What happens when you give your team complete freedom to do their work—and they still aren't moving forward?

In this solo episode of The Joy CEO Podcast, I explore a leadership mistake I made myself: assuming that being a good leader meant staying out of my team's way.

I was leading a team whose work I had never personally done, so I thought the best thing I could do was give them autonomy and stay hands-off. What I eventually discovered was that I wasn't protecting them from the things that were making their jobs harder—broken processes, redundant requests, unnecessary internal noise, and unclear ownership.

Once I walked through their workflow from beginning to end, I could see where my leadership was missing. My job wasn't to do their work. It was to create the conditions for them to do their work well.

That shift ultimately freed up roughly 10 hours a week for my team.

In this episode, I introduce the idea of right-sized leadership and revisit my Hula Hoop Principle: knowing what belongs inside your leadership responsibility, what belongs with your team, and where you've accidentally stepped too far in—or too far out.

If you've ever wondered why your team isn't stepping up, this episode may give you a different question to ask.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

Your Team May Not Need More Accountability—They May Need Better Leadership

When a team isn't stepping up, our first instinct can be to assume they need more direction, more accountability, or more oversight.

But sometimes the problem isn't the team.

Lori shares how being too hands-off meant she wasn't seeing the obstacles that were slowing her team down. Leadership isn't about constantly checking on people. It's about understanding enough of their world to remove the barriers that keep them from succeeding.

Micromanagement Isn't the Only Leadership Problem

We often talk about micromanagement as if the opposite—leaving people completely alone—is automatically good leadership.

It isn't.

Overleading and underleading can create the same result: confusion, frustration, and a team that doesn't know what belongs to whom.

The goal isn't to be more involved or less involved.

It's to be involved in the right places.

Walk the Workflow Before You Assume You Understand It

Lori realized that she couldn't effectively protect her team from problems she couldn't see.

So she walked through their entire end-to-end workflow.

That revealed broken processes, duplicated requests, unnecessary internal noise, and places where her team was spending time on things that weren't actually adding value.

Sometimes leadership starts with curiosity rather than answers.

Your Job Isn't to Do Their Work—It's to Protect Their Ability to Do It

As leaders, we don't need to become experts in every task our teams perform.

But we do need to understand enough to identify what gets in their way.

Lori's role wasn't to step into her team's work. It was to remove distractions, clarify ownership, protect their time, and make sure the right work was happening at the right level.

That distinction helped free up around 10 hours a week for her team.

Use the Hula Hoop to Clarify Ownership

Lori returns to one of her favorite leadership metaphors: the Hula Hoop Principle.

Think about your leadership responsibilities as one hula hoop and your team's responsibilities as another.

Your job isn't to jump into their hula hoop every time something gets difficult. And their job isn't to carry everything that belongs inside yours.

Healthy leadership requires knowing where your responsibility begins and ends.

Find Your Right-Sized Leadership

The best leadership isn't about choosing between being hands-on and hands-off.

It's about being right-sized.

Sometimes your team needs you to step in. Sometimes they need you to step back. Sometimes they need you to ask a question instead of giving an answer.

The leadership skill is knowing which one is required in the moment.

Pause Long Enough to Let Them Lead

One of the hardest things for capable leaders is resisting the urge to solve the problem themselves.

Lori encourages leaders to pause, get curious, and ask questions before jumping in with the answer.

Sometimes the most powerful leadership move isn't giving someone the solution.

It's giving them the space to find it.

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• Lori's experience leading a team doing work she had never personally done.
• The danger of confusing hands-off leadership with effective delegation.
• Broken processes and redundant requests that created unnecessary workload.
• How Lori's team gained back roughly 10 hours a week.
• The Hula Hoop Principle and defining leadership responsibility.
• The difference between overleading and underleading.
• The concept of right-sized leadership.
• Using curiosity and questions instead of immediately providing solutions.
• Lori's Hudson Valley retreat and the importance of creating space for leadership reflection.

