Most performance problems are not about a bad hire. They are about a feedback vacuum where expectations were never clearly set. Lia walks through a simple framework: set explicit expectations, give specific constructive feedback, and only then decide whether someone can turn it around. This episode is essential for any owner or leader who has ever thought ‘they should just know this.’
This episode is part of the Feedback & Hard Conversations series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“We have to first take inventory of where we’re at, what’s going on inside of us, before we have a feedback conversation.”
“A lot of times we bring an emotional charge to the conversation that results in us saying the feedback’s about one thing, but it’s really about something else.”
“…sometimes the timeliness, it’s less important than making sure you are showing up to the conversation the right way.”
“…the self management, taking inventory. This is going to be a secret weapon for actually being able to connect better with your team member.”
Episode highlights
Why the best feedback framework fails if you skip this step
Lia opens with a direct challenge: it does not matter which framework you use, situation-behavior-impact or anything else, if you walk into the conversation carrying an emotional charge, the message will not land. The team member will not hear the feedback clearly. They will read it on your face, your body language, and your tone before you ever say a word. Research backs this up: roughly 70% of communication is nonverbal. The words are almost beside the point if the delivery is off.
The iced coffee and the missing attachment
To make the concept concrete, Lia tells a story almost every manager will recognize. A team member has been rolling in ten minutes late to the 9 a.m. meeting, iced coffee in hand, every single morning. You have not said anything yet because you were not sure how to bring it up. Then one day that same person sends a deck to your VP without the attachment. You see it come through and suddenly you are furious, but the fury is not really about the attachment. It is about all the late arrivals you have been silently tallying. If you open Slack right then and send feedback while you are in that state, the conversation will not be about the deck. It will be about everything else, whether you intend it to be or not.
Taking inventory before you open your mouth
The move Lia recommends is simple but not easy: stop, take a breath, and ask yourself what is actually going on inside you right now. What are you really wound up about? When you do that, you will often find you have two separate issues that need two separate conversations. The attachment problem gets its own conversation, focused on that behavior and a concrete fix (build a checklist before sending anything to the VP). The tardiness problem gets its own conversation at a different time. Keeping them separate means your team member can actually act on each piece of feedback instead of feeling buried under a laundry list.
When timeliness is less important than readiness
Conventional advice says give feedback immediately while the moment is fresh. Lia pushes back on this. If you are genuinely activated, waiting a few hours, a night, or even a few days is better than showing up reactive. You can acknowledge the delay simply: “Something came up last week and we have not had a chance to connect, so I wanted to circle back.” A slightly delayed conversation delivered from a regulated place will do far less damage to your relationship, and far more to actually changing the behavior, than an immediate conversation delivered from a charged place.
What happens when you skip self-regulation
Lia is candid about what unregulated feedback looks like in practice. She describes two failure modes she fell into herself as a manager in the corporate world: going reactive and saying too much, or going so indirect that the team member had no idea what was being asked. “Could you maybe do this next time?” is not a request that sticks. Both responses come from the same root cause: showing up to the conversation before you have processed what you are actually feeling.
Self-management as a leadership superpower
When you take stock before speaking, something shifts. Feedback conversations become less explosive. Team members get less defensive. Requests for behavior change actually get acted on. Lia frames emotional self-management not as a soft skill but as a practical leadership tool, one that directly affects whether your feedback produces results. The team member is not the problem. The preparation is.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 226: How to give feedback without it turning into a laundry list. When you have a lot of corrective feedback to give, rattling it off item by item erodes trust and trains your team to do the bare minimum. Lia’s fix is to categorize feedback into themes, connect each theme to a clear company why, and balance corrections with specific, concrete recognition. This episode is especially useful for small business owners and team leads who feel buried in constant corrections.
- Ep 214: How to give feedback after you’ve waited too long. It is never too late to give feedback, and avoiding it only makes the problem worse for your team. Lia walks through how to own the delay, contextualize the conversation, and deliver the message in a way that reduces defensiveness and rebuilds trust. Most useful for founders, owners, and team leads who have been carrying unspoken feedback and need a practical script to finally move it forward.
