Respect from your team is never automatic and cannot be demanded by title alone. Lia lays out two moves that actually earn it: rolling up your sleeves to genuinely understand the work, and operating with integrity by following through on what you say matters. This episode is especially useful for new leaders, founders managing former peers, and anyone whose team has started to tune them out.
This episode is part of the Self-Leadership & Mindset for Leaders series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“What am I avoiding right now? When we ask ourselves that question, we literally unlock every single answer we need.”
“…when we are avoiding hiring and instead trying to fill the gaps between you and your team members or just having responsibilities fall through the cracks, you are slowing yourself down from the growth you could achieve.”
“…the feedback isn’t about how you would receive it. It’s about how they would receive it.”
“When we are just assuming everyone should, should, should, should, should, we’re avoiding taking responsibility for being a leader in the first place.”
“When we realize we’ve been avoiding leading, we can turn that around very quickly.”
Episode highlights
The one question high-performing leaders ask themselves
Lia opens with a blunt observation: the leaders who are crushing it right now all have one habit in common. They stop, even for two minutes, and ask themselves: *what am I avoiding right now?* It stings because it forces you to look inward instead of blaming the team. That single question, she argues, unlocks every answer you actually need.
Avoidance one: making the hire you know you need
When team members are covering responsibilities that do not suit them, when work is falling through the cracks, when you are personally filling every gap, the real issue is almost always a hire you have been putting off. For corporate managers that means building the business case and fighting for headcount. For owners it means creating the revenue to cover new overhead. Both feel scary, especially after a hire that did not work out.
But the math is clear. A powerhouse hire, a senior operator who dials in your systems, a marketing expert who is actually expert, opens the floodgates on revenue potential. Avoiding the hire does not save money. It slows growth and keeps you as the bottleneck.
Avoidance two: the feedback conversation you keep postponing
Feedback avoidance almost always comes down to one thing: not wanting to be uncomfortable. You know the person will get defensive. You do not want to hurt their feelings. You do not want them to quit. Lia names all of it plainly and then reframes it: the discomfort you are protecting yourself from is also protecting your team member from a conversation that could genuinely change their trajectory.
A story from a workshop with engineering managers lands the point. One manager said he preferred blunt, hard-hitting feedback and was frustrated his team did not. Lia’s response: the feedback is not about how *you* would receive it. It is about how *they* would. And if you are worried someone will quit when they hear hard feedback, the real question is what you are currently allowing to continue, and what message that sends to the rest of the team.
Avoidance three: stepping into leadership fundamentals in the first place
The third avoidance is the most common and the most disguised. It sounds like: “I hired good people, they should just know.” Or: “I shouldn’t have to assign every task.” When leaders are waiting for the team to figure it out without clear expectations, regular one-on-ones, feedback loops, or visibility into priorities, they are avoiding leadership itself.
Naming this one is actually good news. Once you see it clearly, the fix is concrete. Set expectations. Run the one-on-ones. Build the systems and SOPs so people know what good looks like and where their career is going. Those are the inputs that drive engagement, motivation, and performance. You do not need a massive overhaul. You need the fundamentals.
The Snippets tool: visibility without micromanaging
For leaders who want to stop spinning over the weekend wondering what is actually happening on the team, Lia recommends the Snippets template. Team members fill it out in under five minutes each Friday: top wins, where they got stuck, and priorities for next week. You get the bird’s-eye view you need, your team feels seen and recognized, and you avoid the overload of asynchronous check-ins that pile up. Grab it at liagarvin.com/snippets.
Face what you are avoiding and 10x your impact overnight
Avoidance keeps leaders circling the same problems. Naming the specific thing you are dodging, the hire, the conversation, the leadership basics, turns a vague sense of being stuck into a concrete next step. Lia’s argument is that clarity alone can 10x your impact, because your team finally has the direction, expectations, and feedback they need to do their best work.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 228: Why ‘I shouldn’t have to deal with this’ is keeping you stuck as a leader. The ‘I shouldn’t have to’ mindset is one of the most common traps leaders fall into, and it quietly poisons every hard conversation before it even starts. Lia’s reframe is simple: shift from ‘I have to’ to ‘I get to,’ and watch how your team responds differently. This episode is especially useful for business owners and founders who never set out to be people leaders but now find themselves managing a team.
