Change management - getting your team onboard

Struggling with team adoption of new processes or tools? In this episode Lia Garvin explains a framing framework for change management that shifts focus from individual benefits to organizational needs to increase process and tool adoption. Learn simple, actionable steps to reframe communication, reduce resistance, and get your team onboard—based on frameworks Lia has used at Microsoft and Apple.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why "we need this" is the wrong frame for any rollout and what to lead with instead
• How reframing a new platform around what the design team actually wanted got full adoption at Microsoft in one week
• The one question to ask before introducing anything new: what does each person specifically get from this?
• What this looks like in practice for a simple weekly check-in process
• An introduction to Snippets: Lia's new web app for team check-ins built around making adoption straightforward

Resources mentioned:

• Snippets web app: liagarvin.com/snippets

Download my FREE guide to making hard conversations with your team easier at liagarvin.com/convo

Looking for support for yourself of your team? I've got you covered.
Explore manager training, leaders keynotes & offsites, and 1:1 advisory, or my 90-Day-COO program for business owners who want simple systems that actually work.

I transform teams from cost centers to profit centers with practical tools and research-backed strategies that make managing EASIER.

Get all the details at: www.liagarvin.com
Contact: liagarvin.com/contact
Email: hello@liagarvin.com

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lia.garvin
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lia.Garvin

--

© 2026 Lia Garvin / Managing Made Simple

Transcript

Lia (00:00)
How awesome would it be to wake up at three in the morning and not worry if people are working on the right things? Or if a client reaches out and you actually don't really know if you can take on more work or know that you have a one-on-one coming up with someone and you can actually celebrate a win. Wouldn't that be awesome? What if we didn't have to wake up at three in the morning with those thoughts at all?

That is why I'm thrilled to be launching digital snippets today. This is a web version of the Google Docs template that is my most popular tool for teams. And in thinking about how I can make this the most high impact tool for folks, I created this, from scratch, blood, sweat and tears, this is all Lia into making a tool that is going to give you literally exactly what you need.

to have that bird's eye view on what your team is working on. Just like with the Google Doc template, Snippets gives you four key pieces of information. And the reason it's these is because after working with thousands of leaders, after working in team operations at Google, Apple, Microsoft for a decade and looking at what is the information that we need to be able to run teams effectively, it came down to four things. First,

What are the wins? What can we celebrate? What do we get done? Second, where are we stuck or blocked? Where do we need support from our manager? Third, what are my priorities for next week in general? And fourth, what bandwidth do I have? Do I have capacity to take on my work? Am I spread completely too thin? When we have those four pieces of information, wins, sticking points, priorities, and capacity, we have a complete picture on where our teams are at. Now the beauty of it,

is it doesn't replace your existing task tracking tools. If you're using something that's working, click up Asana, whatever, you name it, monday.com. Task tracking tools serve a very specific function. They're the granular. They're to make sure that the little bits of a project are getting done. Love that. But as a leader, that's too detailed. You need a summary view. You need this bird's eye view to say, okay, yes, I know that this stuff got done this week. This high level set of accomplishments.

or I'm going to my one-on-one and I know what wins to call out instead of looking at 35,000 tasks that got signed off. Like how do I know what's important? There's that curation aspect to snippets. You have a place where folks can serve as blockers. And I don't know about you, but I know I've managed countless people that had some blockers, some sticking point that they didn't bring up because they're like, I didn't want to bother you or I didn't want to make a meeting. And it's like, yeah, you should mention it. Right? So this gives you a place for that.

Now priorities for next week, like we wanna know with time to adjust and course correct, this is the top things that I'm focusing on for next week. So that you don't have two people doing the same job, so that you have one job that's not getting covered at all. So that you actually have a sense of what does your team prioritize? Do they actually know what's important? That can give you a lot of insights. And then last, what's the bandwidth? If someone is spread too thin and feeling like they're drowning, again, folks don't always surface that.

and the combination of these signals, these indicators, give you a full picture of performance, of engagement, even showing you where people might be a flight risk. Because if someone's saying they're a 10 on bandwidth week after week after week, they're probably spread too thin. Not only that, if someone is a one or a two at bandwidth week after week, they're feeling underutilized. They're saying, what have I been doing here? And they're not gonna stay either.

