A Team Whisperer is a translator between a business owner or leader and their team, surfacing the real reasons work stalls and people resist change. Lia uses this role to bridge communication gaps, uncover hidden fears, and craft the right level of messaging for each layer of a team. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel stuck in the weeds or whose team keeps pushing back on decisions.
This episode is part of the Communication, Vision & Buy-in series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…79% of employees worldwide feel disengaged. So literally only one in five employees actually feels like, yeah, I’m here. I’m ready to do this.”
“…if things don’t work themselves out, problems get worse. If your team is feeling unmotivated, how would that like work itself out?”
“…we show them why they matter. And it doesn’t matter what kind of job someone’s in, I’m telling you.”
“…when folks see that shift, their entire, entire, entire way they approach their job changes.”
Episode highlights
79% of employees are disengaged. That number is on you to change.
Gallup’s latest State of the Workplace report landed a striking stat: 79% of employees worldwide feel disengaged. That means only one in five people actually shows up ready to go. And engagement has been dropping point by point, year over year. Lia’s take is direct: this does not fix itself. Unmotivated teams, unclear expectations, revolving-door turnover, these things get worse without deliberate intervention. The post-summer moment, what Gen Z is calling “The Great Lock-In,” is the window leaders have to change the trajectory before December 31st.
“It’ll work itself out” is the most expensive thing a leader can say
Lia calls out one of the most common traps she hears from leaders: waiting to see if things self-correct. They do not. A team member with a bad attitude, a group that only does exactly what is spelled out, people quietly checking out because the year feels chaotic and uncertain. None of that resolves on its own. The lock-in is not about pushing people to burnout. It is about naming the moment, giving people something to care about, and stepping into it together.
What a HoloLens all-nighter taught Lia about team buy-in
When Lia was at Microsoft working toward the HoloLens launch, the team pulled all-nighters for weeks leading up to the BUILD conference demo. People came in on Saturdays and Sundays. They brought lunch, played music, and stayed until 6am when the demo finally worked. Then everyone screamed, cheered, and went to get McDonald’s breakfast. The detail that stuck: even if you did not strictly need to be there, there was no way you were leaving. That is what a shared goal does. It makes people want to be in it, not because they have to be, but because they care.
You can create that feeling at a med spa, a stationary store, or anywhere else
The most common pushback Lia gets: “That works for launching a cool tech product. But what about my team?” Her answer is to get specific about why each role matters. She gives two examples that stick:
At a med spa, the person cleaning rooms between appointments might seem like a low-stakes role. But if a client notices anything dirty or late on their visit, that is the first thing showing up on Yelp. That person is protecting the entire client experience.
For program managers in tech, who often feel administrative and invisible, Lia reframes it this way: without someone tracking the schedule, flagging risks ahead of time, and keeping deliverables clear, there is nothing holding the product together. They are keeping the train on the tracks. When she shared that framing with the program managers she led, their entire approach to the work changed.
The principle is the same regardless of industry: show people how they fit into the bigger picture and their demeanor shifts.
How to sustain the lock-in week over week
Setting a goal is the ignition. Keeping people engaged through December requires a lightweight weekly practice. That is exactly what Lia’s Snippets Template is built for. Each Friday, team members map out their top wins and accomplishments, where they are stuck or need support, and their priorities for the following week. It is not a status report. It is a structured way to celebrate progress, surface blockers early, and keep everyone oriented toward the goal. Grab it free at liagarvin.com/snippets.
The move: pick a goal, connect every person to it, celebrate along the way
The Great Lock-In is not a TikTok trend to scroll past. It is a real reset moment that leaders can use intentionally. Set a goal your team can rally around. Spend time understanding what motivates each person and how their specific role connects to that goal. Recognize wins consistently, not just at year-end. And stop waiting for things to work themselves out. Four out of five people on your team may be disengaged right now. That number is not fixed. It is leadership-responsive.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 234: How to get your team to actually adopt any new process or tool. When a new tool or process stalls, the problem is almost never the tool. It is the framing. Lead with what each person specifically gets out of it, and adoption follows. This episode is most useful for owners and team leads who have introduced something new only to watch their team keep doing it the old way.
- Ep 211: How to communicate vision so your team actually buys in. Teams disengage from vision not because the strategy is wrong, but because the message is only delivered once, from one person, without connecting to daily work. Lia breaks down the cascade problem, the repetition principle, and how to equip every level of your leadership chain to carry the message. This episode is essential for founders, executives, and team leads heading into a new planning cycle.
