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 we can effectively coach our teams, we can scale ourselves as managers.”
Episode highlights
What coaching actually means (and what it is not)
Coaching is not giving people the answers. Lia defines it as being a partner to someone to bring out the best version of themselves. As a coach, you hold space, check in consistently, and offer support without handing over a solution. The goal is to keep ownership of the fix firmly in the team member’s court.
This is also what makes coaching a scaling tool. Every time you solve a problem for someone, that problem belongs to you. Every time you coach them through it, they own the resolution and grow in the process.
The first coaching skill: listening at three levels
Listening is not waiting for your turn to talk. Lia draws on the CoActive coaching model to describe three levels: listening for understanding, listening for connection, and listening to what is not being said. That third level matters most.
If someone says everything is fine but is staring at the floor, that is data. If the energy in a meeting drops the moment a topic comes up, that is data too. Lia’s practical rule: whenever the conversation is tense, complex, or emotionally loaded, move it to video. You cannot read body language over email.
Active listening in practice means closing other tabs, making eye contact, nodding, and asking follow-up questions like “what else is coming up?” instead of jumping in with your own thoughts.
The second coaching skill: curiosity over conclusions
Curiosity is the antidote to assumption. When a team member says they are overwhelmed, overwhelmed to them might mean something completely different than it does to you. Instead of rushing to a solution, ask: “What do you mean by that? How is that showing up for you?”
Lia makes one specific word swap that changes everything: drop “why” and replace it with “what.” “Why did that happen?” lands as judgment and triggers defensiveness. “What do you think happened here?” opens a real conversation. The meaning is similar; the emotional effect is completely different.
A real coaching story: promotion without a recipe
A direct report came to Lia and said: I want a promotion next cycle. I need you to get it for me. Two problems. First, promotions at that company were decided by committee, so no single manager controlled the outcome. Second, a manager advocating is not the same as a manager delivering.
Lia could have handed over a to-do list. Instead she asked: What does getting promoted mean to you? What are you frustrated about at your current level? What would promotion actually give you? Those questions surfaced that the team member really wanted visibility and recognition, not just a title.
Then Lia turned the research back over to them: go talk to people who have already made this jump. Find out what projects they took on, what skills they built, what visibility moves they made. Come back with your own gap analysis.
Why the team member owning the plan matters
When the team member returned with their own assessment, the conversation shifted completely. They identified a strength, flagged a skill gap, and proposed a plan. Lia could respond with targeted feedback rather than handing over a recipe.
The contrast Lia draws is sharp. If she had written the plan herself and it had not worked out, she would have become the one who “didn’t get them the promotion.” By keeping the solution with the team member, accountability stayed where it belonged, the team member grew, and Lia kept her time and credibility intact.
Why coaching takes work off your plate
The instinct to just tell people what to do feels faster in the moment. It is not. Lia puts it plainly: if she had committed to going out, gathering all the information, building the promotion plan, and checking in daily, that is an enormous workload that also leaves the team member feeling like a passenger in their own career.
Coaching is not being hands-off. It is figuring out what will create the most leverage for this specific person and then putting the energy there. The team member who figures something out for themselves and succeeds gets more growth from that experience than from following someone else’s instructions. And the manager gets their time back.
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)
If they don’t do it exactly how we set it, or circumstances are different, or whatever, and they come back to us and say, you said, you give me that promotion, you told me exactly how to do it and it didn’t work for me, it becomes your fault. So you really don’t want to be in that situation as a manager. 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 more, 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 at their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with managing made simple. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today, we are going to talk about a manager super skill coaching. And this is going to be one of the most important skills in your tool belt tools in your toolbox, whatever metaphor you want. Because when we can effectively coach our teams, we can scale ourselves as managers.
So it becomes a double threat that you’re really going to want to lean into and really be practicing. Now I often get a lot of questions when I talk about coaching as a manager, what about the moments when I need to be giving direction or teaching? Now I said coaching is a tool, it’s not the only tool you were using. So today we’re going to talk about coaching. And it’s really, you know, it’s it’s on you to really discern when are the right moments to bring out this tool.
But I will tell you, it is a lot of moments. Okay, I think most of the times, we can really lean into coaching as as our first default sort of sort of mode, and then go from there. So let’s start by defining coaching, I really see coaching as being a partner to someone to bring out the best version of themselves. So this might be in sports and in in some other venue. And in the workplace. I think it’s really about helping really elevate someone and as a coach, you’re an accountability partner, by checking in frequently by being there by the person side by by giving support, but not all the answers, you help create a system where they can grow, and they also can take on the solution on their own.
So that’s what coaching is really about. And this is where it becomes the key to helping you scale as a manager. Because when we are bringing a coaching mindset, we are not saying we are going to solve problems for you. But we are going to be there we’re going to hold space for you, which means really just be present and allowing emotions to be there and offering support listening, and then helping someone work through the challenge that they’re going through.
