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
“…when we don’t get feedback, we don’t know where we stand and we don’t know if we’re doing a good job. If we don’t know what success looks like, we don’t know how that project went. Our motivation falls off a cliff.”
“…if we do not give feedback, then yeah, it is going to be too late to fix your team because you’re not telling them anything they have to do to fix it.”
“Pause and reframe and ask yourself, okay, what else can I try? How can I be more clear? How can I bring more support in? What feedback can I add? How can I help people feel more accountable?”
“…when you get out of that rut of thinking, well, I’ve tried everything and it’s hopeless. Like when you shed that perspective, now you have an infinite amount of perspectives available to you to try and explore.”
Episode highlights
The question that breaks Lia’s heart
When a business owner or team leader asks “is it too late for my team?” it signals a stuck perspective, not a fixed reality. Low motivation, sparsely attended team lunches, one-word answers, work slowing down, revenue flat, people not stepping up as leaders. These feel like conclusions. They are not. They are signals to try something different.
Lia ties this directly to the central idea in her book Unstuck: when you feel trapped by a perspective, ask yourself what else is possible. That reframe is the starting point for everything that follows.
Strategy one: reset expectations clearly
When motivation dips and people seem to be doing the bare minimum, the root cause is often simpler than it looks. People do not know what is expected of them. At the start of a new quarter, Lia recommends sitting down with your team, individually or as a group, and spelling it out: here are the metrics, here is what success looks like, here is what bonuses are tied to. Rally people around a clear target before assuming they are the wrong people.
Strategy two: build real accountability mechanisms
Setting expectations without follow-through is where most leaders fall short. Lia is specific here. Assign ownership. Load-balance the work across the team. Ask each person what they need and whether the plan feels right-sized. Then check in before deadlines, not after. Ask about risks. Surface blockers early.
The accountability piece also means asking team members to own their own metrics. If someone runs social media, they should already know the engagement numbers and be reporting them to you, not waiting for you to hand them a report. That shift from passive to proactive is what ownership actually looks like.
Strategy three: give feedback before it is too late
This is the one most leaders avoid, and it is the one that will sink the team if skipped. When people do not receive feedback, they do not know where they stand. They do not know if they are doing a good job. Motivation falls off a cliff.
For positive feedback, Lia is clear: specific always beats generic. Do not say “great job.” Say “the way you handled that tough moment in the meeting put the client at ease and saved us time on the project.” Name the behavior so the person can repeat it.
For constructive feedback, tie it to something the team member actually cares about. If someone has been excited to take on more client interaction and an interaction goes sideways, start there. Acknowledge what they want, name what happened, and offer a path forward. “I know how much you want to build client relationships. That last interaction had some gaps. Let me pair you with someone so you are ready next time.” The person already knows it did not go well. Showing them you are invested in their growth turns that moment into motivation instead of shame.
Putting all three together
Expectations give people a target. Accountability makes the target feel real. Feedback closes the loop and keeps motivation alive. None of the three works as well alone as they do together.
When you feel stuck, Lia’s move is to ask: how can I be more clear, how can I bring more support in, what feedback can I add, how can I help people feel more accountable? That question opens up options. The stuck perspective closes them down.
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)
When you feel like, ah, is it too late for my team? People aren’t really stepping up. Work’s not going at the pace. Revenue’s flat. Motivation’s low. Like, what do I do? I think it’s too late. I think it’s the people. I think it’s this. Pause and reframe and ask yourself, okay, what else can I try? Welcome to the Managing Made Simple Podcast. I’m Lea Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or 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. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today, I’m going to answer a question that makes me so sad to hear from business owners and team leaders in the corporate world, which is, is it too late for my team? This is that feeling that you’ve tried everything, that you have really tried to boost motivation, you’ve tried to set clear expectations, you’ve tried to do all the things, and yet work’s just not humming along like it used to be.
And when we feel this stuck perspective, I love to introduce the concept of reframing, which is the central theme of my book, Unstuck, which is looking at a place that we are feeling stuck and asking ourself, what else is possible? What other perspectives can I try on? What can I do differently here? And so when we’re feeling like, oh, is it too late for my team? I want us to shed that perspective of believing that, yeah, we’re out of options and think about what else we can try.