- Ep 205: Your team is watching how you react. Here is why it matters.. When leaders visibly vent frustration, teams lose morale and disengage before the work even begins. Lia walks through the self-management moves that keep your team steady, including how to acknowledge a hard situation, celebrate effort, and get ahead of setbacks before they knock everyone off course. Most useful for founders, executives, and team leads who set the emotional tone for their people.
- Ep 166: How the Let Them Theory makes you a better manager overnight. The Let Them Theory, from Mel Robbins’ book of the same name, makes you a better manager by releasing the need to control what your team thinks, wants, or feels motivated by. Lia breaks down three specific manager situations where applying ‘let them, let me’ instantly reduces frustration and builds more trust. This episode is especially useful for leaders who over-invest in team members who aren’t reciprocating or who exhaust themselves trying to fix everyone’s motivation.
- Ep 102: How to earn respect from your team (it cannot be forced). Respect from your team is never automatic and cannot be demanded by title alone. Lia lays out two moves that actually earn it: rolling up your sleeves to genuinely understand the work, and operating with integrity by following through on what you say matters. This episode is especially useful for new leaders, founders managing former peers, and anyone whose team has started to tune them out.
Want to go deeper?
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Full transcript (click to expand)
Lia (00:00): we have a big team or a small team, we’re managing in the corporate world, we’re running our own business, this is a wild time to be a leader right now. This is probably one of the hardest times ever to be leading a team, to be motivating, to be inspiring people. And one of the things when it comes down to feeling overwhelmed and stressed and frustrated.
and depleted and maybe burned out and trying to hold it all together so that your team can hold it together. Sometimes we have a tendency to just run, run, run, go, go, go. Because as a leader, we can’t really stop, right? We can’t afford to slow down. But the more we go forward without kind of facing everything that’s coming up, the more little issues that we create or enable or let fester.
And when I work with the highest performing teams and leaders through my ops playbook program, as a coach, a consultant, a fractional COO, whatever it is, a workshop, the difference between the leaders who are just crushing it and 10Xing it right now, and the ones that are struggling are the ones that are asking themselves this one question. And this question, what we’re gonna talk about in today’s episode is going to transform your life as a leader.
because it’s going to get you to look inward, to not be blaming and saying everything’s about your team and you’re not dealing in like, and it’s all everyone else’s fault. It’s to stop even for two seconds, okay, two minutes and ask yourself the question that’s going to unlock everything. Now, what question is that? What am I avoiding right now? Ooh, hurts a little bit, right? It zings when we say that. What am I avoiding right now?
When we ask ourselves that question, we literally unlock every single answer we need. That’s the kind of question I ask you when you’re working with me one-on-one or as a fractional COO. That’s the kind of question I empower you to be thinking about and I ask you to think about every single day when you’re feeling frustrated because that is going to change the game. I’m Leah Garvin and this is the new Manager Playbook podcast where I’m on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job.
And actually, one exciting thing is starting next week, I am rebranding the show to Real Talk Leading Small Teams. Because one thing we know, we’re not, whether we’ve been managing for five minutes or 15 years, I think the new manager concept can feel like, my job’s bigger right now than simply kind of being that manager. We wanna look in terms of leadership. And this conversation today is really helping us bridge that.
and think about this in a bigger way. So the new framing for the show, Real Talk Leading Small Teams, is really how are we having these hard hitting conversations? Really looking inward, what am I avoiding right now? That’s kind of the type of thing that we’re gonna be talking about. So that you are getting exactly the insights, the information you need to lead your team effectively. So same thing, we’re gonna be talking tools and exercises and stories and case studies, all of that.
