How to stop waking up at 3am worried about your team (and what to do instead)

That feeling when you wake up at three in the morning and realize you have no idea if that project got done, or if that team member is even coming into work tomorrow, or if the thing that you handed off got to the right person. That feeling that crushes us in the middle of the night, or it hits us when we’re on a flight and we have no Wi-Fi, or just causes us to feel so, so stressed and impose all of that stress on our team.

This feeling is something you can completely prevent. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today on The New Manager Playbook. Welcome to The New Manager Playbook. This is Leah Garvin, where I talk about simple tools and strategies to make managing the easiest part of your job. Because dealing with people is hard enough. Dealing with all of the uncertainty is hard enough. Dealing with your life is hard enough, right? That we don’t need to have just one more thing.

This stress, this feeling like, I don’t have a good sense of where everything’s at, is something that I support people with every single day. All of my clients, whether they are in the corporate world, or they’re running a small business, or they’re a founder, kind of like stuff I struggle with every day as well, is this feeling that there’s more work to be doing, that I don’t know if I have a whole grasp on it, and that my 18 different systems that I have, maybe I haven’t connected the dots across.

How many of us are using the notes on our phone, our emails, our calendars, reminders, and these different systems that we’re using? Now add your five, 10 team members, they’re all using their own systems. We don’t really know, how do I know everything’s moving in the right direction? So that’s what I want to talk about today is, what actually do we have when we just want a bird’s eye view? Because as a leader, it is your responsibility to have a bird’s eye view, right?

Because you need to know at a moment’s notice, what is the overall status of work, and what’s the capacity of people? So how much room do people have to take on more? So I want to share a little story, because this is a free resource that I have available, and I am encouraging you to check it out, right? So this came from the store, I’m going to tell you right now, so you’re not going to want to miss this one.

So I have a client, he came to me and said, he runs a social media agency. And he came to me and he said, you know, I have one team member that’s really, really crushing it. And I feel like she’s always 10 steps ahead. And I have another team member, and I’m wondering like, is she working on the right thing? She says she’s busy, but you know, when I see her tasks in Asana, and she’s got stuff to do, but I feel like I just don’t have a good sense of where things are at.

And he was feeling really uneasy, and he felt like he couldn’t plan week by week. And he didn’t know if he had handed off too much work, or if she was understaffed. They all work remotely. So he didn’t know, he didn’t want to be bugging her all the time and asking her where things were at. And this was something that he was really stuck around. And he came to me and said, like, how do I, you know, I thought that this would be solved by having something like Asana.

A lot of my clients, they use ClickUp. You know, other folks, you know, in corporate, you might use an internal system, right? That the team’s using, or maybe you use, what is it called, Autodesk, I can’t remember. Anyway, you’re using whatever sort of big systems you have. And you have the tasks, but as a manager or the leader, you’re not going to be combing through the tasks every day, just like digging through like the last open status.

That’s not what you need. And that’s not what my client needed. And when I work with managers in big tech or in other corporate companies, like that’s not the helpful thing. And I think sometimes we make a mistake that we think we’ve solved task tracking by having a really elaborate system. It can solve everything and forecast all these things. But you as a leader, you wake up three in the morning, you’re like, what? Where is this project?

I just want someone to tell me that. So this is what I do with my client. So I introduced this tool, Snippets, which you can find at leahgarvin.com slash snippets. And I encourage you to pause this and download this right now because this tool transformed his business overnight. I have used this with all of my clients and my corporate clients love it too, because this is something that applies to any situation. And this is a template where you ask your team members to share what are the top three focus areas for the following week?

What are some of the wins and accomplishments from this week? And where are places that they’re stuck or need support? So this is literally an editable Google Doc and they add this every week and you ask them to update it by Friday end of day. And this level of visibility gives you that bird’s eye view that you’ve been waiting for around. Okay. Do I understand where folks are at, what they’re working on, what do they think the top priorities are for next week?

Right? Because it’s not always the same as you think. And you want to course correct that. It’s not the list of tasks. It’s what’s the big picture. And then you want to know, well, what did they land? What got done? But not only just like, again, the tasks got done, but what were the big wins? We had a really great conversation with a client or this VP was really excited about the plan or we had a great Q1 review, whatever.