And what we can try, that’s what we’re talking about today. Now to explore this, I want to talk about what are some of the things that are showing up with our teams when we’re feeling really stuck, okay? One example is motivation is really low, right? Things used to be really, people were really excited about the work, they were, you know, they’d come to the lunches and the happy hours and they’d come Monday morning and bring ideas and they’d be sharing things.
And now it’s kind of like, oh, they show up right on time, or they’re not, they’re given one word answers, or those team lunches that you worked so hard to kind of get up and running are only sparsely intended, and you’re like, ah, is this my new team now? Have I lost the team culture? Right? When that question comes up, that’s a signal that we might be feeling stuck and we need to try something else. Another one is, is when you see folks aren’t stepping up as leaders.
And this is one that I have heard a lot from business owners and folks in the corporate world and feeling like, well, I gave my team members a lot of opportunities. I’ve tried to delegate and try to really understand what their superpowers are and invite them to step up and they’re not taking me up on it. Do I have the right people? So that’s another really stuck question of wondering like, ugh, I don’t know if I have the right people in my team.
Can they even be leaders? Another is when work’s not getting done at the pace it used to be. Right? We’re in the beginning of the year, we want to be starting off really strong, and we’re looking around saying, well, Q4 ended kind of, kind of came to like a grinding halt. Like, I don’t know. We had so much momentum in the middle of the year, and now it’s kind of fizzling out. Is my team able to deliver at the pace that I need them to?
And another, if you’re a business owner, revenue’s flat. So you’re doing all these things, you’re trying to get people involved in the sales process, you’re trying to get people involved in growing the business, and you’re seeing revenue flat. And you’re like, well, is this it for me? Have I hit a plateau? So all of these questions where you’ve kind of come to an assumption or conclusion about stuff kind of not going in the right way, being in this stuck place, that your team’s not getting motivated, you lost the culture, that folks aren’t the right people, they can’t step up as leaders, that, you know, you now can’t deliver at the same pace that you could, or that you’ve kind of hit this plateau in your business and kind of out of options.
These are the stuck perspectives I want us to reframe today. And I want us to think about what else can I try? And I want to talk about three areas that I think can be really game changing to get out of this stuck place. Now, the first is to set expectations with your team members. Whenever you are not seeing work being done as you need to, this kind of leadership stepping up, folks really taking on their responsibility to grow the business, that is a moment to reset our own expectations.
This means having a conversation with folks individually or as a team around, hey, you know, it’s Q1, we’re hitting the ground running. Here is what the expectations are. Here’s what bonuses will be based on. Here’s the metrics. Here’s what success looks like. Really getting people rallied around it. Because I think sometimes when motivation is low, it’s because, well, we don’t really know what’s expected of us, or we kind of think we got in this rut of doing maybe the bare minimum and we got to be rallied back around it.
And so that pairs with the second thing that I think is one of the most important things we got to do, which is create accountability mechanisms. And so this is a way to drive motivation because we know what success looks like when we feel accountable, we step up as owners, we bring this ownership mindset, which is proactivity to our work, and we show up really differently. And that’s a way to turn around things like, you know, work not getting done to the pace we need to.
Setting targets, saying, hey, this is what we got to get done this week or this month or this quarter. Here’s how we’ve load balanced across the team. What do you need? Does this feel like the right size plan? And then checking in on it regularly. And this is where accountability often falls short. We have like a great system going into it, it’s all figured out, but then we don’t check back in on it. And if you have aggressive timelines, and these things need to be met, checking in before it’s too late, asking for any risks, talking about mitigations, checking in, checking in, checking in, so that when you get to that deadline, you know 100% if it’s going to be hit or not.
And if it’s not hit, your team is clear, they got to have an answer for that. And that is something that’s really, really important is that our teams don’t feel like it’s optional to get work done. Right? I mean, that’s what really can weigh on you as that manager, as that business owner, when you feel like I’m the only person that cares about if this happens or not. And that’s going to really drive that suck feeling.
As a business owner, when I have a lot on my mind, there is nothing more helpful than having a checklist and nothing more gratifying than crossing things off that list. And as the leader of your team and company, it might feel like the list of things you have to remember to do to be a good manager gets longer every day. That’s why I created my Thriving Team Checklist, including 10 things you can do this week and every week to show up better for your team.
