Managing former peers and friends is genuinely hard, and pretending nothing has changed is the fastest way to make it harder. Lia walks through three moves: name the relationship shift out loud, co-create norms for feedback and hard conversations, and own your authority instead of downplaying it. This episode is especially useful for new managers who got promoted from within their own team.
This episode is part of the Team Culture, Dynamics & Tough Personalities series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…nobody wants to show up to that stuff if no one’s talking to them.”
“I want someone listening when I contribute in a meeting. I want someone to not interrupt me when I share my ideas. That’s what I want. That will make me feel included.”
“…inclusion is not something we add on at the end.”
“…the cost of mistakes is different depending on what background you’re in.”
“…inclusive teams are high performing teams and high performing teams are motivated teams and engaged teams…”
Episode highlights
Why happy hours are not an inclusion strategy
When teams want to build culture and belonging, the default move is pizza parties, happy hours, and team events. Lia calls this out directly. If someone feels excluded every other moment of the day, no amount of free food fixes it. The foundation has to come first. Social events are great after you have built inclusion into the work itself.
Pillar one: Access to information and decisions
Knowledge is power, and when people feel like they are out of the loop, they feel excluded. This does not mean every decision goes to committee. It means you build a clear, communicated process. Tell your team who has input, when the decision gets made, and how they will hear about it. Lia is direct: more transparency is almost always better, especially in uncertain times. If you find yourself asking whether you have communicated enough, turn the heat up a little more.
On information sharing specifically, Lia is blunt: if you are on the same team and you will not share a document, the message you are sending is “I do not trust you.” That is a psychological safety disaster. Set a team norm of sharing by default, and lean hard toward openness.
Pillar two: Safety to take risks and participate
Psychological safety and inclusion are inseparable. Lia draws on her own experience as a woman in tech to make this concrete: the cognitive load of feeling like you represent an entire identity group every time you speak in a meeting is real. When someone interrupts you, talks over you, or re-appropriates your idea, the signal is clear. It is not safe here.
The antidote is active modeling. Catch interruptions when they happen. Amplify ideas by name: “Building on Lia’s idea…” Do not let ideas get shut down at the outset, even ones you disagree with. Shutting ideas down immediately has a chilling effect on future innovation. Say “let’s evaluate it” instead of “that won’t work here.” The goal is an environment where participating does not feel like a risk.
Pillar three: Recognize all kinds of work, not just the glamour work
Nothing signals exclusion faster than an A team and B team. Lia saw this pattern repeatedly in her design career: the ideation team in the spotlight at every town hall, the production team scrambling behind the scenes with zero recognition. People on the B team know they are on the B team, and they leave.
The fix is intentional. When you are prepping a client presentation, a leadership update, a town hall, or bonus decisions, ask yourself: am I showcasing all kinds of work, or just the visible work? Give your customer service person, your operations person, your behind-the-scenes contributor a moment to share what they do and what they have learned. That person is often the one saving the client relationship when things go sideways. The whole team needs to see that, not just you.
Putting all three together
Access to information and decisions. Safety to take risks. Recognition of all kinds of work. Build these three things and you have an inclusive team. Then go have the happy hour. The social events are not the foundation; they are the celebration of a foundation you already built.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 224: Why certain team members bug you (and how to actually handle it). When a team member drives you up the wall but is technically doing their job, the problem is rarely performance. Lia breaks down three specific archetypes that trigger leaders, explains what each one is actually signaling, and gives you a concrete strategy for each. This episode is especially useful for owners and founders who keep dreading their own one-on-ones.
- Ep 218: How to get out of the friend zone with your team members. Being friendly with your team is great until it erodes accountability and makes hard conversations feel impossible. Lia walks through a three-step reset: name your leadership style out loud, set real boundaries, and commit to having the hard conversations consistently. This episode is especially useful for small-team owners and founders who hired people they already knew personally.
- Ep 144: How to motivate and align your team when everyone feels like they are sprinting a marathon. Motivating a team under tight deadlines comes down to shared context, early visibility, and a culture where people feel seen beyond their project output. Alison Curtis and Janessa Mason, leaders at creative agency Skona, share how they align client services and creative teams through transparent communication, collaborative timeline-setting, and deliberate relationship-building at every level. This episode is especially useful for founders, agency leaders, and anyone managing across departments that can feel like they have competing agendas.