- Ep 204: What your team is really asking for when requests feel frustrating or confusing. When a team member’s request feels entitled or annoying, there is almost always a deeper need underneath, usually around recognition, clarity, or belonging. Lia’s move is a two-minute pause to ask what the person actually means before deciding how to respond. This episode is most useful for founders and operators navigating the contradictions of growing a team.
- Ep 103: What is a Team Whisperer and how can one fix your communication breakdowns?. A Team Whisperer is a translator between a business owner or leader and their team, surfacing the real reasons work stalls and people resist change. Lia uses this role to bridge communication gaps, uncover hidden fears, and craft the right level of messaging for each layer of a team. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel stuck in the weeds or whose team keeps pushing back on decisions.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Are you locked in? September is here, summer is over, kids are back to school, and the great September lock-in is in full effect. So if you haven’t been paying attention, this is something that Gen Z has coined as this kind of rush towards the end of the year where we’re going to go all in, whether it’s on well-being or on our goal setting or whatever it is. And so I want us to take this moment, the great lock-in, and think to ourselves, how am I applying this to my teams and my leadership and my business or whatever it is that I need to be applying this to?
Because this is a great moment and it’s not just because it’s a trend on TikTok. It’s because this is a reminder that we have, you know, however many weeks left in the year, however many Mondays to kick things off, however many Fridays to wind things down, however many weeks to set goals to make progress on the things that we want to. Now, it’s not to scare you into burning everyone out and burning the candle on both ends and on creating chaos.
It’s to really level set you that we have this moment we can all kind of reignite energy around, especially when it comes to our teams. Because I don’t know, I don’t know about you, but I felt like this summer was really slow, like people really stepped away. They really took some time off, which is awesome because I think a lot of us needed to do that. But now it’s a moment to say, okay, we’re back. Let’s re-energize our teams.
Because if we don’t seize that moment, then we kind of just like hum along towards the end of the year and finish with a sort of like an uneventful stop. It doesn’t set us up well for the next year. And it certainly doesn’t keep our teams or businesses competitive. So we don’t want to do that. All right. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. How to really fully tap into the great lock-in. I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the New Manager Playbook.
And I’m on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. Because dealing with people, well, it’s hard enough. So I want to kind of paint a picture of, again, this year. It’s been a lot for people. Ton of uncertainty in the economy, political uncertainty, a lot going on, threats of AI and layoffs and automations taking over every kind of company. So let’s think about it from your team’s perspective. They’re like, they’re exhausted.
They’re like, gosh, I just want some clarity and some certainty. I just want to know what the hell’s going on if I’m gonna have a job in six months. So people are feeling really low. And that’s not just my personal observations, of which I’m observing it every freaking day. But Gallup just came out with their state of the workplace report, and they’re finding that 79% of employees worldwide feel disengaged. So literally only one in five employees actually feels like, yeah, I’m here.
I’m ready to do this. Four out of five employees are really struggling. So this means we got to do something about it. And that’s where the great lock-in comes into play. It is this moment that we can re-energize folks around. Or it’s something that we can miss the boat on it when there’s like a lot of kind of positive energy in the world going on right now. And we can say like, yeah, I’m just gonna like leave it and see what happens.
I hear this a lot, and that’s why I want to say it. What I hear a lot, things should just work themselves out. I’m going to deal with it later. People will just kind of figure it out their way. And the truth is, if things don’t work themselves out, problems get worse. If your team is feeling unmotivated, how would that like work itself out? Just like think about that for a second. How is that going to work itself out?
If people don’t have clear expectations, how is that going to work itself out? If your team isn’t really operating as productively as they could, if someone has a really bad attitude, if you’ve had a revolving door of talent and you have people quitting, you know, continually, how is that going to work itself out? Just like explain it to yourself in your mind for a second. That stuff doesn’t work itself out. It actually just gets worse and worse and worse.
And we know this because employee engagement is lower and lower and lower year over year. Think about two or three years ago, it was like 33% engagement. And that was like, oh God, that’s bad. Now we’re at 31%, right? Or I think it was maybe 40. So we’re dropping point by point by point by point every single year. And what does that look like? Folks don’t show up to work excited. They don’t finish projects as strong as they could.
They’re not going above and beyond. They only do what’s spelled out for them. And if you’re a business owner, that is the stuff that keeps you completely in the weed. That’s what I call kind of shifting into an ownership mindset. When people say, well, that’s the task, but there’s such a better way we could do this. And you want to reignite that in people. You want to ignite it in the first place, and then you want to keep it ignited.