But in the new format, I’m also gonna be adding interviews with experts, gonna be doing call-ins. So if you want live coaching on the show, my gosh, I would love to have you on. So send me an email at hello at liagarvon.com if you wanna record the live coaching session for the show. And then also, as always, I’ll be including questions that you have or having them as topics for the show. So I love when you send questions. It is,
First, awesome to hear from you and know what’s resonating on the show and specific questions really help me know I am answering exactly what you’re wanting to hear. So again, send an email to hello at liagarva.com to send any questions. Now, I also want to encourage you to lean into the tools. One of the biggest challenges that leaders are having right now is feeling like I can’t get the information from my team. I don’t wanna create more process. I don’t wanna be micromanaging, but like how the heck do I know what’s going on?
Well, that’s why I made the Snippets tool. This super simple template allows you to see what wins happened throughout the week, where folks were stuck and the top parties for next week. This is the easiest tool to implement. I’m telling you, do not call it a status report. This is really a highlights reel from the week so that your team members can share really what’s working, what’s not. Grab a copy of that at liagarvin.com slash snippets. And I share that because
On the show, I’m going to be giving you tools and strategies and tips, and the more you use them and the more you try them out with your team, and the more you reach out to me and share feedback of how that went, the more these things get easier. So we wanna not just be listening, we wanna be trying these things out. So again, grab that template. It takes your team members less than five minutes to fill it out. I encourage you to ask folks to fill it out every Friday before they leave for the weekend. Fill it out again.
Top three kind of wins for the week, any places they’re stuck and priorities for next week. This gives you that bird’s eye view that you need. So you’re like, okay, folks are working on the right things. I don’t need to spend all weekend spinning. And again, it’s super, well, it’s super easy to fill out, but it allows you to recognize wins, which is motivating and it helps people feel seen and celebrate and recognize. You gotta get that, liagarvin.com slash snippets. Now.
As we’re leading into Real Talk Leading Small Teams, again, that’s gonna be the new show name starting next week. Let’s have some Real Talk right now. What are you avoiding? If it feels like a punch in the gut, it might mean that there’s some big stuff you’re avoiding. But the kinds of things, when we really think about where am I feeling stuck, the kinds of things that we’re typically avoiding are making a really necessary hire, okay?
What am I avoiding right now? I am overloaded. I’m doing everything. Are my team members, people are doing two or three different jobs or they’re doing a job that doesn’t really suit them. They’re kind of covering responsibilities that aren’t right. That symptom right there. We think, what am I avoiding? It’s taking the leap and making a hire. And it’s scary to make another hire. Hey, if you don’t have head count, you’ve got to go in and you’re a corporate manager. You’ve got to go advocate for that and fight for that. And it’s make a whole business case and all this stuff. This can be pretty stressful and intimidating.
If you’re a business owner, you’ve got to actually create revenue and money to cover that overhead. It is scary. But when we are avoiding hiring and instead trying to fill the gaps between you and your team members or just having responsibilities fall through the cracks, you are slowing yourself down from the growth you could achieve. You are shooting yourself in the foot. And that’s why when I said this episode is about actually 10Xing yourself and…
growing your revenue and hitting your goals faster, this one right here is gonna help you get there. Because even if you’re investing in a senior hire and that’s gonna be a significant financial investment, the idea is that that person can really open the floodgates on revenue potential. And so I want you to think about when there’s bottlenecks around bandwidth and getting work done and responsibilities falling through the cracks. And again, the big one really is when you have people that are doing a job that they’re not crushing it in.
A lot of times small business owners will have someone pick up, take on a little marketing, take on a little ops, take on a little bit of this. And those people aren’t experts in that and they’re doing okay. But if you had that powerhouse marketing person or that powerhouse operator that could just kind of get all your systems dialed in, that would accelerate your growth. So the question there, what am I avoiding? Making the hire, taking the leap, figuring out who I wanna hire.
And if I hired someone that wasn’t a fit in the past, figuring out what I learned from that, what didn’t work, these are the things that we’ve got to face head on. And these are the kinds of questions that I help you solve when you work with me, because we have to figure out what is under that. You don’t want to make that hire. That could be all different kinds of reasons. And especially if you’ve had some folks that didn’t work out in the past, that makes you nervous, right? Rightfully so. You don’t want to make the same mistake again. It’s expensive. It’s painful. It’s stressful.