So that's why the digital version is so, I'm literally so excited. You can hear it in my voice because it answers pretty much like every question regarding like what is my team ever working on and work status that I've been asked for the last 15 years. Like I'm just gonna say it. It is the Holy grail. And that's why I built it from scratch. That's why I had to be thinking through every single situation, every scenario.

so I could work that in and fine tune it and update it and make sure that as I piloted it and sampled it with different clients and beta testers, I thought to say, this is going to give, this is going to cover off that thing and that thing and that thing because hey, a tool is only as good as like, as the data in there. Now, what do we get when we enter into the digital tool versus the free Google Doc?

which still is completely available. And if Google Docs is your preference, go for it. I love Google Docs, I use it all the time. No shade there. Well, the beauty of the Snippets template, the web app, is you get to see all your team members in one view. So you can scan down the list and say, okay, so we got five people here, here's what got done, here's where there's blockers, here's where the priorities are for next week. And you truly have that bird's eye view that you just...

can't have the same view in one document without it getting kind of clunky and complicated. And that was the goal of the tool is to create a little bit more depth so that you could start to recognize patterns, see trends, again, look back, see bandwidth over time where folks have a little more space because that's that bandwidth calculation. Not only is that showing you where people are engaged or not, it's showing you, when are you needing to hire?

Like are you, or is everybody really at full capacity? That might be a signal that you need to bring somebody on. And if everyone's under capacity, that might be a signal that that person that you thought you needed to bring on, you really don't need to yet. So this is the beauty of having a bird's eye view is you can start to recognize patterns and trends. And in the tool, you can download monthly recaps, you can download quarterly. So you can start to look over time. Hey, if I'm having a one-on-one with a team member, let's go through the wins.

or let's go through the sticking points. Let's go through this. So it's all the data that you put in that you can start to do something with. Now, you can imagine the power of this as you have folks entering it in week after week after week, that your one-on-ones get easier, your performance reviews get easier because you both have the same sort of set of information that you're talking about. Conversations feel less subjective and emotional. You're looking at the same thing.

And you know it's my mission to make managing easier. This is the simplest way that I could think of using all of the tools, all the resources at my disposal to give that to you. Now, the hardest thing about any new tool, I'm gonna tell you this from experience, is getting your team members to use it, okay? The tool's never really the problem. It's getting people to adopt it because they're used to doing something else or they're used to not having to do anything at all. And snippets, it...

It only takes five minutes for people to fill out at most, okay? You put three wins, one place you're stuck or need support, three priorities for next week, you move bandwidth on the slider and you hit submit. I bet you could fill it out in two minutes if you want it to, right? But you want to, well, we'll call it five minutes so you get something worthwhile to look at. Now, it doesn't matter that it takes five minutes to fill out. The key is that your team members are not used to doing it and they will not do it unless they think there's something in it for them. I don't care if it took five seconds to fill out.

This is the biggest lesson that I learned every team that I worked on over and over and over. And it started when I worked on the HoloLens team at Microsoft. So I'll take you way back years and years ago. I had joined the HoloLens design team and we were getting ready for a huge demo where they're gonna announce the HoloLens to the world at the build conference. And when I started,

Design was tracking their work in a different place than engineering. was kind of, and engineering was using kind of like the internal tools that the whole company used, because engineers have to all use the same tools. So what happened was, because design was tracking their work in a different way, and engineering was tracking their work somewhere else, the two teams were not communicating. And there was a belief that design was just like working on whatever they wanted. And it was kind of on an island and it was disorganized.

Well, I came onto the team and I said, that's not the case. People are busting their butts over here. Like, no one's just like winging it. What is this about? And as I dug into it, it was because they were not using the same tool. So they weren't communicating in the same language. So how would people know? And so I thought to myself, well, if the tool that the engineers are using to type in, you know, their bugs and tasks is the thing everyone in the company is using primarily, that's the place that we have to get on board.

we have to go into their system. We have to be using that main system. And I knew saying to designers like, hey, everyone got to enter all your bugs and move them along and do this. Like everyone was gonna say, no, I don't. I didn't have to do that before. Why do I have to do it now? And that's why they weren't doing it because like it didn't feel necessary. And so I took a step back and I said, you know, right now I think there's this really big frustration between the teams that.

People believe like design isn't working on the right stuff and you're working every day and you have all this stuff going on. And of course we are. Like we were just not in the conversation the right way. And it's starting to hurt us because if people don't know how our work is laddering up to the other team's stuff, like milestones could happen without our engagement and priorities could shift and we don't know about it. Or, you we won't have enough team members and resources to be able to move forward. Like there's a big.

This is a big problem. And the biggest problem is that all the work that you're doing isn't gonna get noticed. So how do we fix that? Well, if we put our work items and tasks into their tool and we connect them to the kind of corresponding tasks, then everyone's always gonna be able to see the full picture. And no one's gonna think we're not working on the right stuff or make decisions without us. It's not gonna happen. And when I said it this way,

framing it in what was in it for them. Not only did this design team get completely on board, they were eager to enter their tasks into this tool. They wanted to, they started the week, yes, okay, let's put our tasks in. When they've got it done, they would check them off. They would send, you know, reports out to their corresponding engineers and product managers. They were like thrilled to be able to use it. I'm not exaggerating. It was because I connected so deeply into what was in it for them.

