving or is this person need a little bit more love? And then we can think about what to do with that.

Is it a conversation? Is it talking about load balancing? Is it getting them some support? Whatever it looks like. Okay. And remember, if we don’t know, if our answer is like, okay, I really don’t know. Like I haven’t had time. Totally understandable. There’s a lot going on. It’s understandable. If you haven’t had time, now is the time to check in, but you don’t want to come on like all like bull in a Chinese shop, like, Hey, we want to just have a conversation and ease into it so that someone feels comfortable sharing and more open.

Right? So this is an opportunity to have a check in, just a pulse check. It can be very helpful to share how you’re doing, set the floor of vulnerability. You could say, Hey, there’s been a lot going on. I know my kid just started kindergarten and that’s been a really big adjustment. It’s kind of had my mind off of work for a few days with the adjusted schedule. How are you doing? What’s going on in your world?

Just opening the door to have a real conversation that sometimes people will respond to that and, and, and share a little bit more, not always, but that’s a great opportunity to try to do that. 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. Now when we start to get a sense that our team members aren’t doing well, this is where I got to tell you, we, we want to lean in.

It can be very tempting to not have the conversation because them not doing very well is going to lead to you doing more work. I’m not going to lie. Like that’s not always what we want to hear. We got a lot of stuff to do in our day. We have a full plate. We got multiple team members. We have our own job, our own clients or stakeholders, our own boss, whatever it looks like. So I know this can be like, don’t tell me I got to stop and fix another problem, please.

But the more we know, the more challenges we can prevent from happening. And I got to say that this is an investment in time now so that you don’t lose good team members so that this doesn’t sort of poison the well. If someone’s unhappy and kind of grumbling about it, that can actually create more discontent across more employees. So you could actually end up losing multiple employees. Productivity goes down. Someone’s just dragging their feet or they start having a lot of absences or different things like their productivity, their quality of their work goes down.

Like there’s a lot of things that start to happen when someone isn’t feeling good and, and when they’re working with us. And so we want to figure out by asking someone questions on are there things that you can support them with and, and, and help them work through, or are they things that aren’t really, you know, related to the job that really are outside of that. And I did an episode on boundaries when it came to kind of like not taking in and believing everything’s something you have to solve and, and this still applies here.

So as you’re talking to your team member and you’re thinking, you know, you’re asking them how they’re doing, if they start talking about a lot of personal stuff, that’s really out of the zone that you can support, um, then hearing them holding space saying, Hey, let me know, you know, do you need time or whatever to put them, but not getting too, you know, crossing too far of a boundary that you’re more than you’re comfortable with on getting involved in the personal side.

I want to talk more about the work side because there are certain things we can do when our team members are saying like, Hey, I’m overwhelmed, I’m frustrated, I’m not happy in this role. And that is asking more questions and not just jumping into the problem solving mode. So once we’ve gotten on a pulse on our team member, let’s say in this, like there’s a sort of thing they’re not loving and the work related side, we want to ask more questions.

Someone says they’re feeling frustrated. They’re saying they’re overwhelmed. They’re saying they’re, you know, kind of in over their head, whatever it looks like, or they’re just not motivated. That’s another one I hear all the time. I’m just not feeling motivated. We want to ask them, what does that look like for you? What does that mean for you? Because a lot of times we’ll hear something like I’m overwhelmed or I’m not motivated and we try to solve it, how it would help for us.

So if we feel like, okay, overwhelmed for me would be, I need to have less work on my plate or unmotivated for me would mean I need to have more variety in my work day. But we don’t know if that’s what our team member wants, right? We really don’t know that until we ask them. So maybe we say, Hey, you know, what does, what does it mean to feel unmotivated? Like what’s kind of showing up for you?

