Provider Power with Sara Sherman

Being “nice” feels safe, until your team stops taking you seriously, boundaries disappear, and accountability quietly dies.

Being “nice” feels safe — until your team stops taking you seriously, boundaries disappear, and accountability quietly dies.

You might think you’re avoiding conflict—but your team thinks you’re avoiding leadership. It’s time to facilitate hard conversations with clarity, confidence, and facts, instead of fear, anxiety, and dread.

When staff don’t take ownership, it’s not an attitude problem—it’s a design problem. Learn how organizational structure shapes behavior and why accountability depends on clarity.    

Promotions are great! Leading your former coworkers can get a little tricky. Learn what's wrong, how to fix it, and what happens if you don't. 

A team doesn’t become “respectable” because of authority—it happens when leadership earns it in everyday moments. Let's breakdown what supervisors actually do (and don’t do) that makes staff want to follow…or quietly check out.

Transcription It’s a very well-meaning philosophy. I totally understand where supervisors are coming from. Unfortunately, this philosophy is sabotaging your success as a supervisor and diminishing your impact as a team leader. Welcome to the Provider Power Moves Podcast. I’m your host, Sara Sherman. Here, I leverage my 35 years of experience in the field to give you practical steps that create big...

Transcription Do you have lazy staff? I know it’s pretty common to think that you do. I hear about “lazy” staff every time I do a frontline supervisor training. Lazy. Here for the wrong reasons. Don’t care. Basically broken humans beyond repair. But they just keep showing up to the job. Supervisors and managers feel frustrated, angry, and stuck. In the meantime, work is not getting done. Complianc...

Transcription Let’s talk customer service. I hear this all the time from provider agency leaders and managers. New hires come in, and they don’t know anything about customer service. And honestly, sometimes even long-time staff still haven’t quite gotten it. So I ask a simple question: are you teaching your expectations around customer service? Almost every time, the answer is no. Here’s the hard...

Transcription Did you see the Relias report that said 50% of DSPs report leaving their jobs because of their supervisor? And if you spend any time at all on LinkedIn, you’ve likely seen post after post talking about how employees don’t leave jobs — they leave bosses. In fact, in the Gallup research report entitled The State of the American Manager, 50% of those polled said the number one reason th...

Transcription Time management is the biggest lie in the book. You’ve been told your whole life that if you just managed your time better, everything would work. You’d hit your goals. You’d get everything done. Your staff would perform better. But here’s the truth: time cannot be managed. You can’t stop it. You can’t move it. You can’t stretch it. Calendars and apps don’t manage time. They only org...

Transcription Today, we’re talking about one deceptively simple goal that changes everything about supervision and staff independence. No, we’re not talking about they can do it if I remind them, or they’ll get it done if I follow up, or even if I nag, beg, plead, and do that for days, I’ll actually get the work done that’s supposed to be done. We’re not talking about any of that. True independenc...