So we figure out how to really make sure, know, what worked, what didn’t there, so that you don’t feel like you can’t make another hire. So that’s all around kind of the bandwidth. What am I avoiding right now when it comes to, know, I’m, folks are working on the wrong things or I’m pulled in the weeds. We might be avoiding making a hire. Another thing that comes up, what am I avoiding right now? Having the hard conversation.
Like feedback is hard. it’s the hardest. Giving feedback to someone you know will be defensive. You know will come with all this, you know, these BS things that they’re saying, well, you did this and this and they’re kind of like, it’s just like, it sucks. Or you just don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or you love your team member and you feel like, ⁓ I don’t want them to feel embarrassed, whatever it is. All of that is I am avoiding being uncomfortable.
See, this is real talk, right? This is we’re doing here. You’re avoiding feeling uncomfortable. And when that is the challenge, now we get over that hurdle by learning how to give feedback, by being empathetic, by actually making time to have a meaningful conversation, by thinking about what is this going on with this other person right now? What might they be experiencing?
I did a workshop a couple years ago for a team of engineering managers and one person asked a question, hey, know, I like when feedback’s really direct and really hard hitting, you know, like it’s annoying my team members don’t want that. And I said to him like, well, you know, too bad. Like the feedback isn’t about how you would receive it. It’s about how they would receive it. And if you’re avoiding because you don’t like someone’s reaction, gotta think, well, this is…
We gotta figure out how to get through to that person because it’s not about how you would respond. It’s about how they would respond. If you’re avoiding because you’re scared someone’s gonna quit, the question is that person a fit? If there’s critical feedback they need and you’re worried they’re gonna quit when they hear it, well, what are you settling for? What are you allowing to continue? What are you showing your other team members is okay? So these kinds of things again, and we worked through this, that…
understanding, gosh, I’m avoiding being uncomfortable. And I’m avoiding, I’m empathetic and I’m avoiding seeing someone else uncomfortable because I don’t want to be not liked. I don’t want the person to leave. I don’t want all these things. We’re avoiding having that hard conversation. It’s uncomfortable and we’re avoiding giving that person an opportunity to actually have a great reaction, have a positive reaction, actually have a tough reaction and then come back around and say, hey, I really needed that. Thank you.
So that’s a huge one too. The third one am I avoiding right now? And there’s infinite number of them. So we could talk about this again on the show is I’m avoiding actually leading my team. So when I talk to leaders and they’re saying, don’t wanna, I shouldn’t have to have these conversations. I shouldn’t have to give the feedback and I shouldn’t have to be assigning the work and people should just know, they should just, you know, they should get it. I hired good people. I want them to be self starters.
when we are just assuming everyone should, should, should, should, should, we’re avoiding taking responsibility for being a leader in the first place. And I’m not saying that to throw shade. I’m saying that that it’s actually really, when you realize that you’re like, okay. Like there’s a little bit of foundations that I can do. I can set some expectations. I can give some feedback. I can make sure we have clear systems and SOPs. So we’re tracking work and folks know what’s going on. I can communicate the priorities better. When we realize that
Oh, I’m actually avoiding the leadership foundations. Well, now it’s actually very straightforward of what we got to do. Have some one-on-ones, make sure folks kind of have a sense of their career paths, right? That’s going to really be driving engagement motivation. When we realize we’ve been avoiding leading, we can turn that around very quickly. And I would say that one, I think, is a big, it can feel big and ambiguous, hazy. It’s like, well, what do mean leading in general? Like, I thought I was doing that.
but we think, okay, what are some of the essentials? And those are the things that I talk about on the show, feedback and delegating and setting quotations and following up and follow through and recognition and all of the tracking work, right? All of these kind of team operations, management essentials, when we aren’t doing those or we don’t have anybody on our team doing that, so maybe we’re the CEO, but we don’t have managers that are actually performing those functions, then it is on us.
