Become an Obstacle Remover

One of the strongest employees on the team had started staying late almost every night.

She was capable, organized, and dependable. Her manager regularly arrived the next morning to find emails she had sent long after the rest of the office had gone home.

At first, he admired her commitment.

Then he became concerned.

One afternoon, he stopped by her desk and asked why she was working so late.

Her answer caught him off guard.

“I’m not really working late. I’m waiting late.”

She was waiting for approvals. Waiting for another department to answer questions. Waiting for someone to make a decision. Waiting for access to information she needed to finish her work.

The employee was not struggling because she lacked motivation.

She was struggling because the path in front of her was filled with obstacles.

That realization changed the way her manager saw his role.

He had been encouraging her to prioritize better, move faster, and manage her time. But time management was not the real problem. The process required her to stop repeatedly and wait for people who were difficult to reach.

She did not need another reminder to work harder.

She needed her manager to clear the road.

The Manager’s Job Is Bigger Than Managing People

Managers spend a great deal of time asking whether employees are performing.

Are they meeting deadlines?

Are they productive?

Are they taking ownership?

Are they moving quickly enough?

Those are fair questions. Performance matters. Accountability matters. People should be expected to follow through on their responsibilities.

But strong managers ask another question before deciding that an employee is the problem:

What is getting in their way?

The answer may be a lack of effort.

It may also be unclear priorities, unnecessary approvals, outdated technology, endless meetings, poor communication, conflicting expectations, missing information, or a process that made sense five years ago but no longer serves anyone.

Managers do not exist only to assign work and measure results.

They also create the conditions in which results become possible.

The best managers spend less time asking, “Why isn’t this getting done?” and more time asking, “What is preventing this from getting done?”

That shift does not remove accountability.

It makes accountability more intelligent.

A Bad System Can Defeat a Good Employee

W. Edwards Deming, whose work influenced modern quality management, made a powerful observation:

Managers often underestimate how much systems shape performance.

Imagine a receptionist who is expected to answer every incoming phone call while also greeting customers, completing paperwork, accepting payments, and helping coworkers.

Calls are missed.

The manager responds by reminding the receptionist to answer the phone.

But reminders cannot create a second pair of hands.

The employee may need clearer coverage, a better call-routing system, fewer competing responsibilities, or designated times for administrative work.

Without those changes, the manager is not solving the problem.

The manager is simply repeating the expectation.

Or consider a sales team required to enter the same customer information into three different systems. Leadership becomes frustrated because salespeople are not updating records quickly enough.

The first instinct may be to send another email about compliance.

But the better question is whether the process itself creates unnecessary work.

Managers can spend months trying to motivate people through a broken system.

Eventually, employees stop believing anything will change. They create workarounds, lower their expectations, and learn to tolerate friction as part of the job.

Great managers notice the friction.

Then they do something about it.

Toyota Built Improvement Into the Work

Toyota became known not only for producing vehicles, but for developing a management system that encouraged employees to identify problems while the work was happening.

Frontline employees were not expected to remain silent when they noticed a defect, delay, or inefficient process. The organization built mechanisms for surfacing problems, investigating root causes, and improving the way work was done.

The lesson for managers is important.

The employee closest to the work often sees the obstacle first.

They know which form takes too long.

They know which meeting produces nothing.

They know which approval creates a two-day delay.

They know which customer complaint keeps appearing.

They know which task requires twelve steps when it should require four.

Yet managers may never hear about those problems because employees assume nothing will change.

Some have raised concerns before and been told, “That’s just how we do it.”

Others have learned that questioning a process makes them appear negative.

Eventually, they stop bringing ideas.

They work around the problem and keep moving.

That silence is expensive.

Every unnecessary step consumes time. Every delay frustrates customers. Every repeated workaround drains energy that could have been used to improve the work.

Your team probably already knows where many of its obstacles are.

The question is whether you have created a way for them to tell you.

Your Team May Not Need More Motivation

Managers naturally turn toward motivation when performance slips.

They encourage the team.

They repeat the goal.

They remind everyone why the work matters.

They introduce incentives, recognition programs, competitions, or new deadlines.

Sometimes those efforts help.

But motivation cannot solve every problem.

A motivated employee can still be trapped by a slow approval process.

A committed employee can still be confused by competing priorities.

A talented employee can still fail without the information, authority, training, or resources required to succeed.

Motivation becomes frustrating when people are being asked to run faster while their shoelaces are tied together.

Before trying to inspire more effort, inspect the environment in which the effort is being made.

Ask whether people know what matters most.

Ask whether they have the authority to make routine decisions.

Ask whether meetings are consuming the time needed to perform the work.

Ask whether another department regularly creates delays.

Ask whether technology helps or hinders.

Ask whether policies protect the organization or simply create motion.

Employees should be responsible for their performance.

Managers should be responsible for the conditions surrounding it.

Obstacles Come in Many Forms

Some obstacles are obvious.

A broken piece of equipment.

An unavailable system.

An approval that has been sitting unanswered for a week.

Others are harder to see.

Unclear priorities

An employee is told that everything is urgent. They move between assignments throughout the day, completing none of them particularly well.

The manager believes the employee lacks focus.

The employee believes they are following instructions.

The obstacle is not discipline. It is the absence of clear priorities.

Too many decision-makers

A project requires approval from five people. Each person makes changes, and some of those changes contradict one another.

The employee appears slow.

The process is slow.