- Ep 141: How to manage former friends without making things weird. Managing former peers and friends is genuinely hard, and pretending nothing has changed is the fastest way to make it harder. Lia walks through three moves: name the relationship shift out loud, co-create norms for feedback and hard conversations, and own your authority instead of downplaying it. This episode is especially useful for new managers who got promoted from within their own team.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
I don’t want someone waiting to talk to me till the happy hour. I want someone listening when I contribute in a meeting. I want someone to not interrupt me when I share my ideas. That’s what I want. That will make me feel included. Not going to the happy hour. So I want us to all think about what can we do first before we have the social events? Because the social events are great, but they happen after we’ve laid this foundation.
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 up their game.
Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go. 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. 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&A session. Welcome back to the show and today we are talking about practical strategies for building an inclusive team, or as I like to call it, inclusion is more than a happy hour.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. This is something I have been teaching on hosting workshops on writing about for many, many years. I have a class on LinkedIn learning on the topic that has just reached 20,000 learners, which is super exciting. And this is something that even when I am not teaching about inclusion, spoiler alert, inclusion will be a foundational element in anything because in order to have a great team, you have to have a culture of inclusion.
So if you’re working with me for manager development, the ops, playbook, employee engagement, any of my stuff just now, I’m gonna sprinkle inclusion in because inclusion is not something we add on at the end. It’s not something that we only talk about when the inclusion person’s in the room, which was the story of my life for a while when I was running inclusion programs. Inclusion is in how we work, and when we think about inclusion from the very beginning, And how we hire, how we make decisions, how we talk about work, how we prioritize, how we showcase work on our teams.
When we think about inclusion from that standpoint, we never forget about it. It never falls off our radar and we start to weave it into the fabric of how we operate. Now, what I talk about inclusion, a lot of times what I hear from managers is, I care. I wanna do it. Just tell me what to do and I will do it. I don’t really understand how. So my goal today is to answer that question, give you with enough information so you never have to wonder, how do I do this?
You just put this episode on repeat, write some stuff down and go with it. So, why do I say inclusion is more than a happy hour? Because when we want to build inclusive teams, create community, create culture, a lot of times what folks do is they start with pizza parties, happy hours, events, team building stuff. And what they forget is nobody wants to show up to that stuff if no one’s talking to them. If they’re not in corporate, into the way we work.
If they’re excluded every other moment of the day, besides at the pizza party, no thanks. And as a person who has attended far too many happy hours where I felt like, oh, I don’t like these people. They’re rude to me. I don’t want someone waiting to talk to me till the happy hour. I want someone listening. When I contribute in a meeting, I want someone to not interrupt me. When I share my ideas, that’s what I want.
That will make me feel included, not going to the happy hour. So I want us to all think about what can we do first before we have the social events? Because the social events are great, but they happen after we’ve laid this foundation. And how do we lay this foundation through focusing on three areas? Number one, making sure that everyone has access to information and decisions. Knowledge is power. And if we feel like we don’t have the information we need to do our jobs well, we’re gonna feel pretty excluded.
This also comes into play when it comes to making decisions. You know, if we feel like only certain people are privy to give inputs and decisions, share their perspectives, and we feel like, well, we never hear about a decision for days or weeks, and we never really know where to find that information. We are going to feel excluded. This is why this first area is so important because we need to make sure as leaders, as managers, that we are looping people in more than maybe we think.
Okay, I’m gonna just go ahead and say, I think more transparency is always better. More clarity is always better, more, more communication right now, especially with the uncertainty is going to be better. So if you feel like, have I communicated enough? I would think about what have I communicated lately and is there a way I could turn up the heat a little bit on that? Access to decisions doesn’t mean people have to, you know, have input into every single thing, or that it becomes decision by committee.
No, this means that you have developed a process for communicating decisions and you’ve communicated what said process is so that people are on the same page, for example, saying, you know, Hey, we have to make a big decision about the direction of this product or service. Here is the process I will be weighing at talking to these people. Here are some opportunity to share your inputs. I’ll be making the decision in two weeks and I will communicate it at this point.
Hey, this, this is a way of being inclusive, just being clear and being transparent about what’s going on. Same thing with sharing information. I have worked with teams that were really, really tight on sharing information and the message that it sends, I’m gonna say it is, I don’t trust you. Literally, if you are both on the same team, in the same company and you don’t wanna share a document with someone, that’s a psychological safety disaster. If I’ve ever seen one, like we should be sharing documents, we shouldn’t say, well, I, I can’t show you yet unless we’re worried one, that person’s gonna give feedback that derails us or say something negative about we’re doing okay.
