Managing Made Simple is a weekly leadership and management podcast for people managers, business owners, and founders who want to lead high-performing teams without falling back into the work themselves.
Each week, host Lia Garvin- 3x bestselling author and former team operations leader at Google, Apple, and Microsoft- breaks down the real, everyday challenges of leading teams, giving feedback, delegating, creating team accountability, high performing culture, retention, and more with performance with practical strategies you can implement immediately. Lia’s work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, and Fortune.
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If you’re asking leadership questions like: • How do I get my team to take ownership and accountability for their work? • Why do I have to repeat myself constantly as a manager? • How do I know if I hired the wrong employee? • How do I delegate effectively without things falling apart or micromanaging? • How can managers tell if team members are overusing AI at work? • What actually motivates employees today? • How do I give feedback that actually moves the needle? • How do I communicate vision, expectations, and strategy clearly? • What are best practices for performance reviews, compensation, and growth conversations?
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Player coach management breaks down the same way every time: the player work wins and the coaching slides. If you lead a team and carry your own deliverables, you already know how the week goes. The player work has deadlines and escalations. Coaching has none of that on a Tuesday, so the one on ones come off the calendar first, starting with the people who seem fine. In this episode, Lia breaks down what that costs you and your team, and the three moves that get you back into the coach half of the job this week.
In this episode you will learn:
Why the player half of the job always wins when you're spread thin
The high performers most at risk while you're heads down on your own deliverables
How to make one on ones survivable at 15 to 30 minutes every other week
Why status updates don't belong in your one on one, and where to put them instead
The one question to ask about every piece of work that lands on your plate
What it means when the answer to that question is no, every single time
Resources mentioned:
Weekly team check-in tool: liagarvin.com/snippets
Advisory and manager training: liagarvin.com/contact
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
As a manager, you're used to wearing multiple hats. Okay. There is probably not a day that goes by where you're not jumping across a thousand different things. But there is a management style that's becoming more and more popular. And probably my bet is you're already kind of doing this. And it's called player coach, where you are overseeing a team and you also have a lot of individual contributor responsibilities. Now, this is going to show up whether you're a business owner that's also deep in the weeds on a number of roles, or managing in the corporate world, where you have quite a bit of maybe your previous responsibilities before you took on the role of manager or something like that. But this is something that when we don't get it right, what happens is we just do player. We forget to coach. And that is at the expense of our team members. They then don't have a manager. They then start, their work starts suffering, and you actually put a ceiling on your own growth as a leader. So we are talking about this on the show how to really maximize this player coach dynamic so that it is a win-win, not a lose-lose. Welcome to Managing Made Simple, a real talk podcast about the ins and outs of leading a team. I'm Leah Garvin, your host, and bring a decade of experience driving team operations in places like Google, Apple, and Microsoft on a mission to make leading your team easier. From delegating to feedback to one-on-ones and more, each week is a mini masterclass on making leading your team easier. Whether you're managing one person or a hundred, everyone is welcome to hang out on Managing Made Simple. Where did Player Coach even come from? Well, this is again not a new concept. This was the management style that I did when I worked at Google as well as Microsoft, where you, again, you have a team, but you're expected to have a lot of your own deliverables. When you're working in a big company, you know, this might be things that are written down on a job rubric or the expectations of your role so that you can be fulfilling those and getting promoted to the next level. If you're running a business, you're like live and player coach every single day, especially if you are in the weeds wearing multiple hats, you haven't hired enough of the key roles, so you're still doing a lot of those. This is going to show up there too. It really doesn't matter what environment you're in. It doesn't matter how many team members that you have. Well, it gets harder if you have team members, I should say that, but it's it's not about the in the situation you're in. It's about are you expected to do two different jobs, essentially for the price of one? Now, we can imagine what the consequences of this are. Okay, first of all, you're doing two jobs, both in a moment today, where the pressure is so, so high. We are moving so fast. There is competitors popping out of the woodworking at every turn, no matter what industry you're in. There are the threats of AI and automation, making us always feel like we're behind. Your team is looking at these threats and they're wanting answers from you. They're wanting certainty, they're wanting clarity. And maybe you haven't even stopped to figure out what getting your own head around what you're doing with it. So, in a moment where there are so many demands of leaders, the player coach model can become really problematic because no shade, I do it too. What happens when you're spread really thin? You start to like try to get things off your list that don't feel like the biggest fires. And that means the thing that usually comes off the list are one-on-ones with your team, or especially checking in with the people that are doing well, your higher performers. Now, I want to get ahead of that second one because 44% of turnover, voluntary turnovers, and people quitting, like deciding to quit, not getting laid off. Data shows that 44% is preventable. And when people were asked, this is a Gallup study, when people were asked why they left, the answer was unanimous. Well, my manager never checked in with me. I didn't know that there was a career path for me. You know, I was doing well, but you know, I didn't get anything from my manager. So I share that because if you're spread too thin as this player