people need to know where they stand. They have to know what the expectations are, what a good job looks like, where their career’s going for them to feel motivated and for them to do a good job. So if we’re feeling like someone else should be doing this or why isn’t this happening, us leaning into the leadership essentials, maybe it’s on the way to hiring a manager to oversee everybody, that’s totally fine. But when we aren’t getting what we want out of our teams, that’s what we gotta come back to, getting back into leadership.
foundation so that folks have management on the team. So this was a big topic today, right? What am I avoiding? Am I avoiding making a hire? Am I avoiding having that hard conversation? Cause I’m avoiding being uncomfortable. Or am I avoiding stepping into some of these management responsibilities? And this is truly why I am changing the name of the show. Cause this is not stuff for new managers. This is stuff for anybody leading people, even if folks do not report directly up to you.
These are leadership and influence skills. And when we figure these things out, we can scale ourselves so much better answering these three questions and facing these things head on. This will at least 10X your impact literally overnight. And it’s going to grow your business. It puts it on a rocket ship because you have so much clarity and people have the answers they need to be most effective. All right, see you next week. See you on Real Talk Leading Teams.
And oh, I am doing a contest for new reviews. So if you add a review of the show, I greatly appreciate it. If you’re loving the show, please add a review and send me a screenshot of your review and I will enter you in for a free coaching 30 minute Ask Me Anything session. So if you’re looking for some help kind of answering wrestling with some of these questions, post a review, send me a screenshot and you’ll be entered to win an Ask Me Anything session. All right.
send that over to hello at liagarvin.com. Do not forget to get your snippets template, liagarvin.com slash snippets. And I can’t wait to see you on Real Talk Leading Small Teams. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
What question should I ask myself when I feel stuck or overwhelmed as a leader?
Ask yourself: what am I avoiding right now? That single question unlocks almost every answer you need. When you stop running on autopilot for even two minutes and face that question honestly, you can see exactly what is slowing you down, whether it is a hire you have been putting off, a hard conversation you keep postponing, or leadership basics you have not been doing consistently. The leaders who are growing fastest are the ones willing to look inward instead of blaming everything on their team.
How do I know if I should hire someone instead of just spreading work across my existing team?
If people on your team are covering responsibilities that do not match their strengths, or if work keeps falling through the cracks, that is a sign you are avoiding a necessary hire. Trying to fill those gaps yourself or patching things with whoever is available slows your growth significantly. Even a senior hire that feels like a big financial commitment can open up real revenue potential. The fear is understandable, especially if a past hire did not work out, but not hiring keeps you stuck well below what your team could actually achieve.
Why do I keep avoiding giving feedback to a team member even though I know I need to?
Usually it comes down to avoiding your own discomfort, not wanting to see the other person uncomfortable, not wanting to be disliked, or worrying they might quit. But avoiding the conversation does not protect anyone. It lets a problem fester, signals to the rest of the team that the behavior is acceptable, and actually takes away the other person's chance to grow. Feedback that feels hard to deliver can land well, and even when someone reacts badly in the moment, they often come back later and say they needed it.
My team members are not self-starters. How do I get them to just figure things out without me having to spell everything out?
Expecting people to just know what is needed without setting clear expectations is a form of avoiding leadership itself. People need to know where they stand, what a good job looks like, and where their career is headed before they can feel motivated and perform well. Rather than waiting for team members to figure it out, lean into the leadership basics: regular one-on-ones, clear priorities, direct feedback, and consistent follow-through. Once those foundations are in place, you will usually see the team step up without you having to chase everything.
What are the most common things leaders avoid that hold their teams back?
Three things come up most often. First, avoiding a necessary hire, which keeps the whole team stretched thin doing work outside their strengths. Second, avoiding hard conversations because giving feedback is uncomfortable and leaders do not want conflict or to lose someone. Third, avoiding the core responsibilities of leadership itself, assuming good people should not need direction, feedback, or clear systems. Each of these creates a different kind of bottleneck, but all three are fixable once you name what you are actually avoiding and face it directly.