- Ep 212: Why avoiding tough feedback is the most expensive mistake you can make as a leader. Avoiding difficult feedback does not protect your team member, it leaves them in the dark and lets problems quietly damage everyone around them. Lia breaks down the most common pitfalls leaders fall into with hard feedback and makes the case that one uncomfortable conversation is always cheaper than the resentment and performance damage that builds when you stay silent. This episode is especially useful for founders, owners, and team leads who know they should say something but keep finding reasons to wait.
- Ep 194: Your team member isn’t performing. Have you actually given them feedback?. Most performance problems are not about a bad hire. They are about a feedback vacuum where expectations were never clearly set. Lia walks through a simple framework: set explicit expectations, give specific constructive feedback, and only then decide whether someone can turn it around. This episode is essential for any owner or leader who has ever thought ‘they should just know this.’
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)
0:00
Because if we’re not doing this, it doesn’t matter what we say. We can use the best tools in our belt, but if we don’t do this first, it’s not gonna go well. We have to first take inventory of where we’re at, what’s going on inside of us, before we have a feedback conversation. 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 OPER 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 realize that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes or are 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. Welcome back to the show. I am flying high. Just got back from the California Conference for Women where I did a booth advertising the new Manager Playbook and not only did I have a line of folks coming up to get a copy and talk to me, I sold out of a hundred copies in almost an hour.
It was just so exciting to see people so excited about the book. And I think what people like about it is it’s something they can get for themselves if they’re a new manager. Something you can get for a team member. If you are about to promote someone into a manager or hire a manager, it’s something you can give to a friend. It’s a refresher. And really true to its name, it is a playbook. And so it doesn’t have to be read in sequence.
Each chapter dives into specific skills. It’s got worksheets and exercises and tools. It’s just so easy to up and reference something just that you’re feeling stuck on in that moment. So if you have not gotten your copy, oh gosh, what are you waiting for? Go to the new manager now. Wait. Go to leahgarva.com new manager playbook or Amazon. Search for the new Manager Playbook and get a copy today. And I just can’t wait to help make managing easier for for you or your team member or your Friend or whoever that might be.
All right? And once you get a copy and dive in, please let me know what you think. I love, love hearing from folks on how it’s helping them in their role. All right, so today, though, I want to dive into one of the skills that I talk about at length in the new manager playbook, a topic I talk about a lot on this show. And it’s a topic that’s whenever I do an episode on this. This is one of the most popular episode types because, folks, we’re hungry to learn about this.
And drum roll, please. It’s feedback. Because no matter how long you’ve been managing, feedback is a doozy, right? Because what we might have nailed in one situation, you know, we got a new team member, or maybe we’re managing folks over different time zones or managing folks, some are remote and some are in office, or we’re managing folks that are way younger than us or way older than us or some new situation. And it just throws all the rules out the window, right?
Or it makes it hard all over again. I hope you do still keep the tools, not just throw them out the window. But you get what I’m saying. Some moments it’s easier, some moments it’s harder, and most of the time, it’s somewhere in between. And usually with a feedback conversation, it’s like the way it goes is something we never expect. We prepare, we prepare, we prepare. And then our team member says something that throws us off.
Like, they handle it way better than we thought or way worse even than we prepped. So we always want to be building our muscles. Now, I’ve talked about my favorite feedback framework a number of times. Situation, behavior, impact. I talk about it again in the new manager playbook. I’ve talked about the importance of recognizing work, right? Giving positive feedback so that we kind of rebrand Feedback is not all bad. But today I wanted to talk about what we have to do even before having a feedback conversation.
Because if we’re not doing this, it doesn’t matter what we say. We can use the best tools in our belt, but if we don’t do this first, it’s not going to go well. And what is that? We have to first take inventory of where we’re at, what’s going on inside of us before we have a feedback conversation. Because a lot of times this is for constructive feedback. Typically when we have to deliver a message that something didn’t go well or, you know, something’s been a pattern, we really just gotta nip it in the bud.
Or something has to be fixed because we’re the manager and we’re under a lot of pressure and maybe this person’s done this a bunch of times and maybe we’ve already said something. A lot of times we bring an emotional charge to the conversation that results in us saying the feedback’s about one thing, but it’s really about something else. Or we are overinflating the significance of a piece of feedback when it was a minor thing because we’ve been holding on to all this other stuff.
