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How do I manage a remote team of 20 without losing my mind?

In this episode, I’m sharing behind-the-scenes of my leadership system. You’ll see the actual things I do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to keep my team performing at a high level, without needing to do the work myself.

Key Takeaways

• When to push vs pull back as a leader
• Your real role as a CEO
• My rule for meetings that got me out of the day to day

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Because if you were in like an island by yourself. It might be really easy. You wouldn’t have anyone to fight with, but you’re not gonna learn anything. We learn and we practice in relationship.

When you have a team and you have a team member and they’re up against their edge whatever it is, you are able to coach them to help them through and figure out what are those stories that they have in their head, that are preventing them from being the best at their job.

Now you just help them grow as a person, and that is extremely rewarding. A lot of times your job as a leader is to coach.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing day. I’m excited for this episode. I haven’t done one in a while on leadership and team. But I recently got some questions about that and then those questions from the group led to a bunch more questions about it and I realized how people love to see and hear kind of the behind the scenes of how people manage teams.

You know, team management and leadership has been a big focus of mine. It is one of my number one focuses this year. I think I shared that at the beginning of the year, like content, which I’m a little behind on ’cause we kind of had some explosive growth, good growth in the company and that got pushed back.

But content and team are my two biggest priorities for 2026. And leadership in general is something I am really passionate about. And, I mean, I’m young, so I’ve had to learn a lot of hard lessons when it comes to leadership and how to be a good leader. I think I’m naturally a leader. But how to do that from, from a very empathetic and understanding how different people work and being patient place has been a journey and, I have a lot of you know, mentorship and support. I have people even today that I call. And the other day I had this, you know, where I had a friend who has a really good friend. He has like a military background, strong leader. He is a leader in his company. And I called him and was like, listen, I’m gonna tell you, I’m gonna vent for a second and then I want you to, give it to me straight. And I’m so grateful for friends who do that, like, don’t tell me what I wanna hear, let me vent and then put, set me straight. So anyways, with, with leadership and team, it’s, it’s probably one of the most challenging parts of growing a business that you’re not running yourself. Managing people is very challenging because everyone has their own things, right? Like everyone has their own triggers, their own weaknesses, their things that they can’t see or and then you too, like your triggers and things like how you work and managing people. It’s, it is definitely a journey, but I also think you can learn so much from it.

Because we learn in relationship. And so when I have moments, especially with my leaders, when I have moments where we’re like, I find us both kind of like in a tension spot. I’m like, great, great. Because we can learn from this. Like it’s easy to be totally good when there’s no tension, there’s no pressure, there’s no stress.

But when one or both find themselves in a point where we’re triggered and butting heads, which happens like, I think that’s. Just like with any relationship, right? I’m like, okay, awesome. Like this is an opportunity for us to like, pause, have a conversation, share both of our perspectives, hear each other, and figure out what we need to do moving forward.

So I also think, you know, as hard as relationships are in general, right, like I think they’re one of the most challenging. ’cause you can’t control the other person. Right. So when you think about friendships, when you think about partnerships, when you think about, you know, business partnerships, marriage, employee relationships, it’s probably the most challenging thing we navigate.

I also think it’s where we learn the most. You know, because if you were in like an island by yourself. It might be really easy. You wouldn’t have anyone to fight with, but you’re not gonna learn anything. We learn and we practice in relationship. We practice our own triggers and our own work and our own shadows in relationships.

So there’s so much opportunity, but it doesn’t make it easy. Anyways, so I got asked all these questions about leadership and I thought I would give you kind of three things, simple, simple things that I do in managing my team. That helped me manage. I’ve got a, a team of 20 right now and I’m pretty much 100% removed from our day to day.

But I still have a very good grasp on what is happening in the company, and I can jump in at any time to a client situation, weigh in on strategy. But the actual operations of the company, I, I’ve been removed for a long time, but like fully removed for a long time and it’s. The best ever because the company actually, like if something happens and I’m sick one day, the company actually runs.

But there are things that I have put into place that allow me to have the perspective I need on the company, the view I need on the company in a very organized way. So these are really simple, but I wanted to share them because the group that I shared them with got a lot of value from this. So the first one is I have always.

And have overtime built systems for this, made sure that data and information is given to me in a systematized way. I learned that I don’t wanna have to ask for updates, so I don’t wanna say. Oh, you know, three days ago I thought of this thing and how is it doing? How is this performing? How is this client doing?

You know, are they getting results or how is our webinar doing? Or how, what’s our sales data look like? I don’t wanna have to go either find it. Or even ask for it, like I want it available to me when I need to look at it. And then I also want important things pushed to me to see, so what this looks like, and it shifts and changes based on what we are doing in our company, but.

For my company, what this looks like is every client has a Slack channel, and at least two times a week actual data updates are put in that Slack channel in terms of ad spend, sales, profitability, notes around what we’re doing. So I never have to, in my director, never has to go searching for an update on a client.