Now, if you work in a corporate team, I get it. It’s a weird time. Okay. It is a weird time. A lot of layoffs, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of threats of automation. So the great lock-in is your time to say, hey, I don’t know what’s going on in the future. I don’t know maybe what’s going on past December 31st, but in the next three and a half months, we are going to like really give it our all.
We’re going to connect as a team. We’re going to recognize good work. We’re going to give feedback. We’re going to roll up our sleeves and solve hard problems. We’re going to get a little bit scrappy and try to get things done. We’re going to finish strong because when we finish strong, that creates this positive morale, this positive buzz on the team that makes us realize, yeah, we actually can do hard things. We can deliver even when things feel uncertain or chaotic.
And that feeling is what people need right now. They need something to care about. And so when we get everyone aligned around a common thing, the great lock-in, finishing strong, a big deliverable, and we show them, I’m not just pushing you to grind you to the bone. I’m not just trying to burn you out, but we’re all doing this together to get to some point. So you’ve got to set that goal. This is what reignites all your teams.
I’m telling you, I’ve seen it over and over and over. Back when I was at Microsoft, we were working towards launching the HoloLens. So the first augmented reality headset or holographic computer. And I remember we were working towards the build demo. And we were really, let’s just say we had the demo in a few weeks and we were not close to doing that. And the team at the time was all in person, obviously. It was about eight, 10 years ago.
And we worked every single weekend. We worked every single weekend for about nine months to ship that product. But leading up to this demo, we came in, we stayed late. We came on Saturday, on Sunday, we brought lunch, we played music. We were all rallying towards this common goal. And it was about a few days before the demo. And we all stayed, every single person. We came in on a Saturday and we stayed and pulled an all-nighter.
And I remember this. We were all delirious. We were just kind of like, oh my God, we were watching the demo again and again, and it wasn’t quite working. And then finally at 6am, we got it and we were all screaming and cheering and people went and got McDonald’s breakfast. And it was like this moment. We all rallied towards something. We were all there and there was no way, even if you didn’t really need to be there all night, that you were going to leave.
Like no way. You were in it. And it’s hard to find that right now, obviously, with distributed teams. And if you’re hybrid or if you’re working full remote, it can be hard to find that common thing. But I’ll always remember that night because not only did a friend of mine show me how to do the moonwalk, which was a pretty, pretty, made it worth it for me. We were all there. We all cared so much. And that enthusiasm actually carried us forward.
So once we did that demo, it was a success on stage at the BUILD conference, we continued to work over the weekend again and again and again. And it was because we knew like, hey, we’re all in this together. And I’m telling you, your teams, they can go above and beyond. They can do very hard things. They can be resilient. They can put in more hours. They can do whatever is needed if they feel passionate about it, if they care about it.
And if you’re sitting there thinking, well, yeah, you’re launching a kind of cool computer that might have been interesting to folks. But we’re a stationary store. Who cares? Or we’re just shipping widgets or whatever. How do you make that connection? Well, you spend time getting to know your team members. You create a goal. You connect their job to how that works to launching it. So you say, hey, here’s how you fit into the bigger picture. And you get everyone excited about their piece in the puzzle.
I work with a lot of med spas, and I’m often asked this question. Yeah, I get like, you know, how does the head injector feel like they’re moving the needle in the business? But what about the person that’s just cleaning up the medical offices between appointments? How does that person feel like they fit into the bigger picture? How do I get that person motivated? They’re literally just cleaning machines, setting up like, you know, shots and wiping down, you know, tables.
How does that person care? I said, well, that person might be the most important person in your team. Because when you come to a med spa or a gym or a salon or anything like that, and it’s, you know, and it’s a high end place, what is the first thing you notice? If it’s dirty, if it’s messy, if it seems gross, if it’s unkept, if the things are late. And so people may not compliment that, but that’s the first thing you’re going to read on Yelp or Google reviews if it’s missing.
So those medical assistants, the folks, the med techs that are kind of cleaning things up between, they might have the most important job because they actually keep up the whole appearance. They keep everything running smoothly. Now, I’ve had this same question come up with software program managers. Program managers can feel very administrative. It can feel like, well, gosh, you know, or a project manager, program manager, you know, I’m just kind of tactical and how does my job matter?
And I’ve gotten this question before because I managed program managers for many years working in tech. And in the very same way, I said, well, gosh, you know, I get it. The product manager, they’re kind of always the front facing person. The head engineer, yes. The UXer. But the program manager or the project manager in some cases, they’re the glue that holds the whole thing together. If you don’t have a clear schedule, deliverables outlined, someone really looking ahead at what risks are coming and outlining how we’re going to mitigate those, if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.