And they say, yeah, I just, um, I’m always context switching from these different projects. It’s cool to be able to work on cutting edge stuff, but I kind of want to focus on one thing. Now, thank God we asked them that because if we thought it was actually, they wanted to work on more stuff, we would have had the whole solution wrong. We went at it backwards. Same thing with overwhelmed. You know, I mentioned maybe we should take work off their plate if they said to us, okay, so for me, overwhelmed is, um, showing up because I have a new roommate.

I’m trying to figure out, I’m dealing with Craigslist every day. I’m interviewing folks and frankly, like the only thing that is helping me right now is focusing on my job. So I’m actually good with my job, but I’m just feeling overwhelmed personally. What if we took all these projects off their plate? They’d be like, Oh God, now I have all this extra time to focus on my roommate and my Craigslist situation. So we don’t want to jump to conclusions and assume we already know the answer.

So the way we get under the surface, we ask questions. What does that mean to you? How is that showing up? What’s something that you’d like to see? Okay. You are not making promises. Okay. Because I have heard folks say, you know, I’m over or I’m unmotivated. My job, I want to do a different job in this company. It’s like, well, that’s not really like how it works all the time, right? I’m not saying you got to do that, but we want to understand what they mean so that we can start to explore something else.

Now, if it’s a load balancing, we have that conversation. If it’s that they need more time on a project, we have that conversation. We see what we can do. If it’s around motivation, they’re not really loving their job. Maybe because we’ve been having career conversations, we have some insight in their goals or maybe we say, well, let’s take a step back. What are some of your goals? We start to get to know, well, what are some things that I have at my disposal that we could start to do to get them closer to resolving this problem?

We don’t have to resolve it in one conversation. And again, we don’t have to make promises. We don’t have to change it overnight. But one thing I will tell you is that the more people feel heard and seen and cared for the more resilience they have in that sense, that 24% of like, I feel like I’m not doing too good. That is going to start to get higher. People are going to say, or the 24% that say they’re doing good, I should say.

That number is going to go up. People are going to start to say, okay, I feel supported. Not everything’s great, but I’m okay. And by having these conversations, the number of managers that think everything’s fine when it’s not is going to go down. We’re going to close that gap. All of this comes together by having these conversations. And I’m going to tell you, I don’t, I’m not called team whisperer for no reason. It is because we have to translate what is happening between what we think and what our team members think and what we’re saying and what they’re saying.

You’ve got to get under the surface. So this is how you do that. This is how you get some team whisperer love into your, into your team dynamics is by going under the surface, asking questions, not jumping to conclusions, not just doing the thing that you would want in their situation. You got to do the thing that they want in their situation. But again, you don’t have to do the thing they want if they want a different role and that’s not available.

It’s about listening, hearing them out and figuring out, well, what is it that they want? I should say it’s not doing the thing they want. It’s learning what it is so that you can have a conversation about that. If it’s taking on some new responsibilities and those are available and there’s space and time, then yeah. If it’s that they really feel like they’re not a fit, then you can support them into finding something that is a better fit.

It may not even be in this company. So when we see something like a huge gap between perception of managers think everything’s fine and leaders think everything’s fine and team members are like, oh, no, it’s not. That is a moment to start your own DIY team whispering because you’ve got to close that gap. We cannot have there to be such a disconnect because that is going to lead instantly to higher turnover and lower productivity. Because even again, even if folks aren’t leaving, if their productivity dips, that’s going to affect your entire bottom line, hands down.

So we have to get ahead of this. And so if this is something you’re like, ah, I’m seeing it. I know what you mean. I need support. These are the kind of conversations I facilitate with teams all the time because it can really help to have an outside perspective. So if this is somewhere you’re stuck and you’re like, I can sense people are burned out. I don’t know how to get right there. Email me at hello at leahgarvin.com.

I would love to help you get to under the surface because I have seen so many times one conversation, simple shifts. This turns the whole thing around. It’s not hard. It doesn’t take months and months. We can fix this kind of thing literally in a couple conversations because once we know what’s the challenge, we can start resolving it. All right. 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.

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