It is pushed to us so that if we see a red flag or we see something that needs attention, we can go and address it proactively. That’s really a big part of this is like how to have a team managing the day to day, but keep you in a proactive versus reactive. So that’s on the client and the delivery side.

On my marketing side, which is, this is what we do for clients in terms of our reporting, but I have it done on my end too. I will get updates, and it varies the, the cadence based on what we have going on, but I’ll get updates on things like if we’ve got a webinar funnel how many leads, how are the emails doing, what’s the cost per lead, what are we doing?

And then on our sales side, how many calls, how many showed up? And this is getting pushed to me both in spreadsheets, but also I like it in simple slack messages because then I don’t even have to open a spreadsheet. It just gets sent to me the high level so that I can go, oh, hey, let’s spend more budget.

Let’s crushing it. We’re getting such a good cost per lead, which this just happened, like we’re getting such a good cost per lead. We have four more days left, let’s push the budget. If that wasn’t being pushed to me, my team’s just gonna operate based on the budget I gave them. And we decided for, you know, a campaign for a promotion.

If we have, you know, in sales, Hey, we’re getting no shows. Okay, what are we doing about that? Let’s make sure we have actions. So depending on what’s happening, like when we’re running a live launch, I get more updates and I tell my team, you know, I want it once a week, or I want in live launches, I usually want more.

And on the delivery side, so any of the main areas of the business. For us, it’s delivery, it’s marketing, and it’s sales. We have a system both in solid spreadsheets, but then also in Slack messages that are being sent to management and to leadership so that we can proactively see things. Before it becomes an issue.

And sometimes, you know, the team who’s in the day to day doesn’t always see things like a leadership team is gonna have a different perspective ’cause they’re not so close to it. And you really want both when you are managing those things. So that’s the first thing I have done for the longest time is like data is so important because data should always be driving actions and data in your company.

should be driving your actions, like you have data when it comes to marketing. You have data when it comes to sales. You have data when it comes to your delivery and your retention and how that’s going, and your operations and all of that data should be driving where the actions are. You know, where’s the gaps, where’s the holes, where’s the opportunities that we can put actions behind?

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is I meet with my direct reports once a week, and then they meet with theirs. I only have two direct reports right now. I try to keep, I try to keep it as minimal as possible. And also, just so you know, I hate meetings like. Let me tell you, I hate meetings, but these are important meetings.

And I have also learned this the hard way because if you, especially a remote team, if you don’t have any face-to-face with your team, and especially if they’re full-time, it’s really hard to maintain that relationship. Like, could you imagine having like a friendship or you know, your partner and all you do is like.

Slack and send messages to each other, like you’ve gotta have that face to face interaction. So I meet with my direct reports once a week. They meet with their direct reports once a week, so everybody’s getting that face to face. And the expectation in these meetings, and this is what I explained to the group, is I don’t run the meetings when my direct reports come to me.

They are running the meetings with what they need from me, and that is the expectation is that they show up with an organized list. Of all the things they wanna talk through or the updates they wanna give me. And if I have things great and sometimes I do have questions I wanna check up on or something I wanna talk through with them.

But most of the time the meeting is for them to come and get FaceTime with me. To be able to work through, you know, a situation, work through a problem, work through, like, I spend a lot of time with my director on the ads team talking through hiring, talking through how we’re going to like structure things as we grow, what positions we need, how we can leverage the team.

We have we talk about process and, and clients. And then on the marketing side, we, we brainstorm and we talk about our upcoming promotions, how we wanna fit our calendar. And then they’re taking that and they’re going and executing, but they get that face time with me. And also, the third thing that I, I’m gonna tie into this, ’cause this was the third thing I had, but it’s, it’s a lesson that I, learned again, the hard way as I was talking to this group, I was like, let me tell you, like I have learned a lot of leadership lessons the hard way because I didn’t know what I was doing.

And it’s one thing to like be a leader and take charge. It’s another thing to actually like inspire and motivate and bring together a team. And doing that remote is even harder. So the next thing is, like I have realized, and I continue to remind myself of this, a lot of times your job as a leader is to coach.

The person that you’re leading is to help them through the moments that they have of overwhelm, of frustration, of self doubt, of you know, failure and figure out what are those stories that they have in their head, that are preventing them from being the best, in my case, they’re leaders, but being the best, you know, at their job.

And that is such an important job. So I go into my meetings trying to pull this out of my team of like, where are you struggling? How are you looking at this? How could I provide you perspective? How could I ask you the right questions? How could I support you in that way? And so I say this because this is the third thing on my list is like, as a leader, you are also a coach and.

It’s very rewarding because you also get to have this impact on the actual human being behind the job. But it’s easy to fall into a place where all you’re focused on is the tasks and the logistical to-dos and the things that they’re working on. And you forget about the human behind the job. And you know, for me, I’ll share with you guys like, ’cause I think a lot of you guys will relate to this.

