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 focus on something, we see more of that. We create more of it. We manifest more of that.”
“Paying your high performers as best you can, that’s going to pay off. We don’t want to try to get a bargain when it comes to our talent.”
Episode highlights
The sentiment is real, but the story you’re telling yourself makes it worse
Owners and leaders are showing up every single day already convinced their team doesn’t care. That conviction is the first problem. Lia calls it a negative confirmation bias: when you’re constantly scanning for proof that everyone is slacking, your brain finds it. You will always find the evidence you’re looking for. That is not a leadership skill. Getting stuck in a victim cycle where everything is happening to you is not a strategy for building a better team.
The fix is not to pretend real problems don’t exist. It’s to separate the story from the facts and deal with the facts directly.
Perception vs. experience: the two-pronged framework
Any team challenge has two layers. The perception layer is how you are interpreting what’s happening. The experience layer is what is actually happening on the ground. Lia is clear that you have to address perception first, because your perception shapes every action you take next. If you walk in already decided that your team is a lost cause, you will manage them like a lost cause.
Once you’ve checked your own framing, then you look at the experience: what deadlines were actually missed, what mistakes were actually made, what accountability was actually absent. Those are fixable through concrete leadership moves.
Setting expectations is the actual leadership move
Two business owners came to Lia in the same week with almost identical situations: a team member made a mistake and took zero responsibility, blamed the owner for missing SOPs or training. Lia’s read was blunt. That pattern is not a good sign for long-term fit. But before you write someone off, you give them a chance by setting the expectation clearly.
The script Lia recommends sounds like this: “When you recognize something getting in the way of doing your job, it’s my expectation that you flag it before you miss a deadline. I can only fix something if I’m aware of it.” Then you watch the response. Someone who says, “You’re right, there were moments I could have said something,” is taking responsibility. Someone who says, “Yeah, okay, I guess,” is not. That response is your real data.
After that conversation, if the same pattern repeats, now you have a legitimate performance management conversation. You have set the expectation, you have given the feedback, and you have documented the gap. That is the progression.
Money is tight, and your team knows it
The second root cause Lia names is economic reality. Raises, bonuses, and promotions are moving slower than they were a few years ago. Your team members are doing the math: same workload, less certainty of reward. The question running through their heads is whether it is worth continuing to push hard when the upside feels unclear.
If you are a leader without direct control over salary, throwing up your hands and pointing to HR is not a solution. You start having real career conversations. That means mapping out visibility opportunities with stakeholders, identifying skills to build toward a future promotion, and showing the person a path forward even when the budget is constrained. Lia points to The New Manager Playbook for a template on exactly how to run these conversations.
If you do control compensation, use that lever intentionally
For business owners with direct influence over pay, Lia is direct: people at the low end of their range know it, and they do not show up at their best from that position. Nearly everyone believes they are underpaid. That is the baseline reality. So the work is not to convince them they are wrong. The work is to show them the full picture, what goes into compensation decisions, what the path to a raise or promotion looks like, and whether there are collaborative incentives like profit sharing that tie their effort to the outcome.
Lia shares a client example: a business owner with a thriving small company who compensates a decade-long team member exceptionally well. The owner’s reasoning was simple. That person is the backbone of the company and needs to know her value. Lia’s reaction was that she wishes every leader thought that way. Paying your best people as well as you can is not generosity for its own sake. It is cheaper than the rehiring, retraining, and onboarding costs that come when they leave.
The reengagement formula
When people feel like they don’t care, something underneath is usually off: a gap in expectations, a feeling of being undervalued, or a missing line of sight to growth. The reengagement path is not about giving participation trophies. It is about making sure every person on your team can see a real path forward, feels genuinely compensated for their contribution, and has had a direct conversation with you about what matters to them. When those pieces are in place, the engagement shift follows.
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)
Tasks are already missed, deadlines are delayed. And it’s like, when a team member makes a mistake, they don’t even take responsibility. What is going on? And every day, team leaders and business owners come to me asking, was it just me? Or like, does nobody care anymore? This sentiment that our team members don’t really care, that they’re just kind of dredging along, this is something that a lot of us are feeling right now. So that’s what we’re going to unpack today.
I’m Leah Garvin, and this is The New Manager Playbook, where we dive into the ins and outs of managing people. Because dealing with people is hard enough. So I am here to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. And with that, I wanted to share my new resource, which is a toolkit for how to really blend AI with your leadership skills. You know, I’ve been talking about AI a lot on our show, because this is like the number one issue that the workforce is being faced with.
