You know that moment. An email drops, a meeting gets scheduled, and your stomach sinks. As a manager, it’s not just your reaction that matters, it’s what your team sees, hears, and absorbs.

This week, we get into:

• Why your team mirrors your reaction to frustrating people and situations
• How to avoid dragging your team into a commiseration spiral
• The power of naming what’s hard without making it worse
• One quick conversation that shifts your team from reactive to ready

Every team hits roadblocks. This is how you lead them through.

Need help leading your team through uncertainty or a tough stretch? Reach out: hello@liagarvin.com

Looking for support for yourself of your team? I've got you covered.
Explore manager training, leaders keynotes & offsites, and 1:1 advisory, or my 90-Day-COO program for business owners who want simple systems that actually work.

I help teams build clarity, accountability, and momentum through practical tools and research-backed strategies that make managing easier.

Get all the details at: www.liagarvin.com
or reach out at hello@liagarvin.com

We’re in a moment of weird contradictions in the workplace: you’re supposed to set clear expectations, but not micromanage; delegate, but not let things spin out; do more with less. It’s exhausting—and it’s why so many leaders feel stuck.

In this week’s episode of The New Manager Playbook, I walk you through three real‑world questions that landed in the “r/Managers” subreddit and how to turn each one into a manager skill you can use:

• A new employee asking for more visibility and wondering, “Why am I not in all the meetings?”
• Taking over a team and being asked to deliver feedback for work you never set or reviewed.
• An open‑calendar policy—but your team still asks, “Why can’t I be in everything?”

We talk about the deeper ask behind each one: it’s rarely entitlement. It’s belonging. Clarity. Recognition. And we explore the two‑minute question you should ask next time you’re frustrated: What is this person really trying to say? Then you’ll know exactly what to do.

Tune in and let’s strip away the noise, reset your baseline, and build managing into the easy part of your job.

**

Looking for support for your team? Reach out at hello@liagarvin.com

When a top performer leaves, the line often sounds the same: “I just wanted something different.”

But the truth is, they probably didn’t see what was possible here.

In this episode of The New Manager Playbook, I walk through how one conversation, done right, can be the reason someone stays.

We’ll talk about:

• Why engagement is down (and what that really means for you as a manager)
• What makes a career conversation different from a performance review
• The delegation trap: how giving away the right work builds trust, not risk
• What to do if a team member tells you something you can’t immediately act on

And why following up matters even more than what you say in the meeting.

This episode is for any manager who's trying to stop the slow drip of good people walking out the door.