Someone leaves or we lose headcount, or a project changes, or an investor doesn't follow through. If we're an entrepreneur or someone that was about to sign on on our team, takes another role. These things can feel so unlucky. But when we see them as that and we get stuck thinking, why me? Why does it always happen to me?
Doesn't happen to anyone else? And we get a little bit into that spiral. It can be really hard to move forward and it can certainly be hard to manage our team effectively.
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Welcome back to the show. Today's St. Patrick's Day, or at least that's when this episode is airing, and I wanted to do a special bonus episode on Luck when it comes to being a people manager, or should I say unlucky situations that people, managers have to deal with.
Now the problem with these unlucky situations is a lot of times this is a sentiment about something that's out of our control. So let's say someone leaves or we lose headcount, or a project changes, or an investor doesn't follow through. If we're an entrepreneur or someone that was about to sign on on our team, takes another role.
These things can feel so unlucky, but when we see them as that and we get stuck thinking, why me? Why does it always happen to me? Doesn't happen to anyone else, and we get a little bit into that spiral, it can be really hard to move forward and it can certainly be hard to manage our team effectively to tackle this.
I wanna introduce the concept of reframing or looking at these frustrating situations through a new perspective. And when we find ourselves in that why perspective, why me? Why is this happening? To shift our questions from why to what instead of why me? We say, what's possible? What can I learn from this?
What can I try? And that's the lens that's gonna get us from an unlucky perspective to a perspective of possibility and opportunity. . As I dive into these examples today, I want you to adopt that perspective and think, okay, what is possible here? And then apply that same perspective as you face unlucky situations on your own team.
First, unlucky situation, unlucky manager. Number one is when you inherit a team with a low performer. , and this can be so frustrating. It feels like it's not fair. A lot of times when there's a low performer, it's because the previous manager didn't deal with it. They didn't do performance management effectively.
They didn't give the feedback that person had to hear. Maybe this person doesn't even know they're a low performer, and we can think, well, this is not my fault. Why do I have to deal with this now? I get it. I've been there years ago, I joined a team and right after I started, I was getting onboarded on who are the new team members I'm gonna be.
And my manager said, Hey, there's one person that's really stuck. They're not delivering it as as we need on this team. I don't know if they're gonna be here for a long time. And the first thing I thought, same thing is, oh my God, this is so unfair. Why didn't they tell me this before I got the job? And I got really frustrated.
And then I said to myself, you know what? I am going to see if I can figure out my own relationship with this. Maybe they were stuck because something wasn't working with them and how the previous manager communicated. So I stopped. I got to know them a little bit better. I asked them where they were feeling stuck, and by getting to know them, I identified that okay, there were some issues with their communication, the way they managed meetings, the emails they were sending.
And so I said, Hey, come shadow me in a couple meetings, see how I structure it, making sure we're really setting the agenda and, and, and wrapping up the end, making sure we have, we're we're making decisions where needed. I shared some examples of email communication so they could see them as a template, and I started to see that the person's behavior turned around.
and what I found was they were needing two things. One was a manager to kind of show them what was expected and what was needed. And that also required patience. Someone to say, Hey, I see you're struggling. Let's take a look at this. And, and what did I see? I saw the person's behavior turn around. They got better at managing meetings.
They got better at emails. Their communication was way more clear, and they went from being a low performer to someone that had a lot of. So this is my strategy for you on how to reframe this stuck perspective of inherited a low performer, and now I'm screwed into how can I build my own relationship with my team members?
What can I do? And I encourage you to do this with every single person on your team. Not to just decide, hey, these are the high performers, they're good, or these are the low performers. But to build a relationship, every single person, get to know them, understand how they like to work, understand what they want in their career, where their strengths and development areas are.
You wanna get to know every single person because your relationship with them will be different than it is with the previous manager. And this requires setting clear expectations. It requires for folks that are struggling, talking about where, where you'll offer support, what you expect of them, what success looks like, and you're gonna see this situation turn completely around.
So that is how we overcome that first challenge. All right, unlucky manager. Number two, when your head count gets cut, or let's say you're an entrepreneur and you can't end up investing in this hire that you have been waiting to. and in both situations, you can't make that key hire you need to make. Now, why does this feel so unlucky or frustrating?
Because a lot of times when we're about to hire someone, we have needed that person for a really long time. We have likely put, put a whole list together, a whole job description, a whole set of things aside that they're going to be doing. So when we unexpectedly lose that headcount or lose the ability to hire, it is frustrating.
It feels completely unlucky. Now, in this situation, I think it's really important to take an honest look at your overall priorities on your team and think about, well, what needs to shift? What has to fall off? If you're in the corporate world, this requires having a convers. With your management chain about, Hey, we had set aside this bucket of work for this person to do, but now without them, here's what we can still cover, but here's what has to come off that list.