coach and you're trying to do all your player stuff because it's more familiar, because it's what you're used to doing, because it gives you a bunch of boxes to check off and you can have a sense of completion, because the player work is where all the fire drills live, where the immediate astronomer VP or a customer complaint or all these things that are like feel more urgent. When you're stuck in player zone, that's where you lose your high performers. Because they want to coach great employees. They want to have someone charting their path, showing them, hey, this is the plan for you. They want to be getting feedback on how they can keep getting better. They want to see what the plan is for them. They want to be recognized, not participation where it's they want to know genuinely, hey, here's where you're going well. So when you do not make time to meet with your high performers or be having your one-on-ones, this is going to be one of the immediate consequences. You're going to start losing your great people. Now, the second thing is you're actually going to put a ceiling on your own self because the reason, if you're in corporate, you were asked to be a manager was about growth potential. And so about showing leadership, about empowering results from other people. So again, if you're ignoring all the coach stuff and you're just getting through your list, because I get it, that's where the urgent stuff comes up, then you're going to always be stuck in this rat race, right? In this hamster wheel of like getting stuff done and you're kind of like loosely overseeing people, but it's not creating more scale in your team. Same issue if you're running a business, right? Same exact issue, just different lens. If you are always just putting out fires, you're not able to look at the strategic growth of your business, right? You actually literally do not have brain space. You don't have time in the day. So we've got to break out of this. And honestly, do I'm not against the framework. I'm not against the model. I think it's actually very valuable in some ways to have an understanding of the day-to-day work. But I think right now it's being done for the wrong reasons as a way to not hire as many people because people are expensive. And I think the antidote for expensive people is not replacing them with automation and AI. You know, I don't think that. I think the antidote for expensive people is to unlock the places that's making them slow. I think it's systems, and you know that because you're a listener of the show. But that's not what we're talking about today. I'm just sharing. I think the player coach model has value. But right now, I think if you are thinking about how to structure hiring a manager, and you're like, oh, this is great because I can have them doing like half their old job while overseeing other people, you've got to set it up from the right way. Because all the issues I'm talking about right now, where you could lose your high performers, you could cap your growth, and obviously the lower performers are already struggling, right? That goes without saying. Those things are what shows up when we haven't set it up right. Okay. Now, if you're in this situation and you it wasn't really on your shoulders to set up this dynamic, I get it. Okay, so I'm not saying go to upper management and be like, I want to reset this. This is a mindset for how you fix this. Okay, we're gonna get out of this stuck point right now. So to break out of the player coach, it's truly a time management, time prioritization exercise. That is the biggest thing because that is what I wouldn't say you have like full control over your time, but it has become ruthless about how do you prioritize, how do you triage things that come in, and how are you really uplifting your team. Now, if I ended the episode right there, you'd be sitting here and saying, cool, but like if I knew how to do that, I wouldn't be stressed about this. Okay, so I'm not saying do that mic drop. I'm gonna tell you how to do that. How do you prioritize what you should be spending time on? Honestly, say after this episode, take a look at your calendar and think, do I have regular touch points with each of my team members? A lot of us, a lot of you, when you are spread too thin, the one-on-ones come off the list first. What happens there is you don't have a good pulse on what's going on your team, and so more issues come up or people don't bring things up till it's later. So I want you, by the end of this week, today's Tuesday, or whatever you're listening, I want you in the next 72 hours to make sure that you have at least a bi-weekly, so every other week, check-in with each of your team members that's between 15 and 30 minutes. Okay. Does not have to be an hour. In fact, should not be an hour. Okay. So that's the first thing we're gonna do to get back into coach mode is make time for coaching, right? Okay. First thing we're going to actually create time. I encourage you to do this on the earlier side of the week, on Monday or Tuesday, carving out 15 to 30 minutes every week or every other week. Once a month, I don't think it's enough. If it's working for you, great. But if you if you're listening because something's not working, then try this and see. 15-minute check-in, 15 to 30 every other week. Now, the second thing, telling you verbatim what to do, is to make sure in these check-ins, in these one-on-ones, you are not just going through project status. You're not going through a spreadsheet, making sure all the work's getting done. There are other places to get that information. So, this again, you're in player mindset if you're like boom, boom, boom, do we get the list done? Coach mindset, how you elevate yourself into this leader, how you get the right level of bird's eye view, how you can be mentoring someone, how you can be uplifting them, right? These are just abstract concepts until you do what I'm about to say. You move status out of the one-on-ones. They send you an email. I talked about snippets, end of each week. What are the wins? What highlights, lowlights, blockers, capacity? End of the week, you get that. Or you ask them before you're one-on-one, make sure all the status stuff's up to date and whatever tracking system you're using. Status is out of the 15 to 30 minute meeting. And in the 15 to 30 minute meeting, and you're one-on-one, you talk about, hey, what's going well, what some that person is excited about, places that they're feeling a little stuck or frustrated. It's very similar to the snippets, right? You you already had the agenda for that if you're using that process. Or have a shared one-on-one agenda and people, you're both adding to this. So you have these topics building over the week. And have a conversation. Your one-on-one