But also keeping that ownership of the solution in their court, I want to talk about a few of the skills that come into coaching and then share an example. One of the most important skills of coaching is listening. And this means listening with our full attention, listening not just to what someone’s telling us not so that we are repairing response in our minds, but listening to everything. This means you really want to be paying attention to body language.
If someone is saying everything is fine, but they’re looking at the floor, or if someone is kind of looking a little bit uneasy. Or if you just they walk into the room and you feel a real energy dip. This is something that we can observe this is part of listening. And in the CoActive coaching model, this is called three levels of listening. One is listening for understanding and the other was listening for connection. The other is listening to what’s not being said, we always want to be deploying this third level, because we want to make sure we’re not missing something that that someone is trying to tell us but they’re not saying it out loud.
But this can be tough when we’re meeting over the phone or over video conference, or it’s definitely really hard to read through email. And so I’m going to say this is something that you practice. And this is why I think if it is a tense subject, or there’s a lot of confusion around something or you’re having a hard conversation, to move it to video to the extent that you can as many times as you can, because you’re going to be able to read a lot more of that body language that’s listening.
And so when we’re listening, we are demonstrating we are paying attention, we are closing other tabs, we are looking at the person if we’re in a conversation face to face or over video, we’re not like looking at our computer, if there’s pings or other things. If we’re face to face, of course we are turned to that person. These are things that I think we kind of don’t always do and are really important to do is to listen actively when someone is talking to you, nod show eye contact say, Oh yeah, what else are what else is coming up?
Not to just jump in with your own thoughts and answers. This is, you know, part of listening can be around building connection and agreeing and adding follow up questions. But a big part of it is just remaining quiet and hearing what the other person is saying. Now another important skill of coaching is curiosity. And this means again, we’re not jumping to conclusions, we’re not ready to share, okay, here’s how to solve this problem. But we are actually genuinely curious about what the other person is going through and experiencing.
So think of an example when someone comes to you and says I’m overwhelmed. Now overwhelmed to me might mean something completely different than it does to my team member. So I don’t want to assume I hear the word overwhelmed and I go okay, I know what this means I can solve this are curious. Asti skill allows us to say, What do you mean by that? What is overwhelming to you How is overwhelmed showing up so that we understand what it means to them.
And this curiosity is going to help us quiet the assumptions help us stop ourselves from jumping to problem solving, because we’re instead really wanting to learn what is going on with the other person. We deploy curiosity and a number of ways I think a really quick route to it is by asking open ended questions I just mentioned, what do you mean by that? How does that show up for you? What are the some of the things you’ve been thinking about?
Or what something you want to try? This demonstrates that you are eager to learn and hear from the other person, as opposed to problem solving or worst case saying, why is that happening? There was no more judgmental question then why, I mean, literally, on agreement here, why is a great question for, you know, solving complex problems, I think, or for like math, but it’s not a question when you’re coaching. Why did you do that? Why did that happen?
This is judgment. And it brings a sense of defensiveness from the other person, it’s really, really hard to, you know, think of anything besides feeling more down and more stuck when someone says why you can easily shift out of why by saying, you know, why did you do that? Why did that happen to what do you think happened here? Look at how much more less judgmental that is. And so we really want to stop ourselves from, from why questions, why might feel curious, but it actually has a whole tarnish of judgment on it.
So we want to shift to what. Now to bring this home, I want to share an example of when I deployed this tool of coaching to get to get out of a sticky situation talking to a direct report around promotion years ago, I was working in a company where promotions were decided in a committee, and you had to get a lot of peer feedback. So it was really not up to the manager decide that my team member came to me and they said, I want to get a promotion next cycle, I need you to get it for me.
Now, first problem with this was that’s not even how the process worked. So even if I, you know, was like, Yeah, let’s do this, I wouldn’t have had control over that situation at all. So that was one thing. But But worse was, that never should be how it works. A manager doesn’t get someone a promotion, a purchase person is demonstrating readiness, or they’ve already been operating in that next level, and the manager can help advocate for them and communicate that but the manager really doesn’t get you a promotion.
So that was something I think all of us managers listener like yeah, obviously, but but I think for our team members, they don’t always realize that. So again, I explained how the process worked, and how it’s not really about me going getting it for them, but they really need to take ownership of the solution. And so what I did here was I brought this these coaching skills I listened to, you know, what are some of the reasons that you’re wanting this promotion?
What are some of the things that you’re feeling frustrated about this level? What does it mean to you to get promoted so that I could understand first and foremost, was it that they wanted more visibility and recognition? What was the promotion going to, you know, achieve for them, so that if there was any sort of setback, as we talked about how to get there, I could still support them in achieving some of those other goals. So it’s important to ask these questions and demonstrate this curiosity because it helps us support our team members and seeing that there’s many paths to success.
And yes, I was going to help them achieve this promotion that they wanted to, I was fully on board with that. And there was ways to also support them in achieving more visibility being seen as a leader and some of these other qualities that they had, you know, thought that promotion represented. So then I said, Well, let’s talk about what the gaps are. And I think I could give you a list of things to try here, and you go do them.
