When a team member is not delivering, the first move is not to replace them. Lia walks through a three-step framework: reset expectations, open a dialogue, and check back in before deciding next steps. This episode is especially useful for small business owners and team leads who feel stuck between loyalty to a team member and the need for real results.
This episode is part of the Performance Management & Course Correcting series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“If you really value something, that has to be the thing you reward.”
“If you are thinking that more than once a week, I wish people would just, or this would be so much better, or they should have just spell it out, let them know, and then they will do it.”
“The more we demystify the process, the easier it is for people, the more they are not fearing it. They’re not dreading it. They’re not stressing about it.”
“Talk about wins. Talk about highlights. Talk about the things that are going well. So your team member sees that you’re actually already aware of a lot of it and the performance review is just a formality.”
Episode highlights
Why your team is anxious about performance (even when they do not ask)
Team members are quietly asking themselves: Am I doing a good job? What does it take to get promoted? When do I get a raise? They rarely voice it until they have been sitting with it for months. By the time someone finally asks about a raise, Lia points out, that is not the first time they thought about it. The anxiety is already there. Managers can dissolve most of it just by getting ahead of the conversation, sharing expectations openly, and making sure no one is left guessing where they stand.
Rule one: your system has to reward what you say you value
If your team talks about collaboration but only promotes people for individual wins, the system is teaching the wrong lesson. If you say quality matters but only reward launches, people will quietly stop doing maintenance work. The performance system cannot say one thing and measure another. Whatever behaviors you want to see, those behaviors have to be part of how people are evaluated. Inclusion, team culture, integrity, all of it. If it matters, it has to show up in how you keep score.
Rule two: spell out what “above and beyond” actually means
Job descriptions tell people the floor. They rarely describe the ceiling. Lia’s fix: get explicit about what exceeding expectations looks like. Is it influencing stakeholders? Taking ownership of team culture? Driving professional development? If you find yourself thinking “I wish they would just…” more than once a week, that unspoken wish is an expectation you have not communicated yet. Say it out loud, and then people can actually deliver on it.
Rule three: make the process simple and lightweight
Lia spent years coaching colleagues through semi-annual performance reviews at a major tech company, staying up late and checking in on weekends to help people write their self-summaries because they were so stressed. The root cause was a complicated system where people believed one write-up could make or break their career. The fix is not a pep talk. It is a simpler system: a scorecard, a goal check-in, a short prep note sent before the conversation so nothing feels like a ambush.
Give feedback all year so the review is just a formality
The biggest reason people agonize over their self-review is that they feel it is their only shot at getting credit for their work. If the manager has been talking about wins and highlights in every one-on-one, the review stops being a high-stakes performance. The team member already knows their manager sees their contributions. The formal conversation becomes a recap, not a verdict. Regular feedback removes the fear because it removes the surprise.
What you get when you put this together
When team members know the criteria for promotion, understand what a raise requires, and get consistent feedback throughout the year, the moving-goalpost feeling disappears. The result is not just less stress around review season. It is higher retention, higher engagement, and higher motivation, without adding more work. You are actually simplifying the process, and the team responds to that clarity.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 229: What are you willing to tolerate, and what is that actually costing your business?. Your business will only ever rise to the level of what you are willing to tolerate, and every day you let underperformance slide is money leaving your business and goodwill leaving your best people. Lia walks through the exact conversation to have with an underperforming team member: set the expectation, ask if they are in or out, and put the decision back on them. This episode is especially useful for owners and founders who keep avoiding the hard conversation because they are afraid of losing someone or damaging a relationship.
- Ep 157: How to keep a promotion-hungry team member focused on the job they have right now. When a team member starts mentally checking out of their current role because they are chasing a promotion, the fix is not a performance conversation. It is a trust conversation. Lia walks through how to proactively name the tension, commit to advocating for your team member, and show them that doing today’s job well is actually the fastest path to the next level. This episode is especially useful for leaders managing early-career team members who are eager but starting to leave current responsibilities uncovered.
- Ep 120: Why your team member isn’t meeting their full potential (and what to do about it). When a team member isn’t living up to their potential, the problem is almost always a diagnosable barrier, not a lost cause. Lia walks through three questions to ask yourself before deciding someone isn’t a fit, including whether you might be the bottleneck. This episode is essential for any owner or leader who sees more in a team member than that person is currently delivering.
- Ep 113: How to course correct when a team member is not delivering results. When a team member is not delivering, the first move is not to replace them. Lia walks through a three-step framework: reset expectations, open a dialogue, and check back in before deciding next steps. This episode is especially useful for small business owners and team leads who feel stuck between loyalty to a team member and the need for real results.
Want to go deeper?
The Manager Essentials Program. Lia’s flagship program for new and rising managers.