Meetings that interrupt the work

The team spends so much time reporting on its progress that it has little uninterrupted time to make progress.

The obstacle is hiding on the calendar.

Lack of authority

Employees are told to take ownership but must ask permission before making even minor decisions.

Eventually, they stop taking initiative and wait to be told what to do.

The obstacle is not unwillingness.

It is learned helplessness.

Conflicting expectations

One leader emphasizes speed. Another emphasizes perfection. A third changes the goal without informing the others.

The employee cannot satisfy everyone, yet may be judged as though the expectations were clear.

A manager who is the bottleneck

Sometimes the obstacle is the manager.

Employees wait for answers, approval, feedback, or access because every decision must pass through one person.

The manager may believe they are staying involved.

The team experiences it as waiting.

That can be uncomfortable to admit, but the best managers are willing to ask:

Am I clearing the path, or am I standing in it?

Leaders Eat Last

Simon Sinek wrote in Leaders Eat Last:

Taking care of people does not mean doing their work for them.

It does not mean rescuing them from every difficult assignment or removing every expectation.

It means using your authority, influence, and perspective to create an environment where they can succeed.

A manager may be able to secure a decision that an employee cannot.

A manager may be able to resolve conflict between departments.

A manager may be able to stop an unnecessary meeting, eliminate an outdated report, clarify a priority, or give someone the authority to act.

These may seem like small actions from the manager’s chair.

To the employee, they can change the entire week.

Great leaders recognize that their position gives them leverage. They use that leverage on behalf of the people doing the work.

Ask Better Questions

Managers often begin conversations with:

“How is everything going?”

It is polite, but it rarely produces useful information.

Most employees respond with:

“Good.”

“Busy.”

“We’re getting there.”

The conversation stays on the surface.

Try asking questions that make obstacles easier to identify:

• What is slowing you down right now?
• What are you waiting on?
• Which part of this process takes longer than it should?
• Where are you spending time that adds very little value?
• What decision are you unable to make?
• Which meeting could disappear without hurting the work?
• What do you have to work around every week?
• Where are our customers experiencing unnecessary friction?
• What is one thing I could remove that would help you perform better?

Then listen.

Do not immediately defend the process.

Do not explain why the policy exists.

Do not tell the employee they simply need to manage it better.

First, understand what they experience.

Not every obstacle can be removed. Some regulations are necessary. Some approvals protect the organization. Some difficult work is simply part of the job.

But even when an obstacle must remain, understanding it allows the manager to explain its purpose, improve the process, or provide better support.

Employees do not expect every frustration to disappear.

They do want to know that their manager sees what they are carrying.

Do Not Become the Permanent Fix

There is an important difference between removing obstacles and solving every problem personally.

A manager who jumps in and completes everyone’s work may provide temporary relief, but the team becomes more dependent on the manager.

That is not obstacle removal.

That is substitution.

The goal is not to become the team’s permanent workaround. The goal is to improve the system so people can move forward without you.

Suppose an employee is repeatedly delayed because another department does not respond.

The manager could contact that department every time and chase down the answer.

That may solve today’s problem.

A better response would be to clarify responsibilities, establish a response-time expectation, identify a reliable point of contact, and create an escalation process.

One approach makes the manager necessary every week.

The other makes the obstacle less likely to return.

Strong managers do not simply clear today’s fallen branch.

They determine why the tree keeps falling.

Protect Your Team From Organizational Noise

One of the least visible roles of a manager is filtering noise.

Organizations constantly produce new requests, changing priorities, meetings, updates, initiatives, and emergencies. Without thoughtful leadership, all of it lands directly on employees.

The manager becomes a messenger rather than a filter.

Every request is forwarded.

Every meeting is accepted.

Every new idea becomes another priority.

The team becomes overloaded, yet nobody is willing to decide what should stop.

Great managers protect focus.

They ask whether the new request is truly more important than the existing work.

They clarify tradeoffs.

They push back when timelines are unrealistic.

They combine meetings, eliminate duplicate reports, and prevent every organizational gust of wind from becoming a tornado for the team.

That protection is not avoidance.

It is leadership.

Your team cannot do its best work when priorities are reshuffled every afternoon.

Sometimes removing an obstacle means saying no on behalf of the people who do not have the authority to say it themselves.

Find the Constraint

In The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt teaches that every system has a constraint, something that limits the system’s overall performance.

Improving everything except the constraint may create activity without meaningful progress.

Managers often respond to performance problems by making broad changes.

Everyone attends training.

Everyone submits more reports.

Everyone works longer hours.

But if the real constraint is one overloaded approval point, none of those changes solve the problem.

Look for the narrowest part of the pipeline.

Where does work pile up?

Where do people wait?

Where do mistakes repeat?

Where do customers become frustrated?

Where does the team require intervention from the same person again and again?

That is where your attention belongs.

You may discover that one removed obstacle produces more improvement than ten motivational speeches.

Make It Easier for Great Work to Happen

Managers do not exist to create more work.

They exist to make it easier for great work to happen.

That may mean setting a clearer priority.

It may mean eliminating a report nobody reads.

It may mean giving an employee more authority.

It may mean improving a process, resolving a conflict, securing a resource, or admitting that your own approval has become the bottleneck.

Obstacle removal is rarely glamorous.

There is no applause for shortening a form, canceling an unnecessary meeting, or clarifying who owns a decision.

But those actions quietly shape performance.

They give people back time.

They reduce frustration.

They improve customer service.

They help strong employees remain strong instead of burning energy