When your company mandates a return to office, your job as a leader is to get your team on board, even if you have mixed feelings yourself. Lia walks through the one pitfall to avoid (naysaying the policy alongside your team), how to make in-person time actually worthwhile, and how to prepare for the wave of exceptions that will follow. This episode is most useful for leaders navigating a hybrid or full return-to-office rollout right now.
This episode is part of the Leading Through Change & Uncertainty series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“High performers are always going to be looking for the best option for themselves. It is never a surprise when a high performer leaves because that person knows their value and they know there’s something out there.”
“…in an uncertain environment, it’s what we have full control over. All we really have control over is how we react, how we respond, how we talk to our team members, what our tone is, how we show up every day.”
Episode highlights
The gap nobody talks about: managers and employees feel the exact same thing
Right now, leaders are telling Lia their teams are checked out. When Lia then sits down with those same team members one-on-one, she hears the opposite: “I’m working so hard and my boss isn’t giving me any credit.” Both sides feel completely unseen. That mismatch is the real problem, and it gets worse when uncertainty makes everyone defensive. Before assuming your team is coasting, ask whether you have actually told them what “done” looks like.
Start with yourself: have you been clear?
The first move is an honest self-audit. When priorities shift constantly and someone picks the wrong thing to focus on, that is a project management failure, not a motivation failure. If you have not explicitly said “this comes off the list so you can focus on that,” you do not get to be surprised when they guessed wrong. Clarity on expectations is not a nice-to-have right now. It is the foundation everything else sits on.
Proactive check-ins as a retention strategy
High performers always have options. They are the first ones to leave when a team starts to feel erratic, and they are the least likely to send warning signals before they walk. Lia’s move: get ahead of it with proactive check-ins that re-enlist people on an ongoing basis. You cannot promise there will be no layoffs or reorg. You can say, “While you are on this team, here is what I am going to do to help you build this skill and get to your goal.” That kind of commitment costs nothing and keeps people in the game.
Managing your own reactivity (your team can already feel it)
Your team reads your vibe the same way your kids do. Saying “everything is fine” while your face says otherwise does not fool anyone. Venting frustration about one team member to the rest of the group is even worse because everyone immediately wonders what you say about them when they leave the room. Lia is clear: find another outlet. Talk to someone on your leadership peer group, a colleague, a coach. Your job as a leader is to create a foundation of stability, even when you do not feel stable yourself.
Confirmation bias will wreck you faster than the economy will
When you are already frustrated, your brain starts hunting for proof that the frustration is justified. Someone shows up five minutes late and you think, “here we go again,” even though you have never actually addressed the meeting start time directly. That is confirmation bias doing its work. The antidote is a simple sequence: set the expectation, give the feedback in the moment (not at year-end review), then watch for a pattern. Only after you have done those steps can you accurately assess whether there is a real performance issue or a skill gap or a caretaking situation you did not know about. Skipping straight to “this person does not care” creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that poisons your ability to turn anything around.
What you actually control right now
Uncertainty strips away a lot of control. What remains is entirely yours: how you react, how you speak to your team, what tone you bring, how you show up, and what you do to regulate yourself before you walk into the room. Leaders who do that work keep their high performers. Leaders who do not watch their best people quietly start looking elsewhere. Self-management is not soft skill fluff right now. It is the most strategic thing a leader can do.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 209: Why your team still feels lost even when you are communicating. When your team feels unsettled despite your updates, the problem is usually a perception gap, not a missing fact. Lia breaks down a two-domain framework for separating what people perceive from what they actually experience, and explains why addressing perception first gets you 80 percent of the way there without changing a thing. This episode is especially useful for founders, executives, and leaders managing managers through ongoing change and uncertainty.
- Ep 201: What most leaders get wrong when talking about change (and how to fix it). Most leaders either go silent or commiserate with their team during change, and both approaches deepen anxiety and disengagement. The fix is a two-part move: acknowledge the frustration honestly, then share what you know or how you plan to find out. This episode is most useful for founders, executives, and managers navigating reorgs, priority shifts, or any moment when the ground is moving under their team.