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• Where might your team be struggling because you're too far away from the work?
• Where are you stepping into your team's hula hoop instead of letting them own it?
• What processes, requests, or distractions are making your team's work harder than it needs to be?
• Are you overleading, underleading, or leading at the right size?
• What would change if you asked a question before giving an answer?
• What could you remove or protect so your team can spend more time doing the work that matters?
• Where does your team need more autonomy—and where do they actually need more leadership?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• Executives and senior leaders managing high-performing teams.
• Founders and business owners who want their teams to take more ownership.
• Leaders who worry they are micromanaging.
• Leaders who have swung so far toward autonomy that they have become too hands-off.
• Managers struggling with delegation and accountability.
• High-achieving women who are used to solving problems themselves.
• Anyone who wants to become a more intentional, effective, and right-sized leader.

📩 Want to Go Deeper?

Follow Lori on LinkedIn to continue the conversation

• Book a Leadership Strategy Call with Lori: loripine.com

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Joy CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Lori Pyne, and today we are going to talk about why your team isn't following your lead and what you can do about it. You know, I'm often asked about this very question. "My team isn't stepping up. I'm giving direction, they're not following it. I don't know why they won't just lead on their own.
Why do they need me to tell them what to do all the time?" And almost every single time, the person who's asking me about this, the person who's inquiring, is assuming that if they just get out of the way and stop micromanaging, they'd be able to have this flourishing team. But today I want to challenge that.
It's not always that you're a micromanager, because sometimes the problem isn't [00:01:00] that you're too present. The problem is not that you're too far in the weeds. Sometimes the problem is that you are not present enough in exactly the right places, the places that your team needs you to be present. So if you are new here, welcome.
I am so glad you found your way to me. This is a podcast for ambitious women who want to lead and live with joy. And when I talk about joy, I am not talking about that fluffy rainbows and unicorn kinda joy. I am talking about the real strategic kind of joy that helps you lead better and live better, the joy that lives within, and I teach you how to get to it.
And for my people who show up week after week, who keep coming back and tuning in, thank you. You know I love you and adore you. So this [00:02:00] very lesson I have learned. Imagine that. I talk about things on this podcast that I have learned, most of them the hard way. Because you see, when I was coming up, there were not a ton of mentors, and I am on a mission to change that for anybody who cares to listen in.
I want to make sure that we are not walking through any of this alone, that we can share wisdoms, share experiences, and help one another out. So I managed a team that I had never actually done the job myself. I had done other jobs around the company, and they said, "Let's move you into this role. You're gonna lead this group of people."
And I'm gonna tell you that story, but that's not actually the point of today. The point is what it revealed to me, and I [00:03:00] think it applies to whether you over-lead or under-lead, right? It will get you to whether you're everywhere or nowhere, and that's the point I want to get to today. There can be so much frustration in being a leader.
You sense that your team could do more, you sense that they could carry more, you sense that they are capable of more, and you just can't put your finger on why they actually don't do more Decisions land on your desk that shouldn't. You find out about problems after they've become problems. Meetings end and everyone just looks at you to tell the answer, to solve the problem.
And you start to wonder, "Have I hired the wrong people? Am I just bad at this? Like, what is happening here?" And [00:04:00] maybe you wonder, is leadership supposed to feel this heavy? And so you start to look around, and other people are making it look really easy. So then you think, "It must be me. I must be the problem."
But the reframe is that it's rarely about who you hired, it's about where you might be standing. And it's not that you're the problem, but perhaps it is about some perspective and learning to trust your own judgment. You know, you can create these same results by standing so far back that nobody knows exactly what it is that they own.
And the same thing can happen when you're so far in everybody else's business that they think that you own what's theirs to own. So both things can happen. It has [00:05:00] different postures and different outcomes, and a team will end up unsure of who's actually leading who and whose lane is where. So I found myself in this situation, it...
and it was really the category where I removed myself. So I was put in this assignment. I had never done the actual job of the people who I was managing. So what did I do? I defaulted to them. I became hands-off. I felt like that was respectful. That was giving them the at- autonomy that they needed. I would kind of, you know, buzz about o- you know, everybody was all over the country, so I would have my one-on-ones, my check-in with- check-ins with them, and then I would make sure that I was checking in with senior leadership and managing the big rocks, if you will.