And then when this happened, I had this unlock of, okay, this is how you implement any process, right? Obviously. But it started to become a pattern. When I moved on after Microsoft, I worked at Apple and the Human Interface Design Team. This is the design team that's responsible for the iPhone and Mac and iPad and watch and music. Like this is the core design team in all of Apple. Well, they had been working in a very specific way for a long time.

Same process. We talked about, well, what's in it for them and why do we wanna track work in a different way? And folks got on board and it started to really move things along a lot faster inside the studio. Then I tried the same process at Google, getting folks onto the design teams onto the same systems as engineers were using and linking their tasks together so that none of the work was gonna become unnoticed or not recognized or fall through the cracks.

I did it in three of the most, I would say companies where people are not really eager to like change the process and the way they're working. I did it there, I did it again and I did it again. And that is why I know when you paint a picture for your team members around why you have a process and you tell that story,

and you make it make sense to them and you get them bought in and you say, hey, we're gonna launch this snippets tool because I want a place to be able to recognize wins. I want a place to be able to celebrate the work that you're doing. And right now you send me an email, I might miss it or you send me a text, I might see it while I'm at my kid's soccer game. And we want a place that we can capture all this. Not only that, I wanna know if I'm a blocker and I want you to have a place that you can enter in that like, yeah, I'm stuck with this. had it.

difficult client conversation and I need to have a brainstorm or I'm struggling with this project I'm doing. You need to have a place for that. And you also need a place to say, hey, okay, these are my priorities. Am I on the right page? Does something have to shift? So you don't feel like you're spinning your wheels on nothing. And then last, if you are spread too thin, I got to know about it so that I can give you some relief.

And when you frame snippets in that way, and I'm telling you, because I launched a very similar tool at Google with engineers who are not always the ones that wanna change the process they're doing. When I launched a similar process at Google, that was the framing that worked. When I've launched this with every single one of my clients that use snippets, that is the framing that works. It is about what is in it for them. And snippets only, it only takes five minutes to fill out.

But when you frame it in that way, someone would take an hour filling it out if that's what it took. It doesn't, it only takes five minutes. But you see what I'm saying? People are willing to invest time in something when it has a payoff for themselves. And I'm gonna tell you, there's all this BS like around, I don't want process for process sake, or I don't wanna be monitored, I don't wanna, you know, like people get real weird about entering things into a task tracking system. They get real concerned about using a time shoot. They feel like they're, you know,

being watched by a big brother, whatever. This is never the point of it. Like, I don't know, whatever, maybe people worked in a company that was the case, but like, this isn't your company. You just wanna be able to support them and you wanna be able to know that people are working on the right things. So like, if you're feeling like, don't wanna cause thrash, I don't wanna introduce something that people think is monitoring them, it's like, you've got the framing all wrong. Because that's not what a work tracking tool is for. A work tracking tool is for clarity. And that is what...

like the underlying premise of snippets is about, it's giving people that clarity so they feel like, okay, I have a place, I can talk about what's going on in my job that's not so, so, granular. And you as the leader, my gosh, like for you, I think you've already understand like the benefits are endless, but why would you like have this tool? Why would you sign up for snippets? Is because this is the peace of mind that you have been looking for of.

I don't wanna micromanage, but I don't wanna be in the weeds, but I don't wanna ask about this, but I'm really nervous. I don't know if I should hire all the second guessing. This is where we start to resolve it. And what's awesome about it is clients, they bring me their monthly reports and they say, hey, let's sit down and look at this. So they download it right from the tool and we look through it we start to analyze trends and patterns and say, okay, well, gosh, this person's had a ton of wins. Like I think that they may be able to lead this next project here.

or this person keeps getting stuck on the same things, I think we might have a training opportunity. So this is the beauty of it when you have the data, you can act on it. And it's just like, you don't have that right level of detail in the task tracking tool. And we can't keep all of it in our head from our one-on-ones. So this is the answer. All right, I cannot wait for you to check out snippets, liagarvin.com slash snippets. We still got the Google Doc version, if that's your jam.

And you also have the option to upgrade to the web app where you're gonna get all these insights, have all of this data that we can analyze and then make decisions from. right, liagarvin.com slash snippets. I cannot wait for you to dive in and really start to unlock all of these patterns. All right, see you next time.