- Ep 200: How to lead through fear and uncertainty without losing your team. When fear takes over, managers default to micromanaging, martyrdom, and reactive decisions that drive away the exact people they need most. Lia and leadership expert Megan Karsh lay out why gritty, honest hope outperforms false reassurance every time. This episode is essential for owners, founders, and managers who are stuck in the middle of pressure from above and anxiety from below.
- Ep 165: Return to office is coming: how to set your team up for success. When your company mandates a return to office, your job as a leader is to get your team on board, even if you have mixed feelings yourself. Lia walks through the one pitfall to avoid (naysaying the policy alongside your team), how to make in-person time actually worthwhile, and how to prepare for the wave of exceptions that will follow. This episode is most useful for leaders navigating a hybrid or full return-to-office rollout right now.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
Everyone’s freaking out right now. I mean, everybody, nobody knows what the future hold when it comes to AI or the economy or jobs or any of this stuff. Everybody’s freaking out. You’re freaking out. And you know what? Your team members are too. And one of the things that I’ve been seeing so much recently coming from my clients and my workshops and my consulting, my coaching, everyone is like thinking none of their employees are trying to work very hard.
And when I have one-on-ones with your team members, they’re saying the opposite. Like I’m working so hard and my boss isn’t giving me any credit. So today I want to talk about really how to bridge that communication. Because the worst thing we can do when things are uncertain and we’re really unclear of where the future holds is to kind of like throw away our employees and assume that they’re not doing anything. Okay, I am urging you.
Give this a listen. Try the things I’m talking about. And there’s so much more that is salvageable about your situation. All right. I’m Leah Garvin and this is the new manager playbook where I talk about all things managing your team because dealing with people is hard enough. So I’m here to make it easy, make it straightforward and really get you out of this stuck place when it comes to managing. So what does this look like? This uncertainty?
I mean, I would say how it shows up for us as leaders is we are carrying so much pressure, so much weight. If you’re a CEO or a business owner, you got the whole business to figure out, like all that is on your shoulders. You’re paying everybody’s salaries, right? It’s all on you. The pressure, the future, all these things. And you’re trying to figure out, well, how do you stay profitable? How do you grow? How do you keep expanding the business?
What new team members are you bringing on? That is a lot to carry and to be thinking about. And so it’s natural that that is feeling stressful. Okay. And now if you’re a corporate leader, you’re dealing with uncertainty around layoffs, around priorities shifting constantly. Maybe your company is doing one thing and then all of a sudden the competitor is doing something else and there’s a lot of pivots. There’s reorgs. There’s really a general in the corporate world, I would say, we’re kind of all wrestling with.
General, just like low motivation. There’s been a lot of change. It’s really scary. You know, am I going to be replaced by AI? Is my role going to be eliminated? There’s a ton of fear right now, right? So if you’re a corporate leader, you’re dealing with having a ton of questions coming at you that you don’t know. That you probably maybe don’t know how to answer or really can’t answer anyway, even if you do kind of know where things are going.
So this is a really, really hard moment right now. And I want to empathize with that first and foremost, we are all kind of like, what’s going on? You know, we’re hoping that things kind of get more stable soon, of course, but like, we don’t know that. And everybody as a leader, you know, everyone’s going to be coming to you to get some sort of sense of stability. And what I’m hearing right now from leaders, whether it’s corporate leaders or your business owner, entrepreneur, founder, whatever you’re in, is that some of that pressure is coming through to your teams.
And they’re not feeling like they have that sense of stability. And the way I’m seeing it is, I have a lot of what I want with employees. So a lot of times I work with a team and I work with the leaders and we figure out kind of what changes we want to make or what kind of trainings or workshops we want to do with the team. And then I meet with folks one-on-one to really understand, you know, what is their sentiment, what’s going well, what could be improved so that I can really connect the dots.
