When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
This episode is part of the Delegation, Bottleneck & Getting Out of the Weeds series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…meeting overload is usually one of the biggest culprits of this feeling like no time.”
“…when we’re there all the time, we’re just getting spread so thin that we can’t keep our head above water.”
“What if you never, ever get out of the weeds, you become more of a bottleneck. You burnout. Eventually you leave anyway.”
“…when they start stepping into that leadership, this is game changing. This allows you to scale and it lets them feel like, yes, I can take on a bigger role.”
Episode highlights
The time squeeze every manager knows
If you constantly feel like there are not enough hours in the day to meet with your team, finish your own work, and still lead well, you are not alone. Lia opens by naming the specific trap many new managers fall into: the player-coach model, where you are overseeing a team and still carrying a full individual-contributor load. Two jobs for the price of one is great for the company and exhausting for you.
Meeting overload is usually the biggest culprit
Before you can fix your schedule, you have to diagnose it. Lia’s first question: how many of the meetings you attend also have your team members in them? That overlap is where the biggest opportunity lives. When you are in every room, you spread yourself impossibly thin and, more importantly, you block your team from stepping up. Both problems feed each other.
The objections managers raise (and why they do not hold up)
Lia anticipates every pushback: “They need me there.” “Who will advocate for us?” “What if they get it wrong?” She does not dismiss those fears, but she reframes the stakes. If you never let go, you become the bottleneck, you burn out, and you leave anyway. Staying in every meeting to prevent a mistake now guarantees a bigger problem later.
A separate concern she hears constantly: “My team members actually want me there because our VP is tough and I run interference.” Valid. But the answer is not to stay forever. The answer is to prepare them.
Train your team to lead the room without you
This is the practical core of the episode. Lia walks through a concrete example: engineers in a meeting where the product team tends to pile on new requests. Instead of just pulling yourself from the meeting and hoping for the best, sit down with whoever is stepping in and script the response. Her suggested language: “Yeah, we will take a look, go back and have a conversation with Lia, and I will get back to you once we figure out how it fits in the schedule.”
The point is simple but easy to overlook. Your team members do not instinctively know they do not have to agree to everything in the moment. That is a skill you can teach them explicitly, in one conversation, before you step out.
Why letting go is how everybody wins
When team members start leading meetings on their own, something shifts for them too. They feel capable. They see a path to a bigger role. They grow. You scale. Lia frames this not as a management tactic but as the move that unlocks the whole system: you hired people who can help you grow, and not letting them do that is the thing keeping you stuck, not the volume of work on your plate.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 233: Why you’re still the point person for everything (and how to fix it). Being stuck as the final decision-maker on everything is almost never a delegation problem. Before delegation can work, three things have to be in place: the right people, clarity on where you as the owner should focus, and simple systems that reduce noise. This episode is most useful for business owners and team leads who have already hired and communicated expectations but are still buried in the weeds.
- Ep 231: Why delegating keeps failing (and the shift that actually fixes it). Delegation fails when leaders dispatch tasks instead of handing off outcomes, keeping themselves as the bottleneck at every step. The fix is shifting from fetch-the-answer assignments to giving a team member ownership of a full result, with clear context, defined success, and agreed checkpoints. This episode is especially useful for leaders who know they should delegate more but still find everything coming back to them.
- Ep 225: How to stop being the bottleneck on every decision your team makes. When your team brings every decision to you for final sign-off, you are doing two jobs at once and your team is never building real ownership. Lia’s fix is to articulate your own decision-making process, then deliberately offload specific decisions with a simple communication system so you stay informed without staying in the weeds. This episode is especially useful for founders and team leads whose capable people are still waiting on them before moving forward.
- Ep 221: Clients keep asking for you by name. How do you hand off work without losing their trust?. When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
0:00
Welcome back to the show and to another episode of Inside the New Manager Playbook. How often do you feel like you don’t have enough time? You don’t have time to meet with your team to do the projects you need to do to get everything done in a week, like every second of the day. Yeah, we all feel like that. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less.
I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant for this show am I programs with small businesses and corporate teams. I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time money. Most of all, stress doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realize that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning 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. And as manager and especially new managers, this can be so overwhelming and exhausting. We feel like I don’t even know if I can do this anymore. And I know as a new manager, I really struggle with this balance.
And I felt like I was never keeping up, like I wanted to be with my teams more. But then I was still doing a lot of my individual contributor work. I was in one of those situations. A lot of us are in where you’re in this player coach model, right, where you’re overseeing a team, but you still have a lot of your own individual responsibilities. And yeah, it’s a two and two job for the price of one for the company, which is awesome.
Not awesome for the manager. That’s topics for another day. But we all, we can feel so squeezed and it’s exhausting. And I think this feeling like we don’t have enough time, it starts to really prevent us from delegating. And so I want to talk about this a little bit. I talk about, again, really at length in the book. All these episodes are stuff I talk about in the book, of really thinking about something that I know a lot of us get real nervous when I say it, so I’m gonna say, I know that’s coming.