And the problem is when we don’t let go and work through whatever we’re carrying with us, it becomes confusing to our team member. Alarming. They’re like, whoa. Like they don’t really know what to expect. It’s hard to calibrate the severity of this. It can break trust with our team member. They can feel like, ah, like you know, under attack. And I don’t mean that you just come in yelling at someone, but a lot of times people can read it on your face if it’s not okay.
They can read it in your body language, your tone. I think they say like 70% of communication is non verbal. Right. It’s not just what we say, it’s how we say it. It’s how we’re showing up. And so we do not want to give feedback until we have processed whatever’s going on. Let me give an example. Like if your team member has been late to the team meeting, they’re the old coming in 10 minutes late carrying an iced coffee, saying there was a traffic jam, right?
Every morning at the 9 o’clock meeting, they’re coming in 9, 10, flustered, out of breath, holding that iced coffee and you’re so frustrated and you haven’t said something because you don’t really know. You haven’t figured out what to say. You don’t want to be nitpicking. And then that team member one day sends a deck out to your VP and they forgot to attach the attachment. And you see that come through and you’re like this freaking person again with their bullshit.
And you get triggered by that. That’s not because of the email attachment. You were already triggered about this feedback you hadn’t shared with them. Or maybe you shared feedback about the late thing and it hadn’t gotten better. But you’re carrying this emotional charge and if you go right then walk down over that task or open up your slack or your email or your chat and you send them in a piece of feedback right after it, cause you want to Give it timely.
We’re supposed to give feedback right away, and you’re carrying that emotional charge. This is not going to be about that attachment. Trust me. We don’t want to bring that over there. What we want to do first, let’s say that attachment doesn’t go through and you feel super wound up and you’re like, this is it, I’m done. Let’s say that happens. Taking a deep breath and saying, okay, what’s really going on right now? Okay, Asking yourself, take an inventory.
Take some deep breaths. What is showing up? What’s here for me right now? You’re gonna see. I’m really fed up about them being late. And the detachment actually really, in some sense has something to do with it. Maybe disrespect and, like, not paying attention. But, like, this attachment’s not about the being late. And so what I need to do first, well, maybe I gotta address the being late thing first. But if I’m gonna bring up the attachment, because again, you do wanna bring things up right in the moment when they happen or shortly after.
So the person has that context saying, right now I can’t make it about the being late because that’s not what this instance is about. And then letting that go and approaching the conversation from a different level, kind of like diffusing some of that emotion. Because if you bring in and then. Then you were late and then this happened, and this happened, the person, it becomes so overwhelming to that team member, and they’re thinking, gosh, what else have you been tallying up?
Right? We’ve been there in those personal arguments, or the other person’s like, whoa, like, didn’t realize that much she hated me. We don’t want to do that to our team members. And this is one thing triggering you is not the moment to realize that you had this laundry list that you didn’t give the feedback, right? So this sometimes is a reflection on us too, that, gosh, I gotta be giving the microfeedback so that I’m not piling up these examples, okay?
And that’s not easy. And trust me, like, I get there a lot. And I’m like, gosh, well, I get so fed up with something that I’m like, well, I gotta say it right now and I gotta do this and I want to deal with it. And actually, sometimes the timeliness, it’s less important than making sure you are showing up to the conversation the right way. And I know it kind of contradicts some of the leading best practices around feedback of giving it In a timely manner, giving it right away.
But if you are showing up, like, really charged, that has so much possibility of harm to your relationship that I would wait. Maybe you need a night, maybe you need a few hours, maybe you need a couple days and saying, hey, this is. Something happened last week. We haven’t had a chance to kind of connect with you, so apologies for not dealing with it earlier. When we’re communicating and sending out stuff to our VPs, we gotta double check stuff.
It’s really important. That’s part of your job. And my expectation is that you double check and maybe you make a checklist. And when you’re sending something to our vp, you say, hey, double checking the grammar, double checking that attachments are sent, and reading through it even after you send it, and giving a piece of feedback, that’s just about that work, just about that behavior. Right? Because then that person can fix that. And now you’re having a conversation about that incident and how they can do better, not about, like, this whole other bunch of stuff.