And we’re all saying the same things, the manager’s saying, I feel like my team is not invested and was really working that hard. Like I’m just like, what’s going on here? And the team members are saying, I feel like my manager doesn’t see all the work I’m doing. Like how do I explain it to them? How do I get through to them? So we’re both feeling the exact same issue, completely misunderstood. This is where the team whisperer comes into play, right?
Because I have to connect the dots and bridge that. So that’s what I want to help you do today is, well, how do you get a real pulse of what’s going on in your team, assess, is my team member working hard enough or are they doing the right things? Like, where’s this gap showing up? And it’s not a one size fits all solution, but what we have to do is to first and foremost, we have to really, really think about, have I been clear?
Am I being clear with the expectation setting, with what I want to, with what I think done looks like, what a good job looks like? Have I been shifting priorities and not talking about how we’re going to assess trade-offs? Someone already had a full set of work and now we throw something new at them. We may not, they may not pick the right thing to take off that list. There’s actually some steps there to make sure, okay, here’s your full set of work.
How are we going to load balance? This is going to come off, focus on that next week. That sort of project management, if that’s not happening with your team member’s work, it’s on us if we’re surprised that they prioritize the wrong thing, or if they’re starting to get overwhelmed, or they’re telling us like, I don’t know what to focus on every day, it’s something new. But that’s what starts to happen when we haven’t had those conversations.
So this is really important to do is thinking first and foremost with ourselves. Have I been being clear? Now, one thing that’s coming up a lot is the really big fear about losing good performers. High turnover, we talk about it so much, right? It costs between 50% and 200% of someone’s salary to replace them. And if you have a high performer leave, and you’re blindsided, I’ve talked about this recently on the show, it’s on you, right?
Because by checking with our team members, we can kind of get a better pulse on that. We know we can’t always prevent people from leaving, but we don’t have to be blindsided. So the next thing we want to be doing is, as we’re checking ourselves, saying, well, am I checking in with my team members to kind of get a sense of how are they doing? Are they feeling unmotivated? What are things that I can adjust? Are there ways that I can look ahead at future projects and say, hey, right now we have this big push, we have to get to this milestone.
And your goal of being a manager, your goal of working on this kind of thing, it’s on my radar, and I’m going to figure out a way to get you involved in that work soon. The proactive check-ins are not only a retention strategy, it’s to continue to re-enlist your people over and over and over and over. We can’t promise certainty. We can’t promise that there won’t be a regor, there won’t be layoffs, there won’t be a pivot, nothing like that.
We can say, hey, while you’re here, while you’re on this team, here’s what I’m going to do to help you get to your goal. Here’s what I’m going to do to help you build this skill, to make the most out of it while you’re on this team. That’s something we have to be doing all of the time. Now the next thing we’re doing is we’re checking with ourselves, okay, have I set expectations? Have I proactively checked in with my team members?
We also want to be thinking about, am I managing my own reactivity and stress levels? Your team members, they see when you’re stressed, they see when you’re happy, they see when you’re not. Our kids, they can tell our vibe is off, right? They talk about this with parenting all the time. Your kids are so much more perceptive to how you’re showing up. And when you’re like, yeah, everything’s fine, and you’re smiling, but you’re dead behind the eyes, they see that, right?
Your team members are the same way. So when you’re saying everything’s fine, but you’re wearing on your face that nothing is fine, or you’re saying everything’s fine, but you’re constantly reactive, or you’re kind of gossiping about people, or you’re really negative, or you’re talking about people like team members and showing your frustrations about things, that starts to poison your team. And I want to be really clear about this one because, hey, we’re all human and we’re all struggling.
And we all might have feelings of being really frustrated by a team member or disappointed. But it is really important as a leader to shield your team from all that stuff, right? Talk to someone that is on your leadership team. If you have frustrations about team members below you, if you don’t have that, talk to a person that doesn’t work on your team, a colleague, a friend. But to talk about negatively or share your frustrations about other team members within that peer group is really, really, it’s inappropriate, frankly.