Full transcript (click to expand)
As a manager throughout the year in your one on one conversations, talk about wins, talk about highlights, talk about the things that are going well so your team member sees that you’re actually already aware of a lot of it and the performance review is just a formality. Welcome to the managing made simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating and more.
We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips, or a seasoned manager looking to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. As a team leader or business owner, you’re no stranger to wrestling with some of the toughest situations that come up as a manager. But sometimes you need a little bit more support, and you don’t have the time to spend researching on the internet or taking a bunch of canned trainings.
That is why I am so excited to share the Managing Made Simple Hub, your one stop shop to everything you need to be a great manager. The Hub is an interactive community offering a monthly live Q& A, ask me anything call, where you can bring up anything that’s top of mind. Along with curated resources and tools, monthly challenges, exclusive discounts on my services, and conversations with experts. The best thing is there’s no longterm commitment and you can hop in and out anytime.
Sign up today at liagarvin.com/hub and I cannot wait to see you in our next live Q and A session. Welcome back to the show. Today we’re going to talk about performance management, really measuring success. And this is a topic that applies whether you are working in the corporate world and you have a team or you’re a small business owner or you’re even a solo partner managing a few contractors or vendors. Okay, we always have to know what success looks like.
And this is something that I worked a lot on when I was in the corporate world, on coaching people around how to represent their work effectively in a performance review, in coaching managers around how to give feedback effectively in performance review conversations. It’s something I do tons of workshops around right now. And so if you are struggling around how to deal with performance reviews in general, Hit me up because I love to talk about it, love to support, and today I’m going to offer three things to think about when measuring performance, really to get you started.
To think about this conversation today, I want us to anchor into what often comes up for our employees. And what I often hear is people saying, I don’t know if I’m doing a good job, I don’t know where I stand, or I don’t really know what the criteria is to be promoted. It feels like a moving target. I don’t know when I get a raise or a bonus. Okay. These are the kinds of things our employees are thinking.
And I always tell my small business owner clients, if someone’s coming up to you and asking when they get a raise, that is not the first time they thought of that question. They have been thinking about that for months, wondering, and they just mustered up the courage to ask you. That means you really want to make sure your team members aren’t waiting, uneasy, feeling these things, thinking these things that they don’t really know how to ask about.
So we want to share this up front. We want to talk about performance expectations, things that have to do with pay, advancement, all the things. I know when I was in the corporate world wondering, am I ready for promotion? Can I ask my manager again about it? I asked him last week. Can I ask him this week? You know, all this anxiety comes up. And as managers, we can alleviate all of this anxiety by talking about performance proactively saying to our team members, Hey, I want to make sure that we’re all on the same page around what success looks like.
Here’s the criteria for getting promoted. Here’s where you stand. Always really practicing recognition. I did a podcast episode about that. I will include that in the show notes. Really making sure people feel like, Okay, I know where I stand. I know what I have to improve on. I’ve gotten that feedback. Okay, that’s why I talk about feedback all the time. You have those tools. Now you want to bring it all together with the performance conversation. And whether you are operating within an established performance system or you’re thinking about how to set one up for your own company, There are three things I really, really want to impart on you today.
Number one, whatever system that you use, it has got to incentivize the behavior you want to reinforce. If you want people to be collaborative, you can’t reward them only for their individual accomplishments. If you want them to operate in integrity, you can’t set targets that are unattainable without operating unethically. I’ve been on teams before where they talk about how important product quality is and customer service, but they only reward people on new work, on launches. And, and, and this starts to show people, well, if I work on maintenance work, I’m not going to get promoted.
So I should just work on the new things. And that is because the system is incentivizing something else. Not what it’s saying. Okay. If you really value something, that has to be the thing you reward. If you want to have a strong team culture, if you want to have inclusion as a value, if you want to see these things show up, that has to be a part of how people are evaluated. Second thing, we have to set expectations around what we want to see.
This is a no brainer, but this is something that we don’t always think about. Okay, and this is a little bit more in the expectations around behavior. For example, a lot of times we have our job description and we’re doing those things, but that’s not enough to be exceeding expectations or crushing it, right? We always know there’s a little bit something extra. What is that above and beyond? That’s what you want to set expectations around. Is it only just going above and beyond the metrics?
Maybe. But is it also taking an active role in building a great team culture? Is it taking an active role in growing the business? Is it really engaging in professional development? Is it, you know, influencing stakeholders or, or clients or, or cross functional team members? These things that you really want to see in order for that person to grow that maybe you haven’t said before, those things you have to say them because we have to know what is it that’s going to make a successful.
And this is a part of setting expectations with our team members around what a good job looks like, the kinds of things that we can get feedback on, the kinds of things we want to recognize them about. But if they don’t know what those things are, then how are they going to deliver on those? And this is the kind of thing when you think to yourself, the question, I wish they would just that’s an expectation to outline.