is about getting to know your team member, getting to think about, okay, they're excited about these kinds of projects. This is where I see that they're really not enthusiastic, but they have to do that thing. So, how do we build some excitement into that? How do we reinforce? Hey, this feedback's coming up again and again. It's not just me being a broken record. I need to deliver this message in a different way. The one-on-ones are where management happens. If you're skipping them, if you're having them only be out of status updates, you're missing all of that. So we've just made two tangible shifts to move you out of player only and into player coach. Coach needs to have one-on-ones, these touch points with your meetings, direct reports, and they have to be meaningful, meaning you're not doing status updates and you're having real conversations. Now, the last thing, right? Well, there's a lot of things, but the last thing I'm gonna talk about today to keep you in coach zone is whenever a piece of work comes across your plate to think to yourself, should I do this, or is there someone on my team that could do this? And please, over time, is there someone on my team that can do this even better than me? That is why you have a team. You want to be growing people to into the best in whatever they're doing. You're not going to be the best at everything. And especially if you're running a business, you are trying to replace yourself in the day-to-day. You're trying to not be doing all these functions, right? So thinking about everything that comes in, it could this be something that a team member would really be able to do? Is this something someone else could do better than me? Is this something I could I could coach someone into doing better than me? That question with every single thing that comes in, doing that triage, you're gonna be seeing over time two answers: yes or no. If yes, obviously, just hand that off. We talk about delegating. You delegate by setting expectations, talking about the non-negotiables, and when you're gonna check in, talking about what success looks like, and they're off and running. If your answer is no, every time you ask, is there someone, could there be? If the answer is no, well, you either have the wrong people on your team, or they haven't been developed into being able to take more on. Or there's some key roles that you need to hire for. So either of these routes give you a lot of information. And sometimes when the answer is no, or it's stuck, or you're feeling like, I can't even come up with what to what to delegate or hand off. The no, the stuckness is where we find a lot of clarity. Because the clarity comes in the hard parts and the messy parts. So if the answer is no, and you're a middle manager in a corporation, and you feel like, oh God, I'm I'm doing all this stuff because like, no, everybody's spread so thin, everybody's burned out, everybody's at capacity, now you have a very real thing to work through around how are you load balancing work across your team? How are you like responding when new work comes in? What is the triaging there? What are the conversations you're having with your own upper management workload? There's a lot there to unpack. And if your answer is no, running a business because you probably because you don't have the right people in place or there's some key roles you haven't hired for, what is your plan to either free up funds to hire some of these roles, to optimize internal systems? That's what I help you with, right? Implementing systems that allow you to free up time on your team or get people in the right roles. Or is it time to have some hard feedback conversations? Is there feedback that has not been said because that's going to get people to take on more and step up in a bigger way? All of these things that we talked today are how you move from player only to coach. And yeah, there's gonna be things if you are in a player coach and you have some individual responsibilities to be doing, that you're gonna be in that like individual contributor mindset. But the point here, the point today is to not do that at the expense of the coaching that is the higher impact work. Because you're never gonna get out of this dynamic if you're not able to get like elevate your team, if you're not able to show them how to take more on, if you're not empowered, empowering them, if you're not giving them opportunities to do that. The beauty of player coach is that you can graduate out of it. Even if your organization doesn't think that, even if they didn't set it up, even though they say managing is always player coach. Like I know at Anthropic, at OpenAI, at a lot of tech companies, it's like player coach because they live, they really do want people to do two jobs with a price of one. Well, you can still graduate out of that and create more space by doing the things we talked about, by not just running around like a chicken with your head cut off because you're so busy, but by stopping and thinking, I have a team, how am I going to leverage them? Not taking advantage of them, not burn them out, leverage them. And you have no idea how to leverage people if you're not talking to them, if you're not learning about what their skills and superpowers are, if you're not learning about their weaknesses, if you're not giving them opportunities to try to take something on and seeing if they succeed or fail. That's what keeps you stuck. And the more spread thin you are, the more you forget this. I get it. It's hard, right? But this is where you unlock all of the potential. Okay. So how do we shift into coach and not just player? Everything that I talked about today. This is something I train managers with all the time. And especially in my one-on-one advisory sessions, this is what we really try to tease apart, what we unstick you, what we give you a concrete plan for the kinds of conversations, what you should be delegating, how you truly set this dynamic up, no matter what has been given to you from the top down. You have full control into making these shifts. And I'm here to support you every step of the way. If you want to learn more about advisory or manager training or how to fix the situation, reach out, Leagarvin.com slash contact. We can talk through options there. And start with the strategies I talked about today. Because when you reach out, and I hope you do, I want to hear how are the one on ones going? What are the conversations you're having? That's the legwork, right? That's the starting point. And then from there, we build your action plan to get you even more space and more time and build up with that leverage. But I want you to start with these three things. All right. See you next time.
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