You want to see the wins and accomplishments. And then three, you want a place for folks to capture if they’re feeling stuck. Because we all know it. A lot of times we have team members that they don’t want to say anything. They don’t want to bother us. They don’t want to ask too many questions. And there’s quietly muscling through something that they could have just mentioned earlier and everybody would be a lot happier. Right then that issue gets bigger and you didn’t know about it until it was too late.

So this is something that a lot of folks struggle with. And having a place for that in this sheet, right in this template, gives someone an opportunity to be able to share where they’re feeling stuck. Now I shared this with my client. So I shared the snippets template, again, grab it at leahgarva.com slash snippets. You are going to love it. I shared it with him and he was like, Oh my God, this is amazing. I’m going to roll this out.

So I’m going to, I’m going to say to my team member, Hey, like I really need to know what you’re working on. It really helps me be able to plan for my week. It really helps me get ahead of this. And I said, Whoa, but no, that is not how you roll this out. And so I actually, the template is actually not even the most kind of magical important part about this. It is the storytelling you do with it.

And I was just came up with one of my clients working in big tech. A manager said, Hey, you know, I want to have, I want to utilize the snippets. I want to have this report. And it’s really helpful. But my team members are asking me like, why do you want to monitor everything I’m doing? Why do you need to have this? I don’t have time for one more status report. I can’t do this. And I was like, dude, you can’t use the word status report.

Everyone’s going to just like delete your emails when you ask for that. No, no, no, no, no saying status report. And I said, well, how did you position it to them? And he said, well, yeah, I need to have a sense of what you’re working on. That’s what I asked them. And I said, this guy did the exact same challenge that my other client did. He said, I need this. This is for me, boss man. No, no, no, no.

That is not how you get people involved. This is a basic Dale Carnegie stuff, right? We have to position every ask of our team members and I’m talking about every single one of them in what is in it for them. If you’re listening to this, you’re saying, well, like they have to do it because it’s their job. Like, duh. Well, yes. But that’s not what motivates people. We all have to feel like there was some upside for us.

And the truth is there is upside because when I talk to you about those three sections, what is, what’s our focus for next week? What are some of our wins? Where am I stuck? Those are all about the team member. The team member is getting support by populating those three sections. So the story is really an easy one to tell. So this is the biggest piece here is how do you communicate this to your team members?

I literally, you can download the transcript and follow this to a T. I honestly suggest doing this, um, not just in an email, but maybe having it in a meeting or sharing a video or an audio just to kind of communicate the tone here, right? Because it is not one of monitoring. It is not one of distrust. It is not one of trying to micromanage. Here’s what it is. This is a tool for us as a team to better understand what everyone is working on.

We want to first make sure that we all have clear priorities for each week because some of the biggest challenges that show up on teams and the biggest frustrations that team members share is I don’t know what to work on first. I don’t know if I’m working on the right things. I don’t know, you know, what, what has higher importance than something else. So that’s what we capture first. Now the second piece is really, really important, right?

We capture, Hey, um, we want to be able to celebrate you and recognize wins. Not only that, I want to have that track record. So when it’s coming up to promotion time, performance or your time, I can quickly look across and see all of these wins, all of this growth. So that’s really important to have too. And we can recognize each other as a team. And the third section, Hey, we’ve got a lot going on. You need to have a place where you can say, Hey, raise your hand and I need support.

And somewhere that as a manager, I can see every week like, Oh, I got to focus on that and really carve out time for you. And that’s why we have snippets. And so it’s super lightweight, spend five minutes at the end of each Friday, filling it out. We’re going to have it in a rolling document, and this is going to give everyone a log to really keep everyone on the same page. Like why wouldn’t I fill that out?

I want to fill it out right now for myself, right? And maybe if you’re listening and you’re like, shoot, I should fill this out for myself. We should be because that sort of win section, that is a personal hype file. Okay. That allows us to celebrate and acknowledge really great stuff that happened along the way, especially if we’re working on longer time horizons, especially if we’re someone that feels like, well, I can’t celebrate or stop and recognize something until it’s huge.

