Some people are managers, and some are individual contributors; two very different species. Both are vital to the success of a company, which means both can make or break that success.

Most individual contributors – engineers and technologists, for instance – are happy to do their thing and leave the bigger picture to their managers; at least, until they progress – as some of them do – to become technical leaders, when their input to management strategy becomes invaluable. But the individuals can’t do their thing unless the managers do theirs, and at times it seems that a manager is unaware of what their role really is.

To my mind, the most important part of a manager’s role is to remove the hurdles that prevent their subordinates from doing their job!

If you think that’s too obvious to merit mention, you’re living on a planet I have yet to visit. In many companies the engineers are struggling to do a great job – what they want and love to do – in the face of major hurdles placed in their path. Not only does management often fail to remove the hurdles – it is sometimes the one who placed them there in the first place.

Of course, the managers don’t normally do this with any malice; they mean to run the business in a structured manner. It’s just that what seems structure to them may be destructive to their people’s ability to innovate, or solve problems, or express the agility that is necessary to run the business optimally. This may come from micromanagement, some manager’s desire to know every minor detail and be a part of every decision; it may come from lack of trust in the subordinate’s intelligence; it may come from stifling budget control processes… there are many causes, but the result is always the same: the engineers, or other individual contributors, are disempowered in their job, and soon become dispirited and either leave or retreat into an attitude of Rosh Katan.

The best way I know to explain the role of a manager comes from the sport of Curling. Not that I’ve ever seen this sport outside of a TV screen; after all, it’s played on ice, a commodity not abundant in my hot country. Anyway, the players have to slide kettle-like granite stones across the ice so they come to a stop as close as possible to a target marked on the ice. And what got my attention is this: as the stone slides along, there are two team members equipped with brooms, which they use to sweep the ice ahead of the stone. This reduces friction, and when it is done expertly, a stone will travel both farther and straighter.

And that, my friends, is exactly the role of a good manager: to sweep away all obstacles in front of their employees, so they can get farther and on a straighter path. Managers, after all, don’t produce anything themselves; they’re measured on the output of their subordinates. What better way to increase this output than to empower the subordinates by eliminating all the hurdles they encounter, especially those that are outside the subordinate’s specialization? If you manage engineers, let them handle the engineering problems – there are more than enough to keep them busy – and focus on dealing with the budget paperwork, and the required supplies, and resolving conflicts with other business units, and the bureaucracy.

One gentleman who got this right was Winston Churchill: when Alan Turing wrote him that the code breaking effort at Bletchley Park was hamstrung by lack of resources, Churchill wrote on the letter “Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this had been done”. He added his famous red “Action this day” sticker and handed this to his staff. Churchill couldn’t break a code, but he knew how to sweep away the logistical nightmare that was threatening the scientists’ ability to execute this critical task.

Image credit: Halo Photographs