But [00:06:00] what happened was there were some real glitches in processes and systems, and my team was really frustrated So I locked myself in a room with a few of them, and I had them walk me through from start to finish how they got their job done, what it was like to be them for a day, to get the order, sell the order, put the order into the system, go through all of the entire process that they needed to go through.
And what actually happened was I saw that we had so many redundant requests for my people. We had so many antiquated systems and processes, and they were spending so much time answering to so many collaborative teams across the company that they didn't know [00:07:00] which end was up, and they actually needed me to be the point person to protect them and to filter all of that other noise out for them.
And so that's what I did. I didn't need to do their job. I didn't need to input data or input trade marketing dollars or run the deals for them. But I did need to understand what it was like to walk in their shoes enough so that I could protect them and incubate them from the internal workings of the company so that they could actually flourish.
And that was my job. And once I did that, I was able to free up about 10 hours a week for them. And you can only imagine how liberating that was for them, how then they were actually able to be out in the field, out with their customers, able to really [00:08:00] work with, you know, the business to actually grow the business instead of being so handcuffed to all of that monotony.
So if you think about it, that was what was in my hula hoop, and every person on your team has a hula hoop. Theirs holds their, their account, their relationship, the day-to-day decisions that they're making, their section of the business. Yours holds something different, and if you're leading a team, your job is likely to be the visionary, to be much more strategic, to make sure you're setting standards.
And the, the judgment for you is to make that call that only looks obvious for where you sit. And when you climb into their hoop, rewriting their work, answering questions they could answer, you're not helping them at, [00:09:00] at all. They can do that So you're training them to wait for you, and that you don't believe that they can do it for themselves.
And then when you vacate your own hula hoop entirely, you're creating this vacuum telling yourself, "Oh, it's trust. I just trust them to run it." But the truth is, you're creating the same exact gap. I created the same exact gap. Either way, nobody's standing in the place that only you, the leader, can stand.
Trusting your team and abandoning your own responsibility to them can look identical on the outside. So I just wanna make sure that the difference whether you're still doing their job or whether you're completely defaulting to them to do their job and you're hands-off, whichever end of the spectrum that you're [00:10:00] on, it's important to ask yourself what is it that you actually need to do to lead this team forward?
That's the question. And what's in your hula hoop, within your control, within your power, within your expertise to actually uncover, discover, and understand what needs to happen? So you could take one decision this week, one thing that you really wanna scratch at. Get really curious. Ask yourself, "What am I missing?
What is it that I really need to poke at?" And set aside your ego. Set aside anything that you think you should know. Just set that aside and say, "Let me assume that I don't know," and ask about a process that you've never questioned. Ask about [00:11:00] something that could be going on with one of your people, and assume that it might feel like you're overstepping, but that it's okay to overstep.
And notice the next moment where you're about to answer before anyone else gets a chance, and pause. Wait five seconds. Just pause and see what happens. See if anybody else can fill in the gap besides you, and let's see what they have to say. Give them room to step up So here's what I'd like to leave you with.
If your team isn't following your lead, the fix probably isn't more of what you've actually been doing, and it's probably not more or less of you. It's actually, are you standing in their way, one way or the other? Are you too much or are you too [00:12:00] little? And what would make you right-sized? Watching for what might be missing and what could you get really curious about, and then asking what nobody el- else has had the courage to ask about.
What is that? If you liked what you heard today, please give us a five-star review. Send this episode to your bestie. We wanna make sure that we are all leading together. Rising tides raise all boats, and I think that leadership is exciting and can be the best part of what we do in our lives, but we can't do it alone.
We have to do it together. And if that makes you curious about me, about The Joy CEO, and the idea that you could be the joy CEO of your own life, I would love to talk to you more [00:13:00] about what it's like to be in a room with amazing women, how to build, how to learn, how to grow alongside women who are doing some of the same things you are.
I'm doing my next retreat October 14th through 16th here in the beautiful Hudson Valley, and you just might love to join me live. Be in a room, roll up your sleeves, meet some other women who are just as feisty and fiery as you, looking for joy, trying to balance this amazing career with an amazing life, and I would love to talk to you more about it.
So I'm gonna detail in the show notes a link. You can find out more, and I would love to see you there. In the meanwhile, I am so glad to be doing this with you. Have a great week, and I will talk to you soon.