And it just starts to create a lot of demotivation, dissatisfaction, it makes people not want to be on your team because they think, well, what are they saying about me when I leave the room? So again, hey, it’s only human to be frustrated right now when someone’s not pulling their weight. But to compare people or to share that frustration, vocalize to the rest of the team, you just got to find another outlet for that. So that’s the third piece I want to talk about is the self-management of our own reactivity.
It doesn’t mean you don’t say, hey, things are hard right now, we got to really pull together. But there’s a line there, right? You still are always as a leader creating a foundation of stability. And you’re utilizing your own tools and your extended network or whatever to figure out how to create that stability for yourself so you can bring that back to your team. Because why would anybody want to stay on a team that they think is a sinking ship?
Of course not. You know what I mean? So that’s what we want to make sure is like we’re keeping the folks that are doing a great job and we’re making sure they’re feeling like, okay, there’s something here to hang on to. High performers are always going to be looking for the best option for themselves. It is never a surprise when a high performer leaves because that person knows their value and they know there’s something out there.
So in times of uncertainty, it is really important to continue to re-enlist your high performers. The low performers are going to be holding on the tightest to what they’ve got because they know they don’t have a lot of options. So it’s the high performers you got to be re-enlisting. They’re the most sensitive to the negative vibes, honestly. They’re the most sensitive to things feeling erratic and chaotic. They’re the most sensitive to not feeling like you’re going silent on folks and coming back with very little information.
They’re the most tuned into that. So these things I’m talking about, about self-managing, it’s to keep your 10 Xers like, okay, I can weather this storm. You’re building resilience. You’re making sure they’re saying, okay, it’s not like anybody, there’s predictability here where there’s really not anywhere. So like, this is a great situation for me to keep going. Those are the ways that we keep our team members feeling like, even though there’s uncertainty, you’re presenting a really solid foundation.
And it allows you, like I said, it builds resilience, confidence in you. It helps people stay being creative because we’re not all on high alert. Like I’m only doing the bare minimum here because who knows what’s going to happen. And you’re going to really need these folks. The last thing around leading an uncertainty, I think, is to not assume the worst. When you’re stressed and you feel like, hey, I’m working on this shit 10, 20 hours a day, I care about this, to start to look for problems.
Because confirmation bias, that will get you so hard, it will start to really chip away at your own motivation. Looking for, you’re feeling frustrated, you feel like your team’s not pulling your weight, and then you start looking for the proof points for that. Again, we’re all human. This is very common. You got to be ahead of this, and that’s why I’m talking about this. Think about, where am I bringing confirmation bias? Are there people on my team that I kind of feel frustrated by?
I haven’t been given the feedback, haven’t maybe set expectations, that’s another story. So when they show up five minutes late, I’m like, ugh, this again. Or when they don’t finish something exactly how we say, we’re like, here we go again. Right? And we’re bringing this confirmation bias, and we have this little bit of a negative sentiment and we’re assuming the person’s not really trying. I said it already. Your team members can feel it when you’re coming with that negative vibe towards them, even if you’re talking with a smile, even if you’re not showing it to them.
So we really have to keep that in check. And how we keep this confirmation bias in check is we say, okay, well, have I set expectations about that meeting start time? We’ve got to start on time because we have a huge day ahead of us. We’ve got to get through it. How we want that email written, how we want the deck to look. Have we set expectations? Okay. That’s step one. Have we given feedback when those expectations were missed?
In the moment, not waiting till the end of the year, not waiting three months. Have we given feedback saying, hey, we talked about our team meetings got to start right at 9am. When you come in 9.05, 9.10, I know it may not seem a big deal, but it throws off the getting through the whole agenda. It’s really important to get there right on time. What can you do to be able to make it happen next time?
Getting clear feedback with the behavior, situation, behavior, impact, or whatever framework you like. Giving that feedback. Then after expectations, after feedback, then we see like, well, is this a pattern? And what’s happening here? Does the person… Is there a skill gap? Is that like, hey, they have a situation where maybe they have a caretaking situation and they can’t make it there. Like they really… They’ve done everything they can. Whereas the person not respecting the team norms and schedule, whatever else, right?