It’s like a worry situation. Or two, we don’t trust them if we’re not feeling like we can share information. And I’m not talking about like highly sensitive stock price moving information. I’m talking about a project plan or you know, a proposal or something like that. Progress on design, whatever it is, where if we’re not feeling like we can share with our team members, we have a trust issue that needs to be addressed because that’s a huge inclusion blocker.
One thing to do to address this is create a policy around information sharing saying, Hey, we share by default, or we open on a Google Docs, you know, comment, access by default, whatever it looks like. Getting everybody on the same page around what that protocol is on your team so that some people don’t share information and other people don’t. And again, we wanna lean towards more transparency, the better. The second pillar of having an inclusive team is making sure everybody has safety and taking risks.
Now, this is essentially the definition of psychological safety, right? Safety, taking risks, being vulnerable without it being held against you. And why I talk about this when I’m talking about inclusion is because a lot of times the cost of mistakes is different depending on what background you’re in. I worked in tech for many years, and as a woman in tech, non-engineer, I felt like, oh gosh, like I have, you know, if I get it wrong, if I say the wrong thing, I, I have the weight of the whole, you know, womenkind on, on my shoulders looking at me like, man, you’re letting this down.
And even if this was in my head, this cognitive load is a lot to bear for someone in in particular identity groups. So when we wanna create an inclusive environment, it means we have to make it safe to make mistakes, take risks, to participate in conversations. Okay? If I’m the only woman in a meeting, it is taking a risk to speak in that meeting because there is so much at stake. And if someone interrupts me or talks over me or re appropriates my idea, so I say something and it’s later mansplained or something else, then I’m not gonna feel safe.
Instead, we model inclusion by amplifying ideas, catching interruptions when they happen, saying, Hey, building on Leah’s idea. Uh, Leah was sharing a great idea earlier that I wanted to come back to. That’s the way that we make it safer to take risks and participate. And that’s the way that we show. We are modeling inclusion. We are not tolerating things like interruptions and, and reappropriating ideas. And this is one of the biggest things that women report in meetings is feeling like, Hey, anytime I say anything, nobody listens when I say it, but when Joe over there says it, everyone’s like, oh, that’s awesome.
Let’s keep doing that. Okay. So we wanna really, really watch out for that. This also shows up in sharing ideas. You know, if someone shares something new and as the business owner, as the founders ceo, you feel like, no, that’s not gonna work. Not shutting the idea with no way that’s not gonna work won’t happen here. It won’t work here. Right? Saying, oh, that’s an interesting idea. Let’s evaluate it. Right? Letting ideas exist without shutting them down is another way to provide safety in sharing ideas, in taking risks.
Shutting ideas down at the outset, even if you don’t agree with it or don’t think it’s feasible. This has a chilling effect on future ideas, on innovation. So, you know, think about what is your process for disagreeing, for saying, Hey, you know, we’re not gonna explore that this time. A lot of times it doesn’t really need to even be said. You can say, okay, we’ve had a lot of great ideas come up in this conversation. We’re gonna evaluate how to move forward and come back to you.
See, you don’t even need to shut it down. If an idea keeps coming up and you feel like it really does need to be shut down, then you can say Thank you for your perspective. Again, we’ll wait. This is likely not to be the direction we’re gonna move forward with, but I really appreciate you sharing feedback. Again, shut it down little bit, but I didn’t say you’re an idiot. Okay, you get the idea. Third thing that fosters a sense of inclusion before you can head to that happy hour is to celebrate all kinds of work.
Nothing speaks exclusion more than having an A team B team situation. And having spent a lot of my career working in design where there’s designers working on the ideation, the vision, the more fun, glamorous work and working with production design, who is at the later stage of the process, often kind of like fixing the stuff that’s broken. There is often an A team B team vibe on many teams. I have seen it, I have lived it.
I have worked it. And it’s demoralizing. When you’re on the B team, you know you’re on the B team. The AAM work gets shown in town halls, in big team meetings to executive leadership, and the B team work is scrambling to do all of the extra work when the AAM folks have moved on to something else. This is often what happens, and it doesn’t mean you don’t have different kinds of roles, responsibilities. It means you find moments to celebrate all kinds of work that is happening and you reward all kinds of work that’s happening.
