Your calendar is full and nothing is getting done. You have a standing 1:1 with every direct report, a team meeting every Monday, and three other recurring calls you cannot explain. Your team still misses deadlines. You still answer the same questions over and over. And somehow you have no time to do actual work. That is not a people problem. That is a missing system. This page pulls together every episode Lia has recorded on running better 1:1s, cutting meeting bloat, setting working norms, and protecting your time so you can actually lead.
Why your 1:1s are not working
Most 1:1s die one of two deaths. Either they turn into a status update where your team member reads you a to-do list, or they get cancelled the moment anyone gets busy. Neither version builds trust, surfaces real problems, or helps your team grow. The fix is not meeting more often. The fix is a clear structure that both you and your team member know how to use. When a 1:1 has a repeatable agenda, it stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling like a real conversation. Lia’s approach inside The New Manager Playbook gives you that structure so you stop winging it every week.
The real cost of a bad meeting culture
Here is what nobody says out loud: every low-value meeting is a tax on your team’s output. When people spend their best thinking hours sitting in rooms (or on calls) that do not require their input, they get behind. Then they stay late. Then they burn out. Then they leave. Meeting culture is a retention issue, not just a scheduling issue. Before you book another recurring call, ask yourself what decision or outcome this meeting exists to produce. If you cannot answer that in one sentence, the meeting should not exist.
How to design working norms that stick
Working norms are the agreements your team operates by: when to message versus email, how to flag a blocker, what counts as urgent. Without them, everyone fills in the blanks differently, and you end up as the tie-breaker for every small call. Setting norms is not a one-hour offsite conversation you forget by Thursday. It is a living document your team actually references. Lia walks through how to build norms collaboratively so your team owns them, not just tolerates them. The result is fewer interruptions for you and faster decisions for everyone.
Prioritization when everything feels urgent
Time management for leaders is not about squeezing more into your day. It is about being ruthlessly clear on what only you can do and what can move down, wait, or disappear. Most founders and managers carry tasks that should have been delegated six months ago. They also carry meetings that should have been an email and reviews that should have been a checklist. Getting your time back starts with an honest audit of where your hours actually go, then matching that to what your role actually requires at this stage of the business.
Building a meeting rhythm that serves the work
A strong meeting rhythm means the right people talk at the right frequency about the right things, and everything else happens asynchronously. That usually looks like a weekly team meeting built around decisions and blockers, biweekly or monthly 1:1s focused on growth and priorities, and quarterly planning sessions that connect daily work to bigger goals. When the rhythm is right, you stop having the same conversation in five different settings. People know where to bring what, and your week stops being one long interruption. Lia’s frameworks help you design that rhythm for your specific team size and work style, not copy someone else’s calendar.
All episodes on this topic
- Ep 182: Still drowning in meetings? How to reclaim 5 or more hours every week as a manager. Most managers lose hours every week because they hold on tighter when they should be letting go. Lia walks through four concrete strategies, from stepping out of meetings and delegating with context to managing your own stress signals and naming the real cut line on your priority list. This episode is most useful for managers who feel perpetually behind and are unknowingly passing that stress straight down to their teams.
- Ep 159: Why your to-do list never gets done (and how to fix it with smarter calendar design). The real reason your week feels like a hamster wheel is context switching, not a lack of effort. Lia walks through three practical calendar moves, grouping similar meetings, planning your week in advance, and color-coding by context, that dramatically cut the mental cost of jumping between tasks. This episode is especially useful for leaders who feel perpetually behind despite working hard.
- Ep 127: How to save 5 to 10 hours a week as a leader (without burning out your team). Leaders lose hours every week to bloated meetings, manual processes, and context they never hand off. Lia walks through a repeatable system, calendar audits, meeting hygiene, process simplification, and intentional delegation, that can reclaim 5 to 10 hours a week for you and up to 30 to 40 hours a month across your team. This episode is especially useful for founders and corporate leaders whose teams have started to notice the overwhelm before they did.
- Ep 89: Why you need 1:1 meetings with every team member (and how to run them well). Yes, you need 1:1 meetings, and skipping them is quietly costing you retention, productivity, and trust. Lia walks through the Roses, Buds, Thorns framework and a highlights/lowlights structure you can run in as little as 10 minutes. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel too busy to add another standing meeting.