So I put together a toolkit with 10 different ways you can apply AI to the leadership skills that you’re using, really derived from The New Manager Playbook book and my book, The Unstoppable Team, to make sure you really have that concrete understanding about how to help AI complement your work instead of replace you. So you’re not going to want to miss this one. This is at leahgarvin.com slash toolkit. Now, where is this, you know, employees just don’t care anymore, no one gives a shit kind of sentiment coming from?
Now, I want to talk about two things that are really important so that we can face this challenge. First is the perception itself. Okay, whenever we’re dealing with team challenges, I like to say it’s two-pronged. There’s always a perception issue and then there’s an experience issue, and both of them can inform the other. But the perception one we always want to address first because that one informs, well, what actual actions do we need to take to change the experience?
And the perception starts with us. If we are showing up every day thinking already, nobody cares, everyone sucks, I don’t have the right team, and all of these things, we are showing up with a negative confirmation bias where we’ll be looking for reasons that everyone is not doing their job, that everyone sucks. I am telling you, this is something that has been scientifically proven, right? It’s not just quantum physics, which I love talking about, but this is when we focus on something, we begin to see more of that, right?
It’s like when you get the red car and now all you see is red cars or whatever, right? This is a function of human and how our brains work. When we focus on something, we see more of that. We create more of it. We manifest more of that. We create more of that in our lives. If we are believing our team members suck and no one cares and everybody’s slacking on their jobs and we believe all these things and we’re thinking that all the time, we are programming our mind to look for those things and be like, yes, I knew it.
I knew they didn’t care. I knew they were that. So this actually starts with us. If there are genuine things that are happening on your team, things that are getting missed, mistakes that are being made, those things we should address through setting expectations. I’ll talk about that in a second. But the perception and showing up every day at work and thinking, oh, this team sucks and all this, that is going to make the situation worse. And so if you’re sitting here feeling like, I don’t know if I have the right people on these things, it’s a moment to self-manage and think about, well, what is the reality of the situation?
There have been deadlines missed, mistakes made and folks didn’t take responsibility. This is an opportunity to reset expectations, to give feedback and actually do performance management. And then I see who’s left people that are actually need a little bit of course correction or people that actually aren’t a fit and don’t need to be on the team. That is the leadership skill, right? Is the performance management. Not that just saying like, oh, I have the worst team ever, right?
That’s not a leadership skill, okay? Like, no, it’s general like humans to kind of complain about stuff. But like getting stuck in that victim cycle that everything’s happening to us, that’s not a leadership skill either. So what we do when we have this feeling like, ah, God, I just don’t feel like people care. It’s we go back and we set expectations. Let’s say, it’s funny, two business owners came to me last week and said like, am I wrong here?
Because a team member messed something up and they didn’t take any responsibility for it. And I sat down with them and I read through the email. One was on Slack, one was an email. And I was like, no, you were right. They legitimately took no responsibility. They said it was your fault for not having training. It was your fault for not having SOPs. They just went like full on like, nope, wipe washing my hands of this.
Now, that is not a good sign. I’m gonna be real honest that that person’s a long-term fit. So I’m just gonna put that out there. But let’s say you say, hey, I think there’s potential with this person. I wanna have the conversation. We always wanna give a person a chance first. This is an opportunity to say, hey, when you recognize something that was getting in the way of doing your job, it’s my expectation that you flag it before you miss a deadline or before something happens because that’s part of you doing your job effectively.
I can only fix something if I’m aware of it. So if you realize you need more training or you need a process or you need more budget or resources, you gotta let me know well before it becomes an issue. That expectation setting and seeing what their response is is gonna really tell you if that person cares. If the person says, yeah, you’re right. Like there were a few opportunities I could have said something and I kind of thought I could muscle through it, but then in the end, I realized I really wasn’t able to.
Okay, they’re taking some responsibility. If they say, yeah, like, okay, I guess, then they’re not, okay? And that’s where you can start to tell. We can’t totally tell from the mistake itself. Even when someone doesn’t take responsibility off the bat, it sure is frustrating. It’s not mature behavior to not take responsibility, but you wanna set the expectations so that you can see, okay, is this thing salvageable? Now, after you’ve set the expectations, you can give feedback on that and say, hey, we missed another deadline and you didn’t say anything, like we were really clear about that.
Now you’re getting that performance management of giving the feedback, setting expectations and saying, well, what do you wanna see from here? So the feeling of like people don’t care, if you come at it, bringing this confirmation bias, looking for problems and then never talking to your team about it and then wanting to fire everyone and start over, that is not a way to actually show up as a leader and how to actually get to the outcome you want, which is that people do take responsibility and they fix that stuff.
