When a team member says they are not motivated, that is your problem to solve, not theirs alone. Lia walks through how to identify intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, move beyond pay, and reconnect your team (and yourself) with a sense of purpose. This episode is especially useful for new managers and small business owners who feel stuck when motivation drops.
This episode is part of the The New Manager Playbook Series (book companion) series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…trust and a lack of trust often causes most of the problems that we have.”
“…it’s not that your team members have to prove themselves to you.”
“…when you assume that and you give them a little bit of an implicit trust, now they have something to meet.”
“…it’s not about proving ourselves. It’s actually about relationship building and consistency.”
Episode highlights
Why trust is behind most managing problems
Trust is not a soft, abstract concept. It is the engine underneath delegation, accountability, and team performance. Lia opens with a direct claim: a lack of trust causes most of the problems managers face. The challenge is that many managers do not recognize what low trust actually looks like in practice.
What low trust looks like (and it is probably you)
Low trust does not always show up as suspicion. More often it shows up as a resistance to let go. Micromanaging, over-checking, and needing constant status updates are all trust signals. If you trusted your team member completely, you would simply know the update is coming. You would know Joe has it handled. The fact that you keep checking means something is off on the trust side.
Trust is a two-way street, and your team goes first
Your team cannot show up consistently if they do not trust you first. Lia argues the order matters: manager trust comes first, team trust follows. The foundation of your team trusting you is predictability. Show up the way you say you are going to. Say the same thing on Monday that you say on Friday. When your behavior is inconsistent, your team does not know who they are getting. That unpredictability kills trust faster than almost anything else.
Assume competence from day one
One of the most common traps for new managers is coming onto a team with a prove-it-to-me attitude. Lia pushes back on this directly. If someone is on your team or in your company, they were hired for a reason. Assume they are there to do a great job. When you extend that implicit trust up front, you give your team something to rise to. You are not starting from zero. The hiring process already did some of that work.
How team members build trust back with you
Trust from the team side is built through consistency: meeting deadlines, showing personal accountability, solving problems without being prompted, and delivering on their role. As that consistency shows up, you respond by offering more responsibility, stretch opportunities, and room to grow. That exchange is how mutual trust compounds over time.
Follow-through is what makes trust real
Saying you are out there looking for growth opportunities for someone means nothing if you never come back with one. Lia is direct here: if you tell a team member you are looking out for them and then nothing happens for two years, they know you were not being straight with them. Follow-through in a reasonable timeframe is what separates a manager who talks about trust from one who actually builds it.
How The New Manager Playbook makes trust concrete
Trust is one of the chapters in The New Manager Playbook because it is too often discussed in the abstract. Lia built the book to give specific, actionable strategies so that if your team’s trust has eroded, you know exactly how to reset it and what to say. The book launched January 27th, 2025, and is available on Amazon.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 163: The New Manager Playbook is here: what’s inside and who it’s for. The New Manager Playbook gives overwhelmed managers a practical, action-oriented guide to leading with confidence and ease. Lia built it around the real struggles she heard repeatedly in workshops and coaching: managing former peers, never having enough time, and not knowing where to start. It is useful for first-time managers and experienced leaders alike, especially anyone stepping into a genuinely new situation.
- Ep 160: How to stop feeling squeezed from all sides as a middle manager. Middle managers feel pressure from every direction because they are caught between their team’s needs and leadership’s demands, with no playbook to guide them. The key move is setting a clear intention for how you want to show up as a leader, then building trust skill by skill so your team sees stability even while you are still learning. This episode is most useful for new and mid-career managers in corporate environments who feel like they are winging it.
- Ep 156: How people pleasing costs you respect as a manager (and what to do instead). Wanting your team to like you is human, but leaning on it too hard makes hard conversations impossible and quietly erodes your credibility. In The New Manager Playbook, Lia Garvin unpacks the people-pleasing trap and shows how building trust through honest, expectations-driven relationships earns you more genuine respect than being everyone’s friend ever could. This episode is especially useful for new managers who default to being fun and casual and then feel stuck when things need to get serious.
- Ep 152: How to motivate your team when they just are not feeling it. When a team member says they are not motivated, that is your problem to solve, not theirs alone. Lia walks through how to identify intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, move beyond pay, and reconnect your team (and yourself) with a sense of purpose. This episode is especially useful for new managers and small business owners who feel stuck when motivation drops.
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)
Welcome back to the show and to another episode of Inside the New Manager Playbook. And this is just a little mini series I’m doing leading up to the launch of the New Manager Playbook on January 27th, 2025. And if it’s past January 27th, then pick up your copy on Amazon. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant.
Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress. 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. Are a new manager learning 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. So what does trust have to do with managing? Everything. Okay. And this is one of the chapters in the book because trust and a lack of trust often causes most of the problems that we have. Like just plain and simple, I’m just going to call it.
Now when we think about trust or an absence of it, you might think, well, I like my team members. I trust them. Like this isn’t a problem. But what we don’t always think about or realize, I should say, is what not fully trusting shows up as. Okay. And a lot of it, it shows up as two things. First, it shows up as kind of a resistance to let go. Okay. So when we’re not good at delegating, when we’re finding ourselves micromanaging, that is about trust.
We think it’s that, oh, we just want to make sure everything’s okay. Or, you know, Hey, my manager’s on my back. I just got to make sure I can tell them, you know, all the updates and stuff like that. But the reality is that we would, if we trusted our team members completely, we wouldn’t, we would just know when we ask them something, it’s going to get done. We would say, oh, okay. I can, I know that like, you know, Joe over here has got this or, or Sarah’s going to going to be okay.
