What is The Unstoppable Team and how will it help you manage with less stress

It brings that together. Plus all the lessons that I’ve learned as I’ve been working with business owners and entrepreneurs and founders and saying, okay, what is the way to communicate this stuff? So that it does remove overwhelm, so that it doesn’t feel more complicated, so that we can manage our teams with ease. And I know I say all the time, managing our teams, it’s one of the hardest things about running a business, and I think a lot of us find that out kind of the hard way.

Welcome to the Managing Midsimple podcast. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager looking to learn the ropes?

Or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with managing made simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today is the launch day of my new book, the Unstoppable Team, and I could not be more excited to both bring this book to you and to talk about really how this can be a tool for you to save time, money and stress in your business.

And if you’re not a business owner and your manager listening to this, there’s also so much in there that you can apply to a smaller team. So everybody listen in. Buckle up, because this is going to be a really fun conversation about really what the book’s about. And yeah, how it can be gamae changing for you. First and foremost, why did I write this book? I talk a lot about my program, the Ops playbook, on this show, and this is one of my main programs that I use with business owners and entrepreneurs and founders.

This is about really laying that foundation for how we get from where we are today and to where we want to be in six months. And we cover six key areas. We talk about priorities, making sure we don’t have too many or too few, and how people see the connection between their individual role and the bigger goals of the company. We talk about onboarding, making sure folks are set up for success. From day one, I talk about expectations, and I always say, you’ve heard it here that when we set expectations up front, then we can refer back to those we’re not micromanaging when we’re pointing back to something that we’ve already established.

We talk about delegating and decisions to make sure that you are not all the way in the weeds, that you’re not a bottleneck, but you can really amplify and elevate the strengths of your team members. We talk about work tracking, how to find the right system, the right level of detail to stay in the know without getting a little bit too complicated with the tracking. And then we talk about performance, how to bring all of this together to make sure everybody on your team knows how to advance, how they’re being evaluated and all that good stuff.

So that’s the Ops playbook program. But I thought to myself, well, there’s so much in here that business owners, entrepreneurs, team leaders and any manager can be applying to their team right away. So I took all that good stuff and I wrote it in a book and that’s what the unstoppable team is. It’s really the companion to the Ops playbook, so that you can start implementing a lot of this stuff yourself. And what’s super fun about it is, as I was thinking about it, it brought together all of the different experiences that I’ve had with different kinds of businesses.

It helps you see yourself inside of other kinds of businesses and recognize patterns. Maybe you run a cafe, but this sort of situation that I worked through with a med spa might apply to you because you have employees that are physically in the same space, you really want to make sure they’re bringing their a game to customer experience. Really right when people walk by your building or walk through the door, you want to make sure that they’re greeted with a positive attitude, all that stuff.

What I really encourage you to do is even if you don’t have the exact business talked about in the book to sort of say, oh, okay, here are some of the parallels. And that’s something that’s been so fun about doing this work, is really identifying what those themes are. Another example, we’re all struggling. Well, whoever has folks remote, we’re struggling with. How do I make sure I have a pulse on the kind of work getting done when I don’t have folks sitting next to me in the office?

And this is a challenge that I’ve worked through with ER companies, with construction companies, marketing agencies, all sorts of different companies, because there’s a theme there. It’s not about the industry necessarily. It’s about how do we create trust and the right level of oversight without being overbearing, but without lacking accountability. That’s the kind of thing I really encourage you to look through as you check out the book. And the book brings together both learnings from my experience driving team operations inside of big tech.

I worked at Apple, Microsoft, Google, bank of America, really working on how do we help teams work more effectively, how do we get our work done without adding too much process. I’m all about simplifying, removing process. It brings that together. Plus all the lessons that I’ve learned as I’ve been working with business owners and entrepreneurs and founders and saying, okay, what is the way to communicate this stuff? So that it does remove overwhelm, so that it doesn’t feel more complicated, so that we can manage our teams with ease.

And I know I say all the time managing our teams, it’s one of the hardest things about running a business, and I think a lot of us find that out kind of the hard way. We’ve hired friends or family members for a business and it’s really hard to see the relationship change because we haven’t had those conversations about, well, this is a different dynamic, right? This has to look a little bit different and it could be awesome and better, but we’re going to have two types of relationships, or we find ourselves getting really in the weeds because we are really passionate about certain areas of our business and of the work and we don’t know how to let go.

So it creates a little bit of strain on our teams, or maybe we’ve had some micromanagers in the past. I think all of us have at some point. So we’re really, really worried about not doing that. We want to be the opposite of that. So then we’re not really managing it all. These are the kinds of things that I talk about in the book and share concrete strategies for working through those. And my goal is that you have this as a companion to you as you’re managing your team, as you’re hiring, if you’re a solopreneur listening as you’re thinking about, okay, well, when is it the right moment to hire a team to start scaling?

If you’re a team leader in a bigger company, you kind of see, okay, well, how can I treat my own team in my smaller environment as sort of its own self sustaining business? How do I set clear priorities and connect my team members work to the bigger priorities of the company? Right. I think that’s something that we can always be doing. We can always be setting clear expectations. Okay. Because that’s what makes feedback easier. That’s another thing I talk a lot about, right.

That feedback is such a hard thing because people can feel like it’s not fair, it’s ungrounded. It’s a judgment. Well, when we first set clear expectations, now that becomes that flagpole that we can point towards when we give feedback, all of these things really come together to help you feel like you have a solid view of everything happening on your team. But more than that, that your team is on the same page. And I talked a few episodes ago about this team whisperer concept and what this is about.

And this is really that translation artifact between you as the leader and your team members, as the receiver of that information, and we’re all kind of operating from different lenses. I’m hoping that this becomes a tool for you to feel like, okay, I can translate that message on my own. I can get through to my team members because I understand the reasons that they may not understand what I’m saying or the reasons they may not be bought in, because, again, it’s not their baby, this business, or they’re not at this level of hierarchy where they feel way more invested.

But there’s so much you can do to get them bought in. And that’s why I say there really is the capacity working through this system, whether through the book or teaming up with me to get it going, which I’m super excited to support you if that’s the case. We can turn your team members into literal profit generating machines because you have a full set of folks, boots on the ground working to grow your business. When we have that happen, now you can scale, now you can grow, now you can reach new heights you have never thought possible or you were really, really hoping was going to happen.

Right? Maybe you were reaching for the stars already, which I love. Now you have the plan to get there. I’ll wrap by saying, as that business owner, as that team leader, as the founder, you are this visionary. You have the why. You know why you’re here. And you probably have a really solid strategy. You have the what are you going to deliver, right? You know the product, you know the service, you know what you do great.

But the how is where we get stuck. And that’s really, again, why I wrote this book. I wanted to give you the how. I wanted to show you that when you add that third leg of the stool, you got the what, you got the why. When you add the how, now you can translate a vision into action. And truly, that’s why I call the work I do the ops playbook, because a playbook really is the translation from vision into action.

It’s how you get your teams on the same page around running the plays. How do they get the ball down the field? To use that analogy, how do they get it over the goal line into the basket? Whatever sport you choose, this is the tool that’s going to get there. I’m thrilled to be sharing this with you today. Check out the book head to liagarvin.com/thebook, or Amazon.com and look up The Unstoppable Team today. It is on Kindle for $0.99.

You’re going to want to grab that today. Grab a couple of paper copies too, so you can highlight. Mark it up. I love doing that in the books that I have, and I cannot wait for this to be the ultimate resource for making it easier to manage your team, for helping you enjoy managing your team, and for helping you read, reach all of those goals and blow past them. See you next time. 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 somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass. It along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.