Get in the rhythm of completing these things every week, and you will find that not only is your team performing better, your job is getting easier in the process. It’s the ultimate win-win. Grab your copy today at leahgarvin.com checklist. So when you set expectations around what’s got to get done, who’s doing what, really clearly delineate roles and responsibilities, really clearly talk about when you’re going to check in, what the metrics are for success, all these things.
This creates accountability for each person. And we ask them to step up as owners. We say, hey, you know, you’re owning this project. You know, what makes sense to be reporting on it? What do we want to be talking about when? Asking them to volunteer some of the metrics for it. Owning the metrics. Hey, one thing when we’re asking our team members to report on something, it’s not just we give them a report on their team area and say, like, speak to these things.
They should already have, be actively checking in on whatever metrics are related to their role. Right? So if they’re doing social media, they should know about the engagement. If they’re working on business development, they should know about lead generation. And they should be telling you. And that feels a sense of accountability. And that gets you out of this stuck place where, you know, revenue is flat. No one’s really speaking to it, where work’s not moving at the pace, where people aren’t accepting it as leaders.
They’re waiting for you to hand them those reports. Right? And then giving feedback. And this is what’s going to really hit on that motivation piece. So I said setting expectations, creating accountability. Our third solution for the stuck place of wondering, ah, is it too late for my team? Is giving feedback. Because once you’ve laid the foundation of expectations, you now have something there that you can pay feedback back to. Right? And so feedback is a really tough one for a lot of us.
Right? We have a lot of baggage around it. I like it a lot. I always say, you know, can I give you some feedback? Is the worst, most uncomfortable question we could hear in the workplace and frankly in life. Right? And it’s because we have a lot of fears around what is somebody going to say? Does this mean I screw everything up? That they don’t like me? That I am worthless? Whatever. We have all this baggage around feedback.
But when we don’t get feedback, we don’t know where we stand and we don’t know if we’re doing a good job. If we don’t know what success looks like, we don’t know how that project went. Our motivation falls off a cliff. Because people need to know where they stand. Our team members need to know they’re doing a good job. They need to know they’re on the right path. So we avoid feedback because we don’t really know how to give it or we feel like, you know, no news is good news or we don’t want to handle a hard conversation.
We don’t want somebody to be offensive. We avoid it. We’re making the situation worse. And that is if we do not give feedback, then yeah, it is going to be too late to fix your team because you’re not telling them anything they have to do to fix it. Right? So feedback is going to be the real, the third piece of this. And one of the most important is giving positive feedback and recognition and appreciation and giving constructive course correcting feedback.
And the positive feedback and recognition, as I talk about often on the show, is about giving specific examples, about talking about the way someone approached something that really landed well, so they can reproduce that and making sure they know that their work was seen and their work matter. Okay. So thanking them again for something specific, not just saying great job, but saying, hey, the way that you handle that tough conversation in the meeting was really, you know, I was really inspired by that.
That was awesome. And it allowed our client to feel really comfortable and, you know, coming to a decision. And now we’ve saved time on our project, right? This is the way that we give positive feedback. Now with constructive, we want to get specific as well. And I love to tie constructive feedback to someone’s bigger goal or something they’re working towards, something that’s important to them, show them that I see you and I care about you. And that is why I’m giving feedback because this is going to make the feedback easier to action and it’s going to increase that motivation because I say, oh, I see my manager is in it for me.
They want me to be successful. So here’s an example. You know, let’s say a team member has been really wanting to present to clients and or take a more active role with clients, whatever, face to face, whether that’s you’re in an agency or you’re in a, some, a physical location where there’s interaction with clients and they have an interaction and it kind of goes south, right? Like it’s not terrible, but you know, they’re asked some questions and they don’t really know how to answer them.
So you got to give feedback, right? Because it’s really important. You want to course correct that and say, Hey, you know, I know you’ve been really excited to get more involved with clients and we’ve been really working to find opportunities for that. And unfortunately, in that last interaction, the client had some questions about our business that you weren’t fully able to answer. And so we had to bring somebody else into the conversation. And so, you know, knowing how important it is to you, I’d love to sit down with you and figure out like, what do you really need to learn about the business and pair you up with a buddy so that you feel up to speed, you know, whatever it looks like so that you can be successful next time.