One thing I’ve had to learn and I’m still learning is I, I do not need to be motivated. I’m very self-motivated. and I also thrive almost in, in like the grind. You see this in how I work out. Like I love. Going into a workout that sounds terrible and I don’t wanna do it, and then doing it anyways.

But not everybody is built that way, and it’s easy for me to focus on the things we need to improve the things that aren’t going well, and just kind of like the like push through mentality. Because that’s how I operate. And my friend pointed out this recently was a situation where he is like, you’re, you’re not, you’re not motivating, you’re not leading, you are just managing.

Like you need to be a leader here and get the team excited for something that might feel overwhelming and not. Be like, come on guys, like let’s push through and do this. So for me, I’ve had to, and I still have to catch myself so many times where my go-to is like. For me, I could just focus on the problems all day and fixing the problems.

’cause I love to do that. Like, let’s, let’s get better. Let’s fix the problems, let’s focus on what’s not working. But most people, that’s not the way that they feel excited. You know, they wanna also feel good about the good things and like that momentum and that excitement. And so I have to intentionally do that because it doesn’t come natural to me.

It doesn’t come natural to me to pause and it doesn’t take even a long time, but to pause and be like, we got this. Like this is, I know this is a lot right now, but here’s where we’re going. And like that motivating like, and that is a piece of leadership. And so that’s something like you, I think you have to know as you manage a team, you have to know what, what is your weakness in how you manage?

And for me, that’s my weakness. My weakness is that I, I don’t wanna say I’m motivated by pain. I don’t think that it’s necessarily true, but I am I love solving problems. I love doing an impossible thing. I love being faced with a problem that’s like, this is almost impossible to do or solve, and then still doing it and there’s like a high on the other side of that.

And so that’s my weakness is that I can get too wrapped up in that and think that that’s like exciting to other people and it’s not. And so I know that’s my weakness, and so I continually make an effort to. Balance that out. And so I think everyone has kind of what their weaknesses is because again, we all, we all have our things, we all have our triggers, we all have our you know, shadow side of us that we, that shows up in relationship.

And so the more you can become aware of that, then the more you can improve as a leader. And back to kind of my third point that I was talking about. You will be very surprised when you start managing a team. If you haven’t yet. How much your job is that coaching? Because anyone that you are their leader, like they look up to you, they’re looking for that advice they’re looking for, for that stability.

In the moments of overwhelm of like that, that you’ve got it, that you, that they’re supported, that they’re understood, that they are heard. the more I I experience relationships, the more I realize it’s simple. People just wanna be seen, they wanna be seen, they wanna be heard, they wanna be recognized.

And for a lot of us that doesn’t. Come natural to do that for other people or, or necessarily be something not even come natural. Like it’s not like it’s hard for me to do that. I don’t think about it enough. So that role of that, that coach, like it is not just about the logistical tactical components, like actually it is probably less than half about that when you are leading a team and it is so much more about supporting and coaching and especially through the harder moments like.

When you have a team and you have a team member and you’re able to move through something where they’re up against their edge, like they’re uncomfortable because they’re doing something new, they are pushing, you know, their comfort on, their confidence on having a voice, whatever it is, and you are able to coach them through that.

Now you just help them grow as a person, and that is extremely rewarding Also a huge part of it. So the way that you do that is you have to have. Face-to-face, you know, interactions and pull out like how you can support them, what they’re struggling with. So those are some ways that I manage my team.

Team is a huge focus for me. I’m, I’m working on trying to hire some in-person talent in Austin because I really want to have the environment of an in-person team. Not a hundred percent of us in person. We just have such a great team who’s not in person, but, I really wanna be able to have a team that’s like, let’s go out to dinner, let’s go play top golf one day.

Let’s, let’s like, actually have these relationships that you just can’t have when you are virtual and just the connection. So I’m, we’re, we’re hiring some roles in Austin and the next podcast studio is gonna be big enough to have a few people working there, and that is super exciting. Culture and team is an ever evolving.

Process. All right, everybody, hopefully you got something out of this. Even if you have like a contractor or one team member right now, I mean, having data reported to you, having cadences where they’re bringing updates to you, that is such a huge part of it. Definitely when you have a team and as you grow a team.

You want to get to the point where you’re outsourcing decisions and thinking. And so that’s a big thing for me through these processes is like I have to offload the decisions and the thinking and the like, I gotta check in on this, I gotta do that because I only have so much bandwidth for that. And so my team does such a great job, and that’s what I train, we train them on thinking that way of like bringing the solutions, bringing the ideas.

Don’t just bring the problems because. Myself and my leaders, we only have so much bandwidth and you have to be able to outsource that to to a team. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in today, and I will talk to you next week.