Ever feel like you're babysitting your team?

Two months ago, I gave an interview to And She Spoke, a podcast hosted by Jennifer Barcelos and Sandy Connery that’s about the strategies and mental resilience it takes to create and run six- and seven-figure online businesses.

They reached out to me after I wrote about my decision to close my own agency, and I took them through the full 10-month decision making process.

Near the end of the interview, our conversation turned to my plans for the future — I intend to work with teams on opps and leadership. Jeni and Sandy both shared that team building was the toughest part of building a business for them.

It was during this part of the interview when this popped out:

“I don’t want to have to babysit people or take care of them.”

You can listen to the interview for the full context.

I wanted to use this comment today as a springboard for a larger conversation, because there’s good reason a lot of women I know use this kind of language to talk about leading teams.

Women are expected to lead at home – by carrying the load for their kids, their partners and, increasingly, their parents.

I’m so glad that we, as a society, have started to talk about and take seriously the mental load women carry at home. From meal planning to schedule keeping to memory making, most family structures demand a woman’s emotional labor from the moment she wakes up. 

It’s no wonder that by the time women get to work, they’re tapped out. 

Women are often punished for asking for what they need at work and have few models for what receiving support looks like.

I’m remarkably privileged to be supported at home by a partner who shares the load with me, but this one still got me.

In the early days of building an agency, I didn’t know how to ask my team for what I needed at work, so I unwittingly undermined myself and created a culture of insubordination. 

The fallout from a bad experience like this is enough to make you decide that it’s easier to do things yourself.

When you do hire, you're so tapped out that all you want is for your team to just show up and do the work they're being paid to do.

After all, you should be able to expect the people you hire to do tasks without a lot of handholding, right? Otherwise, what’s the point?

Yes, you can get the support you need at work, and, no, you're not asking for too much.

But is it clear to your team what those expectations are?

In my experience, a request as seemingly straightforward as "regularly update me on progress of this project" can look very different depending on the company culture your team member came from.

Some bosses might ask for regular updates but actually mean, "Only reach out to me if the deadline is going to be missed." Those same bosses may have reinforced this behavior by being snippy when employees gave them the updates they thought they wanted, teaching the employees to be wary of over-communicating on status.

Other bosses may have meant, "update me during our weekly 1-1."

Your team brings with them their own life and work experiences to their work with you, and these inform the way they interpret your requests.

So when you make a simple request for regular updates and don't get what you're expecting, it can feel like your team member is ignoring your directions or straight-up being insubordinate.

You might start checking in with your team member every couple of days to ask for status and going into the shared file to see where they are with it.

No wonder the word “babysitting” comes up in these contexts.

If this all feels familiar to you, here's something you might try.

Go to your team member – the one that makes you feel like pulling your hair out – and ask them what they think you expect when you ask them to "regularly check-in."

You can say something like, "There's a disconnect between us when it comes to project check-ins, and I'm wondering if it's a simple mismatch between how we define a check-in or even what regular means. When I ask you to check-in on the status of project xx, what do you think I'm asking for?"

It's possible that the team member does understand your expectations and isn't meeting them. That's a whole other conversation.

The good news is at work, it's a lot easier to separate yourself from a teammate that's not pulling their weight!

However, you might uncover that what feels like a failure to follow-though on directions is simply be a communication issue that's easy to resolve. Or maybe the team member is updating their status a specific way that you're not seeing.

Who knows! You won't, until you dig in and have that conversation.

This is a small example, but I share it here, because a million little paper cuts like these add onto the already heavy mental load women carry.

When it comes to your team, you should see the investment of your time and energy pay you back a hundredfold, rather than consistently requiring you to give more of yourself.

You deserve to be fully supported by your team, with everyone moving together to accomplish the same goals.

I've come through this dynamic onto the other side, and I can tell you from personal experience that this process is worth it.

There’s a line in my favorite business book of all time that always comes back to me. “When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world.”

My mission is to get teams a little bit closer to their dream work environment, where everyone has the structure and support they need to do the work that matters.

Including you.