1. You Were Never Handed a Manual for This

At some point, you were doing the job well enough that someone decided you should be in charge of the people doing it. Nobody sat you down first and explained how to have a hard conversation with someone who used to be your peer, how to hold a deadline without becoming the person everyone avoids, or how to keep a team motivated when the numbers are down two weeks in a row. You were just handed the title and expected to figure it out.

On a recent episode of Virtual Equity, Nicole and Lindsey sat down to talk through what they each look for in a great recruiter, five qualities apiece, compared cold with no prior conversation. On the surface, it is a hiring conversation. Underneath it, it is something more useful. Strip away the industry specifics and what they are really describing is how a good leader talks to their people. The accountability conversation. The honest one. The one where you admit you do not have the answer yet. Those conversations are not unique to recruiting. They are the same ones separating managers who build trust from managers who just supervise, whether you are two years into your first team lead role or twenty years into a director title, still translating between the people doing the work and the people making the decisions above them.

2. Accountability Isn't About Whether Someone Made a Mistake

Everyone on your team is going to miss a target, drop a ball, or handle something wrong at some point. That is not the moment that tells you whether you have a strong performer. What tells you is what happens right after.

Lindsey put it simply: she does not need someone to have already fixed the problem. She needs them to say, hey, I messed up, what can I do, how can I prevent this from happening again. That is the whole test. Compare that to someone who, when asked why a number came in low, gives you a list of everything working against them and stops there. Both things can be true at once, the environment can be genuinely hard, and the person still owes you evidence that they tried something in response to it.

The next time a direct report explains a miss, resist the urge to accept the explanation or reject it outright. Ask one more question: what did you try when you noticed this was not working. The answer tells you more about that person's ceiling than the original miss ever will.

3. Give Them a Framework, Not Just an Expectation

If your team keeps bringing you problems without solutions, that is often not a sign they cannot think for themselves. It is a sign nobody ever gave them a structure for how to bring you something other than a complaint.

Nicole and her team use a simple habit they call the one, three, one. Come with the problem. Come with three possible solutions. Tell me which one you think is the best and why. It sounds small, but it does two things at once. It forces the person to actually think through the situation before it lands on your desk, and it gives you a fast way to coach their judgment instead of just handing down an answer every time.

If you manage former peers, this is especially useful. It shifts the dynamic away from you deciding everything, which can feel like a power move to people who were your equal six months ago, and toward you coaching their thinking, which reads as investment instead of authority.

4. Adapt How You Communicate, Not Who You Are

Nicole described it through parenting: how she talks to her oldest is not how she talks to her youngest, even though she loves them the same and treats them fairly. Their personalities and needs are different, so her approach has to flex. The same is true with a team. Some people need the direct version. Some people need you to slow down and explain the reasoning before they will act on it. Some people talk through a decision out loud before they trust it. Adapting to that is not being inconsistent, and it is not being fake. It is doing the actual job of reaching each person in a way that lands.

Where managers get this wrong is assuming adapting their style means abandoning who they are. It does not. You can still be direct, still be yourself, and still meet five different people five slightly different ways depending on what gets through to them.

5. What to Say When You Don't Have the Answer

New managers often think authority means having every answer ready. It does not, and pretending otherwise erodes trust faster than admitting you do not know. Nicole talked about this directly: she may not have the answer right now, but she is willing to go find it, and she holds herself accountable to actually coming back with it.

That single habit, saying I do not know yet but I will find out, and then following through, does more for your credibility than bluffing ever will. It is also the exact skill that matters most if you are the person standing between frustrated employees and decisions made above you. You cannot always explain leadership's reasoning on the spot. You can always commit to going and finding out, and then actually doing it.

6. The Conversations You Have Are What Move the Numbers

When a team's performance dips, the instinct is often to look for a structural fix, a new incentive, a new process, a new tool. Sometimes that is warranted. But Nicole made a point that applies to almost any team, in almost any industry: the conversations you have as a leader with your people are what either drive them toward hitting their numbers or quietly hinder them from getting there.

She can often tell exactly why someone's results dropped on a given day just from remembering a single conversation with them earlier that week. Not because she is tracking a dashboard. Because she knows the people. If you are not having regular, real conversations with your team, you are not just missing a relationship opportunity. You are missing the actual lever that moves performance.

7. Explain the Why, Every Time

Nicole talked about how often people walk away from an offer, a role, or a plan simply because nobody explained the process to them. Nobody broke down what would happen next, who to go to for what, or what the road ahead looked like. That same dynamic plays out constantly on teams. An employee gets handed a new assignment, a policy changes, priorities shift, and if nobody explains the reasoning, the person is left to fill in the blank themselves. Usually, they fill it in with the worst possible version.

This matters most for the decisions you did not make yourself, the ones handed down from above that you now have to carry to your team. You do not have to agree with every decision to explain it honestly. What you cannot do is pass it along with no context and expect your team to trust it, or you, by default.

8. Coach Through the Slump, Do Not Just Track It

Every team has weeks where the results are strong and weeks where nothing seems to land. Nicole described the difference between people who lie flat when a stretch gets hard and people who keep working the problem even when the response is discouraging. That difference is rarely about talent. It is usually about whether someone has been taught, and reminded, that a bad week is not a verdict on them.

As the manager, your job during a slump is not just to notice the numbers dropped. It is to ask what the person is doing despite the resistance they are hitting, and to help them find one more thing to try before they give up on the stretch entirely. That coaching conversation, held consistently, is what keeps a rough patch from turning into someone quietly checking out.

9. Trust Is Built in the Small, Repeated Moments

Respect from a team is not granted with a title. It is built the same way any relationship is built, through a pattern of small moments where you showed up, followed through, and made someone feel like they could bring you a real problem without getting punished for it. That is true whether you are managing people you used to sit next to at lunch or leading a department full of people who have never worked anywhere near you.

None of the conversations covered above work as a one time event. They work because they are repeated, week after week, until your team knows what to expect from you before they even walk into the room.

10. What This Looks Like Starting Monday

You do not need a new system to start applying any of this. Pick one thing. The next time someone on your team explains a miss, ask what they tried instead of just accepting the excuse. Hand one direct report the one, three, one framework the next time they bring you a problem without a plan. Have one honest conversation this week where you say I do not know yet, and then actually follow up with the answer.

These are not complicated moves. They are just the ones nobody ever taught you to make on purpose.