And then if they’re late to the next team meeting next week, have that conversation about that thing. Okay? But you’re only able to get there when you take stock. And, like, what are you even so mad about in the first place? So, again, this is what we want to do before we have any feedback conversation at work. And come on, are you listening? Listening to me like, well, I should do that in my first life too.
Yes. Yes, you should. Before we have any confrontation with anyone, we always should be taking stock about what am I bringing to this conversation so that we can be both communicating on the same plane. And when we do that, we start to find that things aren’t explosive and they’re not so bubbly. And maybe if we’re reactive, sort of, we default a little bit reactive. I know I do that. We. We figure out how to. Oh, you know, when I’ve sort of thought and reflected before the reaction, things go a lot better.
They go a lot more smoothly, and my team member hears me a lot better. And then we start to see, okay, people are listening to our feedback. It’s being actioned. There’s less defensiveness. We’re not in this weird kind of who’s proving right and wrong. And then you can get so much further. And when you do that, feedback feels a lot less scary. Because I know when I was managing in the corporate world, I was always so worried about saying the wrong thing and doing the wrong thing, or I was frustrated at this other thing or felt like I was under a lot of pressure, deadlines weren’t fair, and all these other things were adding up all inside that when I would give feedback because I was frustrated, I didn’t want to like explode with that.
I would be really indirect. I’d say, like, yeah, this thing, I guess it’s not a big deal, but like, could you maybe do this next time? And it’s like, what did you just ask me? Right. So I think we can either be a little bit reactive or we can say nothing. And we don’t want to do either of those things. So the self management, taking inventory. This is going to be a secret weapon for actually being able to connect better with your team member and actually being able to make a request for a shift you want to see next time that really sticks.
All right, give it a try and share how it goes. I always love hearing from you. Thank you. Everyone who shares feedback. Ask questions after the shows, suggest topics. It is so much fun to hear what you think and if you’re loving the show, take 2 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, give a review. It helps bring the show to more people, bring visibility to help make managing easier for more folks out there. Thanks so much and 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 love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why do my feedback conversations keep going sideways even when I prepare?
A lot of times it's not about your words or your framework. It's about the emotional charge you're carrying into the room. If you've been holding frustration about one thing and a second issue triggers you, the feedback you deliver ends up being about everything at once. Your team member can read it on your face, in your tone, in your body language. Before any feedback conversation, take inventory of what's actually going on inside you so you can show up focused on the specific behavior you need to address, not the whole pile.
Is it okay to wait before giving feedback if I'm too frustrated to have the conversation calmly?
Yes. Timeliness matters, but showing up emotionally charged does more damage to the relationship than a short delay does. If you need a few hours, a night, or even a couple of days, take them. When you do circle back, a simple acknowledgment like 'I wanted to connect on something from last week' is enough. A calm, focused conversation about one specific behavior will land far better than an immediate reaction loaded with built-up frustration.
How do I stop piling up grievances and then unloading them all at once on a team member?
The fix is giving small pieces of feedback closer to when things happen, so nothing builds up. But when you notice you have already been tallying things, that's a signal to pause before the conversation and ask yourself what you're really reacting to right now. Keep the feedback tied to the current incident only. If there's a separate pattern you need to address, plan a separate conversation for that. Dumping a laundry list on someone at once makes the whole thing feel overwhelming and breaks trust.
What does 'taking inventory' before a feedback conversation actually look like in practice?
When something happens and you feel a strong reaction, stop before you open Slack or walk over to the person. Take a few deep breaths and ask yourself what is actually going on right now. Name what you're feeling and trace it back to its real source. You might realize the thing in front of you is just a trigger for something unrelated. Once you can separate the two, you can either address the current issue calmly on its own or recognize you need a little more time before the conversation will be productive.
How does my emotional state affect whether my team member actually acts on feedback?
When you show up charged, team members get defensive. They spend the conversation trying to figure out how serious this is, what else you've been keeping score on, and whether they're in bigger trouble than you're letting on. That defensiveness blocks them from actually hearing your request. When you've processed what you're carrying first and come in calm and focused on one specific behavior, there's less friction, less confusion about severity, and a much higher chance the person understands what needs to change and follows through.