But then we also kind of feel burned out, like, Oh, nothing’s going well. Well, actually that helps us log that. Getting our own top three priorities for the week, wouldn’t that be nice to kind of understand? And then knowing where am I stuck? Where do I kind of need support? Maybe that helps us delegate better. So literally a tool for yourself as a leader, just as much as for your teams. Now think about if you had that level of insight into what your teams are working on, that altitude, that big picture, how much more freeing it would be, how you could take a freaking vacation without being glued to your phone, how you could eat dinner without looking at your laptop, how you could sleep through the night.

Oh my gosh. Without the 3am like, Oh God, where’s that project? These are the feelings that we have that make it so hard to be a manager. This is why 52% plus managers are burned out. This is why Gen Z’s reporting. I don’t want to be a manager. Like, no, like, yuck. Look, look at what they’re dealing with. We can get through this by using tools like snippets. So that is why I’m like so freaking excited to be launching this today, uh, leogarva.com slash snippets, totally free, grab the template there and on the site where you get the template.

I have a video walking through exactly how to roll it out just like I did here because the rollout is the most important thing. I want to say again, this is not a tool for you. That is not how you communicate to your team. That’s for sure. This is a tool for your whole team. You’re thinking about that as a unit. How do we all perform better? This is that vehicle. And when you start to think about that and you frame things in that language, this is, this is the bigger picture.

This is about how we understand we’re on the same page. This is how we remove duplication of efforts. This is how we do this collectively. It doesn’t seem like a, because I said so sort of thing. We want to drop all that because none of that works. Trying to get people to listen to you because you said so, like try, try, uh, raising a toddler and seeing how that’s going to go. Like anyone that’s a parent’s like, yeah, no, that doesn’t work.

Anyone that’s been a manager doesn’t work. Anyone that has been managed that way knows maybe I fell in line because that was just how it was here. But I didn’t feel bought in. I didn’t feel, you know, ownership of it. And so I want to be really clear. I, there’s, you know, like sometimes I get questions like, well, aren’t we handholding too much? Aren’t we making it like overly supportive of folks or, you know, is this, is this gone too far?

Communicate like using an influencing strategy that really gets someone bought in to communicate what’s in it for them so that they see the value in something that also benefits the bigger team. No, I don’t think that’s coddling. I really don’t. And I think the more we lean in with clarity and context, then it doesn’t actually become subjective. Like, am I being too cuddly versus it’s like, well, this is just the basics of how to, you know, communication skills, how to, how to get things done.

And recognition is another piece of that. I’ve gotten a question, you know, are we, you know, recognizing people all the time? Like, are we just, and I talk about this a lot on the show, it’s not participation awards. This is genuine recognition. When people are cataloging, like, okay, here’s what went well. Here’s what I accomplished. Here’s what I’ve gotten done. They’re starting to take more pride in their work. They’re seeing that that’s actually fueling them to do more great things because that’s, this kind of just part of human motivation.

So this is a tool also to help your teams take ownership of, okay, I’m getting ahead of my priorities. Let’s say your team member says, well, I don’t know what my top three things are for next week. That’s really good to know that Friday than Monday, right? Wouldn’t you rather have a little bit of time to help course correct? Yes. Right. And a huge one, of course, is making sure folks aren’t just sitting on a problem, a place they feel stuck and doing nothing about it saying, well, I didn’t want to bother you.

Like we’ve all been there. And it’s like, of course I don’t want you to bother me if you’re going to mess this thing up or miss the deadline, like, come on. But people are not always proactive, right? And so we have to give them tools to do that. So snippets, you are going to love it. I am so excited about this leahgarvin.com slash snippets. That is S-N-I-P-P-E-T-S snippets, I’ll put it in the show notes as well and download your copy.

Try it on your team. Use the rollout strategy I shared with you and let me know how it goes. I am so excited. Every client, again, that I’ve worked with has, when using the framing or reframed it in this way, if they kind of got a little rocky start, they have seen so much clarity on their team and they have felt this weight lifted off their shoulders. And then everyone is just firing on more cylinders, everyone’s kind of operating in synchronicity and that just turns up productivity like tenfold.

So you are going to love it. Grab the template and please, please let me know how you like it. Talk soon.