- Ep 76: How to optimize your meetings and save $2,000 a month. Meetings that run over are costing you roughly five hours and $2,000 every single month, and three simple shifts can fix that. Lia walks through the agenda, the parking lot, and the end-of-meeting timer as a repeatable system to end on time, every time. This episode is most useful for owners, founders, and team leads who want to reclaim time without overhauling how their team works.
- Ep 56: How to make your 1:1 meetings actually useful (and stop the status update spiral). Effective 1:1s are not status update sessions. Lia shares a four-part agenda (rapport, wins, where they are stuck, and closing actions) that turns every meeting into a genuine window into how to support your team. This episode is for any manager whose 1:1s feel like a waste of time.
- Ep 25: How to run better meetings and actually get results. Better meetings start with one thing: clarity on the goal before anyone walks in the room. Megan Karsh, founder of the (em) Collective, shares the GRP framework (Goals, Roles, Process) and a handful of facilitation tools that help managers run tighter meetings, make better decisions, and stop wasting everyone’s time. This episode is especially useful for managers who feel like they are always in meetings but never quite getting to a real outcome.
- Ep 16: How to stop dreading Monday by auditing your calendar every Sunday night. The Sunday Scaries ease up when you take 10 minutes Sunday night to sort next week’s meetings into three buckets: ones you must attend, ones you can delegate, and ones that never needed to be meetings at all. Lia walks through exactly how to run that audit, including how to set up whoever you delegate to for success. This episode is especially useful for managers who hit Monday already feeling behind.
Also relevant
- Ep 203: Why top performers leave and the career conversation that keeps them. Top performers leave because they cannot see a future on your team, not because the job was bad. The fix is a regular career conversation, separate from performance reviews, where you ask about bigger-picture goals and then follow up with real opportunities. This episode is most useful for founders, owners, and team leads who want to stop losing good people before the resignation letter arrives.
- Ep 193: Why Your A-Players Are Pulling Back (and How to Stop It Before It Spreads). Quiet cracking is when your highest performers stop bringing their best energy, not because they want to slack off, but because they are burned out, spread thin, and running on empty. Lia walks through how to spot it, why it ripples through your whole team culture, and three foundational moves to reverse it before you lose your best people. This episode is especially useful for owners, founders, and team leads who have noticed their most reliable people quietly stepping back.
- Ep 192: What happens when your best people feel underutilized (and what to do about it). When team members feel underutilized, your top performers are the first ones quietly heading for the exit. Lia walks through the real cost of underutilization and the simple, conversation-based moves that show your people you see their full potential. This episode is especially useful for anyone who has lost a great team member and could not figure out why.
- Ep 139: How to tell if your team members are actually thriving (not just fine). 89% of leaders think their team is thriving, but only 24% of employees agree. That 65% gap closes when you ask better questions and listen for what your team member actually means, not what you would mean in their shoes. This episode is essential for any leader who suspects something is off but is not sure how to surface it.
- Ep 91: 10 weekly habits that make managing a team dramatically easier. Ten simple weekly actions, the Thriving Team Checklist, can prevent the communication breakdowns that quietly burn managers and teams out. Lia walks through each item, from asking for feedback and delivering specific praise to load-balancing conversations and removing process friction, so work flows with less effort. This episode is most useful for any leader who feels like small things are constantly slipping through the cracks.
- Ep 85: How nailing the basics of managing solves your HR issues. Most HR problems are actually ops and management problems in disguise. Jackie Koch, founder of People Principles, and Lia break down the foundational moves that prevent people issues before they start: effective 1:1s, structured 30/60/90-day new hire reviews, and lightweight work tracking. This episode is essential for any owner or team lead who keeps putting out people fires and wonders why.
- Ep 67: Three working norms that will save your team five hours a week. Unclear expectations around communication, meetings, and file organization are the biggest hidden time drains on any team. Lia walks through three concrete working norms you can establish this week to recover four to five hours per person, per week. This episode is especially useful for owners and team leads who feel like their team is always reinventing the wheel or chasing down information.
- Ep 35: How to amplify your team members and keep them engaged, with Rachel Smith of Google. Keeping your team engaged starts with leading with empathy, connecting people to a clear sense of purpose, and making personal development a real part of the job. Rachel Smith, Director of Strategy and Operations at Google, shares practical tools including skip-level meetings, the 10-10-10 decision framework, and intentional connection rituals that help managers build trust and fuel performance. This episode is especially useful for managers of managers and anyone leading distributed or hybrid teams.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
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