That’s something to make clear. And then they will just. If you are thinking that more than once a week, I wish people would just, or this would be so much better, or they should have just spell it out, let them know, and then they will do it. Third thing, make it simple and lightweight. I’m not exaggerating here. I coached dozens and dozens and dozens of people every six months before our semi annual performance review in the last company I was at.
It broke my heart that people were so stressed about it that they felt like they weren’t accurately representing their work in their write ups about their work and that they, they were so worried about this, that I would stay up late at night, checking with folks on the weekend, like all, all hours of the day, helping people write their performance reviews. So they’d be less stressed about it. But why were they stressed in the first place?
Because we had a super complicated system that people believed whatever was written down on that paper was going to make or break their career. Now, this is something managers could have done a better job at explaining wasn’t even the case, but the whole point is it wasn’t a simple system that a lot was writing in that self write up that people were putting together. And if you have the opportunity to design a system, make it simple.
Is it some kind of scorecard or rating? Do you set goals that you then check back on whatever it is, keep it lightweight, ideally send someone some sort of idea of what the conversation is about before they have it so they get the sense of what’s going on. Always give feedback periodically so that nothing, nothing is a surprise during that performance conversation. The more we demystify the process, the easier it is for people, the more they are not fearing it.
They’re not dreading it. They’re not stressing about it. And so this is the case if you have an established performance system in your company. Give regular feedback. Always make sure people know where they stand and talk about any issues way before the performance review so there’s time to resolve them and then people won’t be stressed about it. And one of the big reasons I think people get stressed about writing up like a recap of the work that they did is because they feel like, well, this is the only way that I’m going to get recognition for my work.
If I don’t explain it exactly perfectly right, something’s going to get missed. As a manager throughout the year and your one on one conversations. Talk about wins. Talk about highlights. Talk about the things that are going well. So your team member sees that you’re actually already aware of a lot of it and the performance review is just a formality. That’s it my friends. When we do these three things, incentivizing the behavior we want to reinforce, setting clear expectations around what that behavior is, and making it simple.
And really, fourth bonus, I did mention this, giving feedback all the time, demystifying feedback so that nothing is a surprise in the performance review. Thank you. This is how we make performance easy. We reduce fear around it. And this applies whether you’re in the corporate world or a small business owner doesn’t matter. These are principles and the more clear you are about it, the more people feel like, oh, I got this. I know the criteria to be promoted.
I know when I get a raise or a bonus. I know the expectations of me. I know what success looks like. It doesn’t feel like a moving goalpost when you have that clarity. Now you have higher team retention. Now you have higher engagement, higher motivation. All that good stuff comes right back to you. And it wasn’t by doing any more work, it was actually simplifying the process. Okay. Keep it simple. Keep it straightforward. And you got this.
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. I always love to hear from you. So please reach out at LiaGarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I make performance reviews less stressful for my team members?
Give feedback regularly throughout the year so nothing is a surprise when the review comes. In your one-on-ones, talk about wins, highlights, and things going well so your team member already knows you see their contributions. When the review arrives, it feels like a formality rather than a high-stakes event. Also keep the system itself simple. Complicated write-ups and unclear criteria are a big reason people dread reviews, not the conversation itself.
Why do employees always seem anxious about whether they are going to get a raise or promotion?
Because no one told them the criteria upfront. By the time a team member works up the courage to ask about a raise, they have been quietly wondering for months. As a leader, you can eliminate that anxiety by proactively sharing what success looks like, what the path to promotion is, and how pay or bonuses are tied to performance. When people know the rules of the game, the uncertainty and dread disappear.
How do I design a performance system that actually motivates the behavior I want from my team?
Make sure what you measure and reward matches what you say you value. If you say collaboration matters but only recognize individual results, people will stop collaborating. If you say integrity matters but set targets that are impossible to hit ethically, you are sending the wrong signal. Whatever behavior you want to see, that behavior needs to be part of how people are evaluated, otherwise the system quietly teaches people to prioritize something else.
What should I include in performance expectations beyond the basic job description?
Think about what separates someone who is doing the job from someone who is truly excelling. That could be actively contributing to team culture, taking initiative in growing the business, investing in professional development, or building strong relationships with clients and cross-functional partners. If you catch yourself thinking 'I wish they would just,' that is an unspoken expectation. Say it out loud. Once people know specifically what above and beyond looks like, they can actually deliver it.
How often should I be talking about performance with my team, not just during formal reviews?
Continuously. Use your regular one-on-ones to share recognition, point out wins, and address any concerns well before a formal review cycle. If something needs to improve, raise it early so there is time to actually fix it. The goal is that by the time a performance conversation happens, nothing in it surprises your team member. When people already know where they stand, the review stops being something to fear and starts being a straightforward check-in.