Practical advice for managing teams

The secret to scaling a small team without burning out is shifting your attention from the what to the how, making it easier and clearer for your team to get work done. Lia walks through six core operational focus areas (onboarding, priorities, expectation setting, work tracking, decision-making, and performance management) that together form a team operations playbook. This episode is especially useful for founders, entrepreneurs, and small business owners who are growing their teams and want to stop being the bottleneck.

The Sunday Scaries ease up when you take 10 minutes Sunday night to sort next week’s meetings into three buckets: ones you must attend, ones you can delegate, and ones that never needed to be meetings at all. Lia walks through exactly how to run that audit, including how to set up whoever you delegate to for success. This episode is especially useful for managers who hit Monday already feeling behind.

When a team member disagrees with everything, the move is to ask open-ended “what” questions that shift them from defense to possibility, not to label them difficult. For managing up, set explicit expectations with your leadership chain so you can delegate without slipping into micromanagement. This AMA episode is especially useful for newer leaders navigating pressure from above and resistance from below at the same time.

The key to more effective leadership, stronger feedback conversations, and better team alignment is understanding how each person’s brain processes information, especially under stress. Michelle King, HR executive and leadership coach, walks through the HBDI assessment framework, the four thinking-style quadrants, and the practice of self-mastery that ties it all together. This episode is most useful for leaders who want a concrete tool for building empathy, improving communication across differences, and inspiring discretionary effort from their teams.

When your team is not following through, the root cause is almost never attitude. It is almost always a lack of clear expectations. Lia walks through how to define what success looks like, get buy-in on the why, and diagnose what is actually blocking progress when expectations are set but work still stalls. This episode is essential for anyone who has ever asked “why isn’t my team listening to me?”

Unlucky situations on your team, inheriting a low performer, losing headcount, or watching a star player walk out the door, are not bad luck. They are a perspective, and Lia walks through a concrete reframe for each one: shift from asking “why me” to asking “what’s possible.” This episode is most useful for managers and founders who feel stuck after an unexpected setback.

Empowering your team starts with hiring for potential and transferable skills, then building the systems and clarity that let people bring their own genius to the work. Rebecca Cafiero, founder and CEO of The Pitch Club, shares the frameworks she carried from a Fortune 150 corporate career into entrepreneurship: share the five-year vision, ask people how they want to be managed, and pay for A-players rather than the cheapest option. This episode is especially useful for founders and small business owners building their first real team.

Even experienced managers can quietly disengage their teams by skipping training, refusing to delegate, and failing to build a strong bench of leaders. Lia walks through each mistake with concrete examples and the specific moves that fix them. This episode is most useful for anyone who has been managing for years and senses something on their team is starting to slip.

When reorgs and layoffs hit, the fastest way to keep your team together is to stop over-explaining the business rationale and start answering the one question every person actually has: what does this mean for me? Jenn Liu, former SVP of Product and Senior Director at Google, shares a two-part framework: lead with clarity on the individual level, then shift the team toward a sense of progress and contribution. This episode is essential for any leader navigating uncertainty who is unsure how much to say, when to say it, and how to keep people engaged when the ground is moving.

The broken rung in the corporate ladder is the single greatest factor holding women back, and managers can start repairing it today with three concrete moves. Lia walks through how to give more actionable feedback, proactively create and amplify opportunities, and close pay gaps before anyone has to negotiate. This episode is especially useful for any people leader who wants to move beyond good intentions and into daily habits that actually change outcomes.