Because it is a nightmare having to rehire your whole team, like no way does anyone wanna do that. Let’s say worst case, you realize you need to get rid of like 90% of your team and you have like two people that are great. That sort of situation is not good for the two high performers. They will probably leave because they see like what the hell is going on in this team where we lost like eight out of 10 people and I’m carrying the weight while you hire people.
The ideal is that people are here wanting to do a good job and they just need to be given the feedback. That’s the ideal. And again, in the cases where someone doesn’t take the feedback, that’s a different conversation, right? Around a performance plan and whatever else. So that’s first. Now, the second piece of what could be sort of surfacing people not to demonstrate like they’re really bought in is the reality that money is tight right now.
In big companies, a lot of companies aren’t offering their raises or the bonuses or the promotions that they were offering at their rate that they were before. It might have recently changed in the last few months or even year. And people are saying, well, I’m doing the same amount of work and I don’t have that certainty that X, Y, Z is gonna give me a promotion which is gonna get me paid more. I don’t have that certainty that these things are gonna get me that raise or that bonus.
Do I really need to keep busting my ass for that? That is a thing, a question that your team members is running through their head. That is the reality of the times right now. So if you’re in a, if you’re a corporate manager or you don’t have direct control over someone’s salary, or you have some control, but you don’t have a ton of wiggle room in there, the answer is not to just throw up your hands and say, well, budgets are tight.
I don’t control it. Like, you know, go talk to HR. It’s to start to talk about that person’s career goals and how there are other ways to create an incentivizing career, even with things that are out, like when there’s a lot out of your control. For example, if someone has been wanting to, you know, move towards a promotion, maybe you could talk about a plan of getting them more visibility with stakeholders, having them show more leadership, do different activities and projects so that when promotions open up more, they are ready, they are set up.
Maybe you talk about, you know, hey, how do we start building your skills up in this capacity, right? So that you feel like you’re really growing in this role, even if it’s setting you up for a role that you take in the future, right? And this is the importance of career conversations. And why I talk about them in the new manager playbook book is because we have to be having these. A lot of times managers think, well, I’m having a performance review.
I’m having one-on-ones. I don’t really need career conversations. This is where you understand what motivates someone so that you can create a plan for getting there. And that has value for us in and of itself. So you’ve got to be having those. And if you aren’t sure what to do, check out the book because it spells out and gives a template for how to have those. Now, if you are in control of the salary, if you’re a business owner or you’re in a company where you can have direct effect on someone’s compensation, you got to understand that when people are at the low end of the range, they know it.
And we don’t show up our best when we’re at the lowest end of the range. And one other thing you got to understand is every single person in every single job always feels like they’re getting underpaid. Like 99.9%, I said not to talk in absolutes, 99% of people think they’re being underpaid. They’re moving too slowly and they deserve more. That’s the reality. So now with that said, how are you getting someone engaged and excited about the work when they feel like they have like a bad deal?
Well, you can talk about what goes into compensation and how it’s evaluated. You can talk about what paths are for progression and in promotion, right? When bonuses are available. You can talk about, you know, having a collaborative incentive of a profit share. So we hit this certain goal, then we give bonuses. These are all things that I talk about with business owner clients, right, through my Ops Playbook. This is what we set up when we talk about how to match priorities, expectations and performance so that people really see their path to growth.
If your team members feel like, well, like I’m not getting paid that well. I’m just like, you know, this business owner is getting rich off my back, which is a lot of people think because they don’t understand the cost of running a business. That is on you to really help break down and make clear. And if you are trying to pay people as little as possible, you got to realize like you get what you pay for.
You always get what you pay for. It makes such, paying people a little bit more, showing them, hey, I really value you. Maybe paying them a lot of it more because they’re doing an amazing job. This will always pay off. Paying your high performers as best you can, that’s going to pay off. We don’t want to try to get a bargain when it comes to our talent. And so if you’re feeling like your team members aren’t really caring, there probably is something in there around them not feeling valued.
Now I know, again, we’re not saying and giving out participation awards and that people should get a raise every day just for doing their job. But we want to make sure people feel like there is a path to growth, that they’re being valued, that they’re being well compensated, and that they have, you know, that there’s something in it for them. So whatever that looks like. And again, I work a lot with leaders on this because it’s going to look different for every company, every team, every kind of industry.