So if you are preparing for a town hall meeting or a large update or briefing some executives or preparing an update on what the team’s been doing for leadership, things like that. If you are going to present to a client, if you are going to, you know, give out bonuses, whatever it looks like when you’re going to put a spotlight on work and reward that work, making sure you’re doing that equitably. Because the people that are doing quote unquote just behind the scenes work or some of this, what might be looked at as B-team work, they are not gonna stay when they feel like they are on the B team.
You have to create a vibe of, there’s one team. All of our work is important. All of our work has its moment to shine. And back that up by showcasing that kind of work. For example, if you have a team member that works on customer service or you know, filing complaint tickets or whatever, like that kind of thing where, you know, maybe a product person’s usually in the spotlight or the person that’s meeting with the clients is usually a spotlight.
Figure out a time where that person can share what they do, what they’ve learned, what their job is like. Because that person is the one who’s saving you. When a client comes upset or when a customer’s not happy with something, this person does have a strategic role on the team. So you wanna make sure that not only does that person see it, the whole rest of the team sees it so that they don’t propagate this AAM B team vibe.
So these are the three ways that you lay a foundation of inclusion on your team, making sure everybody has access to information and decisions, making it safe to take risks. And making sure you are recognizing and rewarding all kinds of work happening, not having an a b team situation. And when you do this, when you have created an inclusive team that shows up in how people work. Now go have that happy hour. Go have that pizza party, whatever it is.
There’s a lot of strategies on how to have inclusive team events, meaning don’t always serve alcohol, don’t have it after hours, all these little things. I can definitely put some links for resources in there, but this was not about how to have inclusive happy hours. This episode was all about how to create an inclusive team, how to make the work inclusive so that you can run with whatever you want on the social side. And I mentioned this is one of my favorite, favorite, most longstanding topics to teach on.
So if you are ready to build your most inclusive team yet, because inclusive teams are high performing teams and high performing teams are motivated teams and engaged teams, if you are ready to do that work, Then reach [email protected] and we will dive into these three areas in a lot more depth, answer any questions that folks have around implementing it around well, what to do in this situation or that situation so that folks come away with a really solid understanding of how to apply this to their teams.
Again, that’s to email me at [email protected]. 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 liaarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why don't team happy hours and pizza parties make employees feel included?
Social events only work after you've built a foundation of inclusion in how the team actually works. If someone is being interrupted in meetings, left out of decisions, or excluded throughout the day, they are not going to feel welcomed at a happy hour. Inclusion has to show up in the daily work, not just at the party. The social events are a great bonus, but they cannot substitute for creating an environment where people feel heard, respected, and informed every single day.
How do I make sure everyone on my team feels included in decisions?
You don't need to make every decision by committee, but you do need a clear, communicated process. For example, tell your team who will have input, when a decision will be made, and when and how you will share the outcome. Transparency about the process itself goes a long way. Also, lean toward sharing more information rather than less. Withholding documents or project plans from team members sends the message that you don't trust them, which is one of the biggest inclusion blockers a leader can create.
What does psychological safety have to do with building an inclusive team?
Psychological safety is central to inclusion because the cost of making a mistake or speaking up is not the same for everyone. Someone from an underrepresented group, for example, may feel like one wrong word reflects on their entire community, not just themselves. As a leader, you create safety by amplifying ideas, calling out interruptions in real time, and never shutting down an idea with a flat no. When people see that it is genuinely safe to contribute, they are far more likely to participate and stay engaged.
How do I stop an 'A team, B team' culture from forming on my team?
Start by making sure all kinds of work get visibility, not just the high-profile or client-facing work. If your town halls, leadership updates, and bonuses only spotlight one type of contribution, the people doing behind-the-scenes work will know they are on the B team and will eventually leave. Give every role a moment to share what they do and what they have learned. The goal is to show the whole team, through consistent action, that there is one team and all of the work matters.
What are three practical things I can do right now to build a more inclusive team?
First, make sure everyone has access to information and decisions by being transparent about processes and defaulting to sharing rather than withholding. Second, create safety for people to take risks and share ideas by amplifying contributions in meetings, catching interruptions, and responding to new ideas with curiosity instead of dismissal. Third, celebrate all kinds of work equitably, not just the glamorous or visible projects. These three things build the foundation that makes any team social or culture event actually meaningful.