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.
This episode is part of the Self-Leadership & Mindset for Leaders series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. And this is something that I strongly believe can be fixed.”
“…all of us have the power to be that second category of managers, the ones who lead effectively, the ones who empower, the ones who understand how to give feedback and have hard conversations and do that with empathy…”
“…when we focus on the team dynamics first, we see everything else come together.”
“…managers are burning out, managers aren’t being supported, managers are feeling stuck.”
Episode highlights
Two kinds of managers, and why the bad ones are not villains
Lia opens with a question most of us carry from our own careers: have you had the manager who left you spinning, or the one who made you believe you could blow past your own goals? Her answer is direct. The first kind is not out to get anyone. It is a skills problem. Most people step into management without real training, copying what they have observed or just trying to get things off their plate. The skills gap is fixable. That is the whole premise of the show.
A decade of seeing the same pattern
Lia spent over ten years in team operations at Bank of America, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and design agencies of every size. Her job was helping teams work better together. What she kept finding was that when work was not getting done, it was almost never about technical skill or motivation. It was always something interpersonal: unclear expectations, fuzzy roles, communication breaking down, people feeling excluded. Fix the people dynamics first, and everything else follows. Not everyone wanted to hear that early on, but team after team proved it out.
Writing, a TEDx talk, and leaving corporate
Along the way Lia started writing, which led to her book Unstuck, about the power of reframing limiting beliefs to reach bigger career aspirations. She gave a TEDx talk on reframing the finality of decisions. Then in mid-2022 she realized she was not living what she was teaching. She left corporate, launched her consulting firm (now known as the Workplace Reframe), and went all in on manager development, employee engagement, and retention.
Why small businesses deserve this too
One thing that bothered Lia: effective team operations were mostly a corporate conversation. Small business owners with lean teams were left to figure it out alone. That gap drove her to build The Ops Playbook, designed to take the guesswork out of the minimum processes a small team needs to run smoothly and get everyone on the same page fast.
Managers are burning out too
The familiar line is “people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Lia believes that is true and also incomplete. Managers themselves are burning out, unsupported, and stuck. This podcast is explicitly for them: a place to talk openly about why the job is hard, pick up concrete tools to try, and know that someone is in their corner making one of the most stressful and most rewarding jobs a little bit easier.
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 217: What are you avoiding right now? The question that unlocks your leadership. The single question that separates high-performing leaders from struggling ones is: what am I avoiding right now? Lia walks through three common avoidances, making a necessary hire, giving hard feedback, and actually doing the leadership fundamentals, and shows how naming each one makes the fix surprisingly straightforward. This episode is most useful for founders, owners, and team leads who feel stuck, behind, or like the same problems keep resurfacing.
- 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.
Want to go deeper?
Unstuck. Get unstuck in your career and your leadership.
Full transcript (click to expand)
This conversation is going to be your place as a leader, as a manager, to come and have a safe, open, and candid conversation about why it’s hard. Get some tools and strategies to try out with your team so that you don’t have to feel stuck. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it.
And everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. I think we’ve all had one of two types of managers in our careers. The kind that gives us ambiguous feedback, kind of picks at all the things that we’re doing. We never really know if we’re good enough, and we kind of go down this spiral of wondering why am I even here?
Or the kind that believe in us, that, that amplify our ideas, that help us blow past our goals and, and, and think past what we ever thought was possible for ourselves. And when we think about this first camp of managers, I don’t think they do that because they want to, like, they’re out to get us or something like that. I think it’s a skills thing. And a lot of us become managers without a lot of training, without a lot of support, and we’re kind of just wing it thinking about, well, what have I observed in the past?
Or, you know, how do I just get things done? How do I get people off my back <laugh>? How do I, how do I kind of tell people what to do? Or we don’t understand what the role’s about? I think all of us have the power to be that second category of managers, the ones who lead effectively, the ones who empower, the ones who understand how to give feedback and have hard conversations and do that with empathy, but without the skills, we’re not really gonna do a good job at that.
So that’s why I created this podcast was because, you know, I think too many of us have had that first kind of manager and have thought, well, do I even belong here? Is this a job that I can do? Is this, do I wanna work in this company? Should I even be in this kind of workforce because of these kinds of managers, we’ve all heard it. People don’t leave companies, they leave managers. And this is something that I strongly believe can be fixed, and that’s why I’m here.
So a little bit about my story. I spent over a decade in the corporate world working in team operations. So this was about driving programs and processes to help teams operate effectively. And I did this across Bank of America, Microsoft, apple, Google Design agencies, large and small. And as I was doing this work, trying to figure out how to help people work better together, I always saw the same patterns. It wasn’t that when work wasn’t getting done, it wasn’t because people didn’t have the skills or they were unmotivated or, or anything like that.