But that is a really clear, surefire way to re-engage people, to get them excited about the work, to get them to care, right? To give a shit, right? This is this feeling of, why is this happening? Well, we are going to feel, if we’re feeling underpaid, we’re going to be like, well, should I really care a lot? Like I have a new client that has a thriving business and she has a really small team. And one of her key team members has been with her over a decade.
And she compensates this person so well. I have never seen someone compensated so well for the kind of role she has. But the business owner said, well, she’s the backbone of this company. I want her to know how valuable she is. And I said, gosh, I wish every single leader thought that way. Because what happens a lot of time is we’re struggling. We’re trying to make our numbers. We’re trying to hit profitability. And so we start cutting with our people and then they don’t feel loyal to us.
They don’t care. So if you have any room, you got to pay your good people as best you can. You have to because you are going to incur that cost anyway and rehiring and retraining and onboarding, which is the most expensive expense a business can incur. So there we have it. When we’re feeling like, do people even care what’s going on? No one’s taking responsibility. This is an opportunity to shake off the confirmation bias, looking for proof that no one cares.
Got to let it go. Then we set expectations, give feedback. We actually exercise performance management and see like, okay, was there just a gap and the person does care? And then we get really, really clear on recognition through career goals, career conversations, and through compensation if it’s available, through opportunities, you know, growth potential. All of these things have value. But when people like, we’ve got to believe, okay? I believe your team members don’t just show up because they don’t care and they don’t want to be there.
Like, let’s give them more the benefit of the doubt, that there is a way to find that connection for every single person. I really do believe that, no matter what the job is. And when we find that, we can start to create like that hook of investment and alignment and buy-in. But it’s not just because they’re lucky to have a job. That’s not doing it for people, right? So we have to do these things. And when we do these things, we start to see that engagement shift.
Okay? So before you leave, if you have not downloaded that toolkit, head to leahgarver.com slash toolkit. It is ways to incorporate AI into being a leader because you still got to have hard conversations. You still got to be giving this feedback. You have to be using your critical thinking. And there are ways to utilize tools when it makes sense. So grab that toolkit. And if you’re struggling with this, let me know. Because this is something that a lot of us are seeing.
I’m getting the question every single day. Like, why is no one caring right now? Why is no one taking responsibility? And it may be nuanced in your team. And by looking at a couple of factors, I can figure out right away what it is and what to tune. So don’t be a stranger. All right, see you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why does it feel like my employees don't care anymore?
There are two things happening at once. First, if you are already showing up believing your team is checked out, your brain will look for proof of that and find it everywhere. That confirmation bias makes the problem feel bigger than it is. Second, there is a real factor right now: money is tight, raises and bonuses are harder to come by, and team members are quietly asking themselves whether putting in the effort is still worth it. Address both by checking your own mindset first, then having honest conversations about expectations, feedback, and career growth.
What do I do when an employee makes a mistake and refuses to take responsibility?
Use it as a chance to set a clear expectation rather than assuming the worst. Tell them directly: when something is getting in the way of doing the job, you expect them to flag it before a deadline gets missed, not after. Then watch their response. If they acknowledge there were moments they could have spoken up, that is someone taking responsibility and showing they care. If they shrug it off, that tells you something different, and it may be time to move into a more formal performance conversation.
How do I re-engage employees when I can't give them a raise?
Start having real career conversations. Find out what that person actually wants, whether it is a promotion, new skills, or more visibility with decision-makers, and then build a plan toward it even if budget is frozen right now. Getting someone more exposure to leadership opportunities, putting them on projects that stretch their skills, and making it clear there is a path forward all create a sense of investment that compensation alone does not cover. People disengage when they feel like there is nothing in it for them, so your job is to help them see what that future looks like.
Is it worth trying to fix a disengaged team member or should I just let them go?
Give them a real chance first by setting expectations and giving direct feedback before making that call. A lot of what looks like not caring is actually a gap in clarity, someone was not told what was expected, or they did not feel safe flagging a problem. Once you set the expectation clearly and give feedback when it is not met, you will quickly see whether the person course-corrects or keeps repeating the pattern. That response, not the original mistake, is what tells you whether this is a fit issue or a system issue.
How much does compensation actually affect employee engagement for small business teams?
It matters more than most founders want to admit. When team members feel like they are at the low end of the pay range, they know it, and it is hard to show up fully when you feel undervalued. If you have any room to pay your best people better, do it, because the cost of replacing a strong team member through rehiring, retraining, and onboarding is almost always higher than paying them well in the first place. If you truly cannot raise pay right now, be transparent about how compensation is evaluated and what the path to a raise or bonus actually looks like.