She’ll give me that update because she’s consistent and predictable with that thing. So trust allows us to delegate and it prevents us from micromanaging. And this is what I would say from the you as the manager standpoint. But the thing about trust is it is a two way street. So we’re not really going to trust our teams if they don’t trust us. And I think probably they’ve got to trust us first because then they’re going to show up like more consistently and then we can trust them.
I would say if I had to think about it, that’s probably the order it happens a little bit chicken and the egg. But now does establishing trust take years? No. Does it take five minutes? No. Right. So it takes spending the time to get to know your team members, to understand their work styles, to communicate consistently as a manager, to show up the way that you say you’re going to. This sort of predictability is going to fuel a stronger sense of trust faster.
When you say everything’s okay one day and then it’s not the next day, like why would I trust you? I don’t know who I’m getting. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde situation or the Hulk situation if you prefer that analogy. So we have to show up the way we say we’re going to. But I think you helping build that one side of your trust with your team members for your team members, this is only one piece of the puzzle.
And I talk about both these sides in the book because it’s really important. Your team members demonstrate trust or build trust with you, I should say, through their consistency in their work, right? Them following deadlines, them showing personal accountability, them problem solving on their own, them having that consistency. Now I want to differentiate one thing is we don’t, while we have to build trust as a new manager, we’re managing a new team or with our team if we’re managing them now and we need to improve our trust, it’s not that your team members have to prove themselves to you.
And where I think we can get stuck sometimes is we come in onto a new team, we’re approaching the role new and we’re kind of like acting like everybody, I’ll believe it when I see it. Everybody’s got to prove it to me. Now if the people are on your team or they’re in your company, they got hired there for a reason. You’ve got to assume competence. And I want you to assume that they’re here to do a great job because when you assume that and you give them a little bit of an implicit trust, now they have something to meet.
They have a target to hit. It’s not like we’ll see if you’re going to show up tomorrow. You don’t want to start from scratch. You don’t have to because your hiring process has already brought them through the door and there’s like a trust in that. So when we’re talking about trust, it’s not about proving ourselves. It’s actually about relationship building and consistency. So your team members are going to be building their trust through them doing what they’re going to do and being consistent with their roles and delivery and job performance.
And then through that, you start to give them more responsibilities and you start to let go and you start to offer them, you know, stretch opportunities and that’s how you build this mutual trust. When you say, Hey, I’m out there looking for opportunities for you to take on this thing you show up in the future soon after with, Hey, I found one of those things, right? You don’t just let that go for two years. The person’s like, this person’s just BSing me.
They want me to feel like you’re out there trying to help me, but I know you’re not. So there’s a follow through and a consistency and a predictability and also doing it in a pretty, you know, reasonable timeframe. That’s also going to make it faster to build trust with your team. So again, I just wanted to tease this little, this concept of trust. It’s something I think we talk about in abstraction a lot when it comes to managing, like of course we need to trust each other.
Why wouldn’t we? And these goes without saying, but how do we do it? And that is why I talk about it in the new manager playbook. I share specific strategies for building trust, um, things to talk about what you, you know, how to show this consistency so that it’s not abstract so that if you feel like your teams don’t have trust, you can actually reset and you can have that conversation. So don’t worry. I got you covered.
New manager playbook coming out January 27th. And again, if it’s already past that day, check it out on Amazon, wait to hear what you think. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it.
See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I build trust with my team as a new manager?
Trust builds through consistency and relationship building, not through waiting for people to prove themselves. Show up the way you say you will, communicate predictably, and take time to understand your team members' work styles. When you say you will look for a stretch opportunity for someone, follow through in a reasonable timeframe. That predictability is what fuels trust faster than anything else. If your team sees a Jekyll and Hyde situation, where everything seems fine one day and not the next, they have no foundation to trust you.
Does my new team need to earn my trust before I delegate to them?
No. If someone is on your team, they were hired for a reason, so assume competence from day one. Coming in with an 'I'll believe it when I see it' attitude puts people in a position where they are starting from zero, which is unnecessary and damaging. When you extend implicit trust upfront, you give your team a target to meet. The hiring process has already done a layer of vetting, so lean on that and let your team members show up to a role that already respects their potential.
What does a lack of trust actually look like on a team?
A lack of trust often shows up as micromanaging and difficulty letting go of tasks. Leaders sometimes frame this as wanting quality control or needing to keep their own manager informed, but the real root is that they do not fully trust their team to follow through. When you genuinely trust someone, you know that if you hand them something, it will get done consistently and predictably. Micromanaging is the clearest signal that trust has not been established, whether that is trust in your team or trust from your team in you.
How does trust between a manager and team actually go both ways?
Your team trusts you when you are consistent, communicate clearly, and follow through on what you say you will do. You start to trust your team as they demonstrate consistency in their work, meet deadlines, show accountability, and solve problems on their own. As that consistency builds on their side, you naturally start delegating more and offering stretch opportunities. Both sides feed each other, but as the leader, you likely need to extend trust first, because when your team feels trusted, they are more likely to show up in ways that earn yours.
How long does it take to build trust with a new team?
It does not take years, but it also does not happen in five minutes. Trust builds through repeated, consistent actions over time. Getting to know your team members, understanding how they work, communicating the same way you said you would, and following through on commitments within a reasonable timeframe all speed up the process. The more predictable you are as a leader, the faster your team can calibrate to you and feel safe showing up consistently in return.