It was always something interpersonal happening. People weren’t communicating with each other. People didn’t understand clear expectations. People didn’t have clear roles and responsibilities. People felt excluded. This was what got in the way of people getting their work done. And these were the kinds of problems that we needed to solve in order for people to feel like, yes, I can do this. I can be successful. And I shared this hypothesis and, and, and many of the teams I was on, sometimes it was received very well.
Sometimes I was told focus on the work stuff first and the people stuff later. And I, I just believed, no, the people stuff has gotta come first. And I kept reinforcing that belief and sharing that and improving it out team after team. And slowly people started to see, oh yeah, when we focus on the team dynamics first, we see everything else come together. And so after doing this in a number of different kinds of jobs, I got really into writing.
I was writing a lot about team dynamics and, and wrote my book Unstuck. And the book had come out, which is about the power of reframing and how to help people really reach further their greatest career aspirations by, by letting go of limiting beliefs. I did a TEDx talk and, and I was super excited about getting that idea in the world, how to reframe the finality of decisions I found middle of last year, middle of 2022, I was stuck.
I wasn’t following my dreams, I wasn’t putting this out into the world. And so I left the corporate world and I launched my business, the Workplace Reframe, which is an organizational effectiveness consulting firm dedicated to help bringing out the best in teams, teams large and small for teams in the corporate world. I dive into a lot of things around manager development, employee engagement, retention of women. So you see, this is where that passion of manager development really, really started to, started to grow.
And, and a really big driver for recruiting this podcast was having these conversations, things that I’m hearing as I’m running these programs and, and, and learning more from managers that I’m working with. And then for entrepreneurs and smaller businesses, you know, I thought to myself, well, why are team processes and, and team operations sort of these strategies that are more known and understood in the corporate world, who’s bringing those to small businesses? How come, you know, we’re not making lives easier for folks that have a smaller team?
And so I’m on a mission to help smaller businesses simplify and, and bring ease into how they get work done. And so I have an operations playbook program that I support entrepreneurs with to really take the guesswork out of what are the minimum sort of processes you need to be effective, and then how do you make sure everybody’s on the same page about that? So that’s a little bit about some of the work that I do.
And, and that’s the center of it is about my passion for building effective, inclusive, empowered, motivated, great, great teams because we spend literally a third of our life. Is that the stat? I think it’s a third, but I gotta believe it’s more than a third <laugh>. We spend such a big chunk of our lives at work in teams with managers. And man, if, if we don’t figure out how to make that feel a lot better, how to make sure people feel supported, then what’s the point?
And I think it’s on all of us, especially leaders and managers out there to help make that experience better. And as I said, there’s a lot of conversation around, people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. But as I’ve talked to more and more managers over the course of the pandemic and, and where we are right now, managers are burning out, managers aren’t being supported, managers are feeling stuck. So this podcast, this conversation is going to be your place as a leader, as a manager to come and have a safe, open, and candid conversation about why it’s hard.
Get some tools and strategies to try out with your team so that you don’t have to feel stuck so that you know someone is in your corner on your site trying to make the whole really difficult, often stressful job, but often amazing, fantastic job of being a people manager a little bit easier. So if I can give that to you, then my mission is accomplished. 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.
I always love to hear from you, so please reach [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why do so many managers struggle even when they mean well?
Most managers struggle because they never received real training or support before stepping into the role. Without those skills, leaders default to what they observed in the past or just try to get things done, which often means unclear expectations, poor communication, and people feeling excluded. It is not a character flaw. It is a skills gap. And because it is a skills gap, it can be fixed. That is the whole premise behind Managing Made Simple.
What actually causes teams to underperform or fall apart?
After a decade working in team operations at companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, Lia found the same pattern over and over. When work was not getting done, it was rarely about skill or motivation. It was always something interpersonal: people not communicating, unclear roles and responsibilities, no shared expectations, or people feeling excluded. Fix the team dynamics first, and everything else comes together. The missing system is almost always the people stuff, not the technical stuff.
Why should a small business owner care about team processes, not just corporate managers?
Team operations and people processes have traditionally been taught and practiced inside large corporations, but small business owners face the exact same challenges with smaller teams and fewer resources. Lia built her operations playbook program specifically to bring those same frameworks to entrepreneurs, taking the guesswork out of what minimum processes you need to run effectively and making sure everyone on the team is on the same page.
Is Managing Made Simple only for new managers or is it useful if you have years of experience?
The podcast is built for both. If you are new to leading a team, you will find practical tools to get started on the right foot. If you are a seasoned leader who feels stuck, burned out, or like you are winging it, you will find strategies to level up. The common thread is that managing people is genuinely hard, and everyone deserves a place to get honest, candid support without judgment.
What is the main reason people quit their jobs, and can it actually be fixed?
People do not leave companies, they leave managers. Lia believes this deeply, and she also believes it is fixable. The problem is not that leaders want to make their teams miserable. It is that too many leaders are stepping into management roles without the skills, training, or support they need to lead well. When leaders get the right tools and learn how to give feedback, set clear expectations, and lead with empathy, that whole dynamic shifts for the better.