And so the program manager, they are, they literally are keeping the train on the tracks. And when I shared this with program managers in my career, their complete demeanor changed. Even if they were working on some random feature that they didn’t really care about, they cared about it because they mattered. And that is how we get people to care and to feel this great lock-in. Is that we show them why they matter. And it doesn’t matter what kind of job someone’s in, I’m telling you.
And if you’re struggling with this, please come ask me, you know, how to connect that to your teams. Because I teach this all the time. Because when folks see that shift, their entire, entire, entire way they approach their job changes. I’m telling you. And a big piece of this, it’s recognizing work, right? It’s saying, hey, what are the wins? What are we doing? What’s going well? And that’s how we sustain this great lock-in, right? We don’t just wait till December 31st and go, did we make it?
No, we say, hey, here’s how you connect to the bigger picture. And let’s celebrate the things that are going well along the way. It’s not participation awards, it’s giving meaningful feedback. That’s why folks love my snippets template. Because we write down every week, Friday, map out, top wins and accomplishments, right? You know, where am I stuck or need support so you make sure folks are really flowing and the priorities for next week. Because if we don’t have a sense of that, how do we keep people engaged?
How do we keep people really working towards that goal? We can’t. So that’s the first place to start if you’re like, I don’t even know how to approach this. Grab the snippets template. It’s at liagarva.com slash snippets. And it’s a super lightweight practice that is mostly centered around celebrating wins and keeping that momentum. That’s why folks are loving it because it’s very, very easy to use. And frankly, it’s not another status report, but you get to understand the status of work.
But I want you to take this moment, everyone else is doing it. It’s all over TikTok. Be a part of the great lock-in. Reignite your team, re-energize folks around it. And let’s bring that 79% of people who feel disengaged. Let’s try to get it to like 70. Let’s try to, let’s try to get even lower. Let’s have your team not be the case. Right? I remember Jon Stewart years ago had a skit around like four out of five dentists for men recommend brushing your teeth.
And he had like, well, what is that fifth dentist? Like, wow, who cares? You know, it’s like, this is, why do you want to have a team where only one out of five people really wants to be there? Let’s get it up to three to four. Let’s get it up to all five. That is completely in your control. And if you need support, you know who to call. Talk soon.
Questions this episode answers
How do I re-energize my team after a slow summer and get them focused for the rest of the year?
Set a clear goal everyone can rally around and connect each person's role to that goal. People disengage when they feel like what they do doesn't matter. When you show a team member exactly how their piece fits the bigger picture, their whole approach to their work changes. Then celebrate wins along the way, not just at year end. A simple weekly practice of noting top wins, where people are stuck, and priorities for next week keeps momentum going without burning anyone out.
How do I motivate a team member whose job feels routine or unimportant?
Show them the impact of what breaks down when their role is missing. A medical assistant cleaning equipment between appointments might seem low stakes, but a dirty or disorganized space is the first thing a customer notices and the first thing that shows up in a bad review. A project manager might feel purely administrative, but without someone tracking risks and keeping deliverables clear, the whole team falls apart. Once people see they are genuinely keeping the train on the tracks, their entire attitude toward the work shifts.
Is it possible to build team momentum without pushing people to burn out?
Yes, and the difference is framing. You are not asking people to grind themselves down. You are inviting them into something shared. When you give people a common goal, show them why it matters, and recognize progress along the way, they often choose to go above and beyond on their own. The goal gives people something to care about, and caring is what drives effort. The burnout risk comes from pressure without purpose. Purpose is the thing that makes hard stretches feel worth it.
Why does team disengagement keep getting worse if leaders just wait for things to work themselves out?
Problems like low motivation, unclear expectations, and bad attitudes do not resolve on their own. They compound. Gallup data shows global employee engagement has been dropping year over year and is now at around 21 percent, meaning roughly four out of five employees feel checked out. Waiting and hoping things sort themselves out just allows small issues to grow into bigger ones. If you want a team that finishes strong and sets up the next year well, you have to actively create the conditions for engagement rather than waiting for it to appear.
What is a simple weekly habit that helps leaders keep their team engaged and on track?
A short weekly check-in format works well. Each week, team members note their top wins and accomplishments, where they are stuck or need support, and their priorities for the coming week. This is not a status report, it is a lightweight way to celebrate what is going well, catch blockers early, and keep everyone moving toward the goal. Recognizing wins consistently is what sustains engagement between big milestones rather than only checking in at the end of the year.