We can only assess what’s really going on when we’ve done the steps to set expectations and give feedback. And we’re seeing like, oh, is this a problem? Like a pattern? Is it something that’s a skill gap, scope, whatever? Now we undersurface. But if we’re just decided, this person, oh, they don’t care, they don’t respect this place. They don’t… They barely do anything. And that’s our lens. How are we going to be communicating with them? We’re never going to get anything better than that.
We are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s the biggest one. If you take one thing away from this episode is to watch when there is uncertainty, watch for that confirmation bias, that negative confirmation bias to keep making the situation worse for you. Because again, you are a leader, you are a manager, your team, that is like your asset. You’ve got to get folks firing on all cylinders. You have to be able to turn that around and you’re never going to be able to do that if you’ve already written people off.
So this episode really, it’s about self-management is one of the most important things that we can do as a leader. And the fact is, in an uncertain environment, it’s what we have full control over. All we really have control over is how we react, how we respond, how we talk to our team members, what our tone is, how we show up every day, what we’re doing to manage ourselves internally, whether it’s meditation or inner work or journaling or working out or whatever it is.
Just how we show up and create some certainty for our teams. That is going to, again, it’s going to re-enlist them. It’s going to keep those high performers. It’s going to create resilience. It’s going to help you weather the storm. So it starts with us. There’s actually a lot we can do to create stability. I’m telling you. And if that’s something that you’re like, God, I just, I’m really struggling with this, then reach out. Because there are some concrete tools that I share with my clients all the time that have really helped them get over this hump.
So their team members aren’t feeling kind of at the whim of however you woke up today because you are under so much pressure and you are only human. So as always, never hesitate to reach out. But try these strategies. I really think all this is going to go a really long way to helping you feel like, okay, I can get my team through this. I know what I need to do to be regulated. And then we go from there.
See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I keep my best employees from quitting during uncertain times?
High performers always know their value and they know options exist for them, so they are the first to leave when things feel chaotic or unstable. To keep them, you have to proactively check in, not just when there is a problem. Tell them what you are doing to help them grow and build skills while they are on your team. You cannot promise there will be no layoffs or pivots, but you can promise to invest in them right now. That re-enlistment, done consistently, is what gives high performers a reason to stay and weather the storm with you.
Why does my team seem unmotivated even though I feel like I'm working so hard?
The gap is almost always a communication problem, not a motivation problem. Leaders feel like their team is not pulling their weight, while team members feel invisible and unrecognized for the work they are doing. Before assuming the worst, ask yourself whether you have set clear expectations, communicated priority trade-offs when new work comes in, and given real feedback in the moment. If those steps have not happened, the disconnect is a missing system, not a disengaged team.
How do I stop letting my stress affect my team's morale?
Your team reads you the way kids read a parent. Even if you say everything is fine, they see it on your face and feel it in your tone. The first step is finding an outlet outside your team, whether that is a peer, a colleague, or your own leadership network, to process your frustrations so you are not venting about team members in front of the group. The second step is building your own regulation habits, whether that is exercise, journaling, or something else, so you can show up as a stable, grounded presence. Stability from you creates resilience in them.
What is confirmation bias in management and how does it hurt my team?
Confirmation bias in leadership means you have already decided someone is not trying, and then you filter every interaction through that lens. When they are five minutes late or deliver something imperfect, it becomes more proof they do not care. The problem is your team members feel that negative energy even when you are smiling at them, and it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where nothing ever improves. The fix is to check whether you have actually set expectations and given direct feedback first. You can only assess a real pattern after those steps have happened.
How do I manage shifting priorities without overwhelming my team?
When you add something new to a team member's already full workload, you cannot assume they will automatically drop the right thing to make room for it. That is your job as the leader. Walk through their existing work with them, name what comes off the list, and be explicit about what to focus on first. If that conversation does not happen and they prioritize the wrong thing, the confusion is on the system, not the person. Clear load-balancing conversations are what prevent the 'I do not know what to focus on' spiral that kills momentum during uncertain periods.