How many of the meetings at your end? Because meeting overload is usually one of the biggest culprits of this feeling like no time. How many of the meetings that you’re in are your team members? Also in this posing the question, you know, this becomes the biggest source of opportunity to get more time for yourself. And I know if someone said that to me when I was new at managing, I’d be like, so, like they need me there.
I would think to myself, well, how am I going to get the context or, well, you know, there’s some things that I have to be talking about or advocating for. Who else is going to do it? These are the types of things that we start to say to ourselves. But the problem is, when we’re there all the time, we’re just getting spread so thin that we can’t keep our head above water. Now, that’s not the only problem.
We also prevent our team members from stepping up and that will that’s what’s going to keep us stock. It’s not just that we have so much going on, it’s that we have a team because there are people right there at our fingertips ready to help us scale, and we’re not letting them do that. I know it’s scary. I know that it feels like, well, what if they get it wrong? What if they don’t represent what we have to do?
What if they blow with the client? What if this, what if that, what if this? What if you never, ever get out of the weeds, you become more of a bottleneck. You burnout. Eventually you leave anyway. And so it doesn’t even freaking matter. You have to utilize your team better. Well, one thing that I hear a lot say, but my team members want me there. They don’t like it. They have a they we have a really tough VP and they want me to kind of shoot them for that.
Or if I’m not in the meetings, they’re going to get assigned all this work and no one’s going to be a buffer. I hear you, I hear that all the time. We have to train our team members on what to do in those situations. For example, with the one where, you know, if you’re not there, someone’s going to sign a bunch of work to your team, sit down with your team members and say, or whoever’s kind of going in your place and say, hey, I know this isn’t meaning where.
Let’s say it’s a group of engineers, okay, I know this is a meeting where when you’re there on your own, the product team starts throwing out a bunch of new ideas at you, and you feel like you kind of have to agree to it. Well, I’m not going to be there. I really want you to take the lead. And when someone proposes a bunch of work, just say, hey, yeah, we’ll take a look. We’ll go back and have a conversation with Leah and we’ll I’ll get back to you when we when we figure out what we have, how that fits in the schedule.
Coach. Your team members that they don’t have to agree to everything. Don’t just go there because you feel like they don’t know. They don’t have to agree to everything. It’s a conversation you can have with them. And I know you might feel like you’re oversimplifying and it’s more complicated than that, but it really isn’t. It’s about training your team members on the key things that you look out for, and the things that you would be doing when you’re in the meeting.
So they can try. Because when they start stepping into that leadership, this is game changing. This allows you to scale and it lets them feel like, yes, I can take on a bigger role. I can become a leader on this team. It shows them so much is possible and now they are growing and you’re scaling and oh my gosh, everybody wins. Literally. Okay, so I really want you to think about that. And again, I talk about it more in the book on ways to do that.
How many meetings are you in that you also have team members in? And where can you offload some of this, and what do you have to do to make that happen? All right. New Manager playbook comes out January 27th to get on the list for exclusive updates. Had to league overcommit new book. And if it’s past January 27th pick it up on Amazon. And I am so excited to see what you think. This has been such a joy to write, to talk about with folks, to get feedback on.
And yeah, it is just it’s all going to be, you know, my goal is to make managing your team as, you know, the easiest part of your job. So if this can make it just a little bit easier, then mission accomplished. 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.
Questions this episode answers
How do I find more time as a manager when I'm completely overwhelmed?
Start by looking at your meetings. How many meetings are you in where your team members are also present? That overlap is your biggest opportunity. When you are in every meeting alongside your team, you spread yourself too thin and block your team from stepping up. Identifying those meetings and stepping back from some of them, after coaching your team on how to handle them, is one of the fastest ways to reclaim your time without dropping anything important.
What if my team members don't know how to handle meetings without me there?
Coach them before you step back. Sit down with whoever is going in your place and walk them through the specific situations they will face. For example, if a product team tends to pile on new requests, tell your team member they do not have to agree on the spot. They can say they will bring it back to you and follow up once the team reviews capacity. Your team members likely do not know they have that option until you tell them. That conversation is the system they have been missing.
Why is refusing to delegate actually making things worse for my team?
When you stay in every meeting and hold onto every responsibility, you become a bottleneck. Your team cannot grow, you cannot scale, and eventually burnout forces you out anyway. You have people right there ready to help you scale the work, and not letting them do that keeps everyone stuck. When team members start stepping into leadership roles, they grow, you free up capacity, and the whole team moves faster. Holding on too tight costs everyone.
How do I delegate when I'm worried my team will agree to too much work without me there?
Have a direct conversation with your team member before the meeting. Tell them they do not have to commit to anything on the spot. Give them a simple script: they can tell stakeholders they will review the request with you and follow up once they know how it fits the schedule. Most team members feel pressured to say yes because no one has told them they are allowed to pause and check in first. That one coaching conversation changes everything.
What's the real reason managers struggle to delegate even when they know they should?
Fear drives most of it. Fears like what if they get it wrong, what if they upset a client, what if no one advocates for the team. Those concerns feel very real, especially for new leaders. But the alternative, staying in everything, leads to burnout and never getting out of the weeds. The fix is not to just let go cold turkey. It is to train your team on exactly what you watch for and what you would do, so they can step in with confidence and you can step back without everything falling apart.