Now, I know that's not an easy conversation, but you do have to have it because just saying, okay, we didn't get this person. Now everybody has to do 125% of their job. This is how we burn people out. So we have to talk about less people means less priorities. If you're an entrepreneur, same thing. If you had some key things that you were going to delegate and offload, then that means figuring out.
What's realistic for what your team can get done and what has to wait until you can get that hire. It's not easy to decide. I know everything is important, but we can't just put that load onto our team members when they're already at full capacity. Things that we can do here is figure out, hey, can I hire a temp or an intern?
Can we reduce the scope of a project? Where can we bring on more support potentially for a short time? This is how we get through that gap. But again, it really requires load balance. Now in the corporate world, when I'm having these conversations with managers around what's doable, what's realistic, I like to frame it in terms of risk management, because we're not talking about hiring because we just want more people or we want a bigger team.
This is about, here is what can get done with this number of people with this number. with this person, and it's important to be setting these expectations continually with your own management chain, with your partners, with your stakeholders, so they understand that, hey, if we have more people, we can deliver this.
But if we don't, here's what's realistic. Framing it as risk management and trade offs. This is how we have a more objective conversations around something that can feel very frustrating and personal, especially when it comes outta nowhere and we feel like we're being squeezed and we're under pressure and we have to deliver.
I encourage framing it as scenarios. Hey, if we lose a person, here's what's realistic. If we got a person, here's realistic so that we can always be communicating proactively about this. Okay? We've come to our last unlucky manager, number three. Your star team member leaves, and this is a bummer, not only because it feels unlucky outta nowhere, but a lot of times when we have a star player, you know, they're a 10 Xer, they are doing 10 times the amount of work, or a lot of times they've really contributed to building a strong culture on a team.
And it can be really disruptive for the team as a whole. When a star player leaves. It's important to stop and take stock of the overall structure of your team. Are there more things that you can be doing to build more leaders on your team, to be building more star players, to not having the best type of work or the most interesting or highest impact or, or most visibility work being on one person but distributing that a little bit better?
I also really suggest having conversations with all of your stairs, all the people that are there talking about, Hey, we lost someone. It's a bummer. I wanna make sure you're supported, that you're getting what you need from. that you're getting what you need from your career. I've been in a situation where we had a great team member leave and my manager went around to each of us and said, let's talk about how did this feel?
What, what did we lose? What do we wanna make sure we do differently so that all of us feel more supported? And in having that conversation, they both acknowledge that there was a loss. It's important to acknowledge that. And then they let us all, and I remember being able to share feedback about. I felt like we weren't really able to all contribute in the same way and then that manager could turn things around.
I know for me, when I've been in that situation where that manager had that conversation really took stock of can we distribute things more balanced? It ended up changing the whole dynamic of our team, and everybody was really able to rise to the occasion. This requires soliciting feedback, making feedback a two-way.
Getting feedback from your team members, maybe your peers, your own managers, about I lost someone and I really wanna make sure that this doesn't become a pattern. What can I do differently? Last, I think not comparing people to the stars, not making it feel like, oh God, Sarah left, we're screwed. Now what are we gonna do?
But again, saying, Hey, this was a bummer. It's a setback. We really, we really valued Sarah. How can we all rebuild this together? How can we all support each other in having the best team we. This is how we reframe these unlucky situations. We've inherited a low performer. One of our headcount gets taken away, or we can't invest in a new hire or one of our star team members leaves.
These are how we reframe these unlucky situations into opportunities to invest in people, to rebuild new relationships with our team members, to scope down the work where maybe we were scoping things unrealistically in the first place, or to have conversations with our stakeholders about trade-offs.
And last to take the opportunity to make everybody into a. And this applies to whether you are in the corporate world or you're an entrepreneur with a smaller team really trying to grow. When we reframe these unlucky situations into opportunities, not only do we make the situation better for ourselves as managers, but we make the situation better for all of our team members.
One last area that can make us feel unlucky as managers or founders or or CEOs of small businesses is when we are focused on the vision, on all the things around the what, but we're not quite focused on the. and so things aren't getting done as smoothly as we think they should be, or people are leaving like we talked about, or we're not quite sure how people are spending their time.
This is why I'm so excited to be launching my new program, the Ops Playbook, where I sit down with founders and managers and CEOs of small businesses to map out the core team processes that you need to have an effective team so that you can scale beyond wherever you are today, across six different sessions.
We map out your onboarding process, decision making priorities, expectation setting, how you wanna track work, and how you wanna manage performance on your team so that you can scale, you can grow, and you can stay in your zone of. Knowing all the details are figured out for you to sign up for the ops playbook, email me at [email protected] or reach out on my website at liagarvin.com.
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 out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn.
See you next time.