And it may or may not results in a promotion. And the risk there is it becomes my recipe, and it doesn’t work in the same way for you. And then I’m the one that didn’t get you the promotion, I kind of thought that more than I said that out loud. But that was the reality. \
And that is one of the biggest risks when we are problem solving, or giving our team members like full instruction on how to do something.
Because if they don’t do it exactly how we set it, or circumstances are different or whatever. And they come back to us and say, you said you give me that promotion, you told me exactly how to do it, it didn’t work for me, it becomes your fault. So you really don’t want to be in that situation as a manager. So I said, go talk to a few people that are at our at this next level of hierarchy and learn what did they do to jump from the level you’re at to the next one?
What kinds of projects did they take on? What were some of the different visibility opportunities they did? Or some of the skills that they built? And come back to me and share? What are some of those gaps and some ideas for how to close them. So they came back to me a few days later, and they share it. Okay, here’s what I’m hearing, I think I’m doing really well in this one area. But here’s the place I could, I could actually, you know, build a little bit more skill around.
And we had a really open conversation where they had full accountability to taking on this plan, where it wasn’t a recipe that I had given them. They came to me with the plan. And then I could give feedback and say, Oh, I think one more thing over here. Are we really helpful or yes, okay, that is a great place that you’re really strong and and this place could use a little fine tuning. And we had a conversation that they were accountable for as opposed to me writing I plan on saying, Here you go, good luck.
And I will tell you, the person took all of that feedback they took, you know, they they worked on these gaps, they close these gaps. And in the end, it ended up really working in their favor. So this is the benefit of deploying this coaching skill is, and this is how it takes work off our plate as managers is if I had said, Okay, I’m gonna go get you a promotion, I’m gonna go talk to every single person and figure out what do you need to do and come back together and give you a plan and meet with you every day about it.
This is so much more work on our plates, that actually doesn’t leave our teams feeling empowered. And it’s not about saying, Oh, it’s all up to you I’m hands off, it’s about saying what is going to have the most leverage with his team member was going to make the biggest impact. And that team member taking the plan on themselves, and figuring it out and working on it and feeling really proud of a sense of accomplishment that they learned what they need to do, and they did it.
And it resulted well for them, that had so much more growth for that person than if I just told them plan. And in the end, it resulted in a lot more kind of headaches for me if they had gone in and did what I told them and it didn’t work out. So this again, is why coaching is so important. So this is something I’m going to be talking about quite a bit because coaching is such a key mentors go and I want to share more examples.
I’ll probably bring some experts in to talk about it as well. Because again, coaching is one tool, but it’s probably the one that you’re gonna want to use the most to be honest to be a to be a supportive, empathetic, compassionate leader who has accountability on their team. Because the biggest thing I just said, coaching keeps the solution with your redirect report, and it’s not on you and it helps stop you from problem solving. 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 and where everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you. So please reach out at Lia garvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
What is coaching as a management skill and why does it matter?
Coaching means being a partner to someone to bring out the best version of themselves. As a leader, you are not solving problems for your team member but holding space, listening actively, and helping them work through challenges while keeping ownership of the solution in their court. This matters because it scales you as a leader. When your team members can find their own answers, you spend less time micromanaging and more time on high-leverage work, and your team builds real confidence and accountability along the way.
How do I use coaching to help a team member get promoted without just handing them a plan?
Instead of writing a step-by-step plan for your team member, ask them to go talk to people already operating at the next level and find out what they did to get there. Have your team member come back with their own assessment of their gaps and ideas for closing them. Then you can react, refine, and encourage. This keeps the ownership of the promotion plan with the team member, not you. If the plan fails when you wrote it, it becomes your fault. When they own the plan, they own the outcome and the growth.
What questions should I ask when coaching an employee instead of jumping to advice?
Use open-ended, what-based questions rather than why questions. Ask things like, what do you mean by that, how does that show up for you, what are some things you have been thinking about, or what is something you want to try. Avoid asking why because it carries a tone of judgment and makes people feel defensive. Shifting from why to what opens the conversation and shows genuine curiosity about what the other person is experiencing, rather than signaling that you already have the answer.
What are the three levels of listening I should use when managing my team?
The CoActive coaching model describes three levels of listening. The first is listening for understanding, the second is listening for connection, and the third is listening to what is not being said. That third level is the most important for leaders. Pay attention to body language, energy in the room, and anything the other person seems to be holding back. If the conversation is sensitive or emotional, move it to video so you can read those cues. Close other tabs, make eye contact, nod, and ask follow-up questions instead of preparing your response while they are still talking.
How does coaching save me time as a manager compared to just telling my team what to do?
When you hand a team member a ready-made plan, you take on all the work of creating it and all the blame if it does not work. Coaching flips that. You ask the right questions, the team member researches and drafts their own approach, and you give feedback on what they bring back. This takes far less of your time and produces a much stronger result because the team member is invested in a plan they built. It also protects you from situations where someone says you told me exactly what to do and it did not work.