Practical advice for managing teams

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.

Managing up effectively means framing your team’s needs in terms of what your senior leader actually cares about, not what you care about. Lia’s approach is to translate burnout and morale concerns into concrete risk-and-mitigation language that speaks directly to a leader’s bottom-line priorities. This episode is most useful for managers, team leads, and founders who feel squeezed between their team’s needs and leadership’s demands.

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.

The fastest way to get your team more invested in their work is to visibly invest in them first. Lia walks through a set of proactive moves, from asking for feedback to hosting team rituals, that signal you are building a real culture, not just managing tasks. This episode is especially useful for owners and managers who want to get ahead of burnout and turnover before problems surface.

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.

Most leaders set clear expectations and stop there, but accountability lives in the follow-through, not the ask. Lia’s move is to flip who owns the reporting: instead of handing team members their numbers, require them to present the report and bring a plan. This episode is essential for any owner or manager frustrated that people agree to things and then quietly let them slide.

Most people become managers because of tenure or past job success, not because they wanted the role or had the skills for it. The New Manager Playbook is Lia’s answer to that gap: a tangible, exercise-filled guide that brings down the barriers making management so hard. It is built for first-time managers, business owners figuring out the people side, and seasoned leaders who want a reliable reference to keep growing.

When team members ask about titles, they are almost always signaling one of two things: a need for clarity about their role or a need for recognition of their experience. Lia breaks down both motivators and gives a practical framework for matching titles to seniority, pay, and scope before you make a hire or a change. This episode is especially useful for small business owners and founders who have direct control over what they call their people.

When a team member gets defensive about feedback, the problem is rarely your delivery alone. It is a signal to reset communication norms and make feedback an explicit, agreed-upon part of how your team operates. This episode is most useful for owners and managers who have a casual communication style and now need to introduce more directness without losing trust.

You are micromanaging if you are in every meeting, every decision lands on your desk, or your team is actively asking to take on more. Lia walks through each sign with a concrete fix, including how to shift from problem-solving to coaching and how to set clear delegation expectations upfront. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who want to let go but keep falling back into the weeds.