158: Inside The New Manager Playbook - How to delegate and get your time back

Welcome back to the show and to another episode of Inside the New Manager Playbook. How often do you feel like you don't have enough time? You don't have time to meet with your team to do the projects you need to do to get everything done in a week, like every second of the day. Yeah, we all feel like that. 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 Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant for this show am I programs with small businesses and corporate teams. I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time money. 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. And as manager and especially new managers, this can be so overwhelming and exhausting. We feel like I don't even know if I can do this anymore. And I know as a new manager, I really struggle with this balance.

And I felt like I was never keeping up, like I wanted to be with my teams more. But then I was still doing a lot of my individual contributor work.

I was in one of those situations. A lot of us are in where you're in this player coach model, right, where you're overseeing a team, but you still have a lot of your own individual responsibilities. And yeah, it's a two and two job for the price of one for the company, which is awesome. Not awesome for the manager. That's topics for another day. But we all, we can feel so squeezed and it's exhausting.

And I think this feeling like we don't have enough time, it starts to really prevent us from delegating. And so I want to talk about this a little bit. I talk about, again, really at length in the book. All these episodes are stuff I talk about in the book, of really thinking about something that I know a lot of us get real nervous when I say it, so I'm gonna say, I know that's coming. How many of the meetings at your end?

Because meeting overload is usually one of the biggest culprits of this feeling like no time. How many of the meetings that you're in are your team members? Also in this posing the question, you know, this becomes the biggest source of opportunity to get more time for yourself. And I know if someone said that to me when I was new at managing, I'd be like, so, like they need me there.

I would think to myself, well, how am I going to get the context or, well, you know, there's some things that I have to be talking about or advocating for. Who else is going to do it? These are the types of things that we start to say to ourselves. But the problem is, when we're there all the time, we're just getting spread so thin that we can't keep our head above water. Now, that's not the only problem.

We also prevent our team members from stepping up and that will that's what's going to keep us stock. It's not just that we have so much going on, it's that we have a team because there are people right there at our fingertips ready to help us scale, and we're not letting them do that.

I know it's scary. I know that it feels like, well, what if they get it wrong? What if they don't represent what we have to do? What if they blow with the client? What if this, what if that, what if this? What if you never, ever get out of the weeds, you become more of a bottleneck. You burnout. Eventually you leave anyway. And so it doesn't even freaking matter. You have to utilize your team better. Well, one thing that I hear a lot say, but my team members want me there. They don't like it.

They have a they we have a really tough VP and they want me to kind of shoot them for that. Or if I'm not in the meetings, they're going to get assigned all this work and no one's going to be a buffer. I hear you, I hear that all the time. We have to train our team members on what to do in those situations.

For example, with the one where, you know, if you're not there, someone's going to sign a bunch of work to your team, sit down with your team members and say, or whoever's kind of going in your place and say, hey, I know this isn't meaning where. Let's say it's a group of engineers, okay, I know this is a meeting where when you're there on your own, the product team starts throwing out a bunch of new ideas at you, and you feel like you kind of have to agree to it.

Well, I'm not going to be there. I really want you to take the lead. And when someone proposes a bunch of work, just say, hey, yeah, we'll take a look. We'll go back and have a conversation with Leah and we'll I'll get back to you when we when we figure out what we have, how that fits in the schedule. Coach. Your team members that they don't have to agree to everything. Don't just go there because you feel like they don't know. They don't have to agree to everything.

It's a conversation you can have with them. And I know you might feel like you're oversimplifying and it's more complicated than that, but it really isn't. It's about training your team members on the key things that you look out for, and the things that you would be doing when you're in the meeting.

So they can try. Because when they start stepping into that leadership, this is game changing. This allows you to scale and it lets them feel like, yes, I can take on a bigger role. I can become a leader on this team. It shows them so much is possible and now they are growing and you're scaling and oh my gosh, everybody wins. Literally. Okay, so I really want you to think about that. And again, I talk about it more in the book on ways to do that.

How many meetings are you in that you also have team members in? And where can you offload some of this, and what do you have to do to make that happen? All right. New Manager playbook comes out January 27th to get on the list for exclusive updates. Had to league overcommit new book. And if it's past January 27th pick it up on Amazon. And I am so excited to see what you think. This has been such a joy to write, to talk about with folks, to get feedback on.

And yeah, it is just it's all going to be, you know, my goal is to make managing your team as, you know, the easiest part of your job. So if this can make it just a little bit easier, then mission accomplished. 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.