Right. Now that sort of piece of feedback we need to avoid, but we have to tell that person. And when they feel, when that interaction went badly, that person knows it probably, they feel it. They’re like, Oh man, I want, I was talking so much about how we want to interact with clients. I blew it. Right. So if you show them, Hey, you know, we got to fix this, but we will help you fix this. That is going to increase motivation.
So those are my strategies. Like when you feel like, Oh, is it too late for my team? You know, people aren’t really stepping up. Work’s not going at the pace. Revenue’s flat. Motivation is low. Like, what do I do? I think it’s too late. I think it’s the people. I think it’s this. Pause and reframe and ask yourself, okay, what else can I try? How can I be more clear? How can I bring more support in?
What feedback can I add? How can I help people feel more accountable? Because that’s going to turn around every single one of those issues. And when you start to do that and you start to ask yourself, what else is possible? Now you think of all sorts of other ideas. So the three things that I shared, that’s not the only things you can do, but when you get out of that rut of thinking, well, I’ve tried everything and it’s hopeless.
Like when you shed that perspective, now you have an infinite amount of perspectives available to you to try and explore. And with each one of these things, making sure we’re really inviting our team into the conversation, asking them for feedback as well, asking them where you can be more clear. What do they need to feel supported? This is also going to help them get unstuck. Okay? So let’s not ask ourselves that question. Is it too late?
No, it is not too late. Try these things. And if you’re feeling stuck on a particular thing, I want to invite you to join an SOS call. So these are an hour session where you bring an issue, whatever thing is making you feel stuck. And in an hour, we talk about some concrete, actual strategies that you can try right away on your team. So if you want to book that, head to LeahGarvin.com slash SOS. Folks are really enjoying these.
They give you that solution, that actual plan right away. And it’s just a way to be able to move forward and not feel like, oh, I got to figure this out alone. Because you don’t have to figure it out alone. This stuff is hard. So if you’re stewing on it, if it’s keeping you up at night, schedule that SOS call. I want you to be able to sleep tonight and I want you to not wake up at 3 a.m.
thinking about how hard your team needs to manage. Okay? LeahGarvin.com slash SOS. 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 loved this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it.
See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
What should I do when my team seems unmotivated and I feel like I've tried everything?
Before deciding it's too late, pause and reframe the situation by asking what else you can try. The first move is to reset expectations clearly: tell your team what success looks like, what metrics matter, and what bonuses are tied to. Low motivation often comes from people not knowing what's expected of them or drifting into a rut. Pair that with real accountability check-ins and specific feedback, and you give people a reason to re-engage. The problem is rarely the people. It's usually the missing system around expectations, accountability, and feedback.
How do I create accountability on my team without micromanaging?
Set clear targets at the start of a project or quarter, load balance the work across the team, and ask team members what they need to hit those targets. Then check in regularly before deadlines, not after. Ask about risks and roadblocks early so nothing surprises you at the finish line. Better yet, ask team members to own their own metrics. If someone handles social media, they should already know the engagement numbers and be bringing them to you. That ownership mindset is what turns a passive team member into someone who actually steps up.
Why do my team members stop stepping up as leaders even when I give them opportunities?
When team members aren't stepping up, it usually signals a gap in expectations or accountability rather than a gap in capability. They may be waiting for you to hand them reports or direction instead of owning their area. The fix is to be explicit: tell them they own a specific project or metric, ask them to define what good looks like, and have them report on it. When people feel genuinely accountable for an outcome, they show up differently. Pair that with feedback so they know when they're on the right track.
How do I give constructive feedback to a team member without killing their motivation?
Tie the feedback to something the team member already cares about. If they want to grow into client-facing work, and an interaction didn't go well, open by acknowledging that goal: tell them you know how important it is to them, describe specifically what happened and the impact it had, and then offer a concrete path forward like pairing them with a buddy to get up to speed. That combination shows you see them and you are invested in their success. Done this way, constructive feedback actually increases motivation rather than draining it.
Does giving positive feedback really make a difference when my team is in a slump?
Yes, and the key is making it specific. Saying 'great job' lands flat. Instead, name exactly what the person did, how they approached it, and what impact it had. For example, pointing out that the way someone handled a tough moment in a client meeting made the client feel comfortable and helped the project move faster. That kind of feedback tells your team member their work was seen and it matters, and it shows them exactly what to repeat. When people don't get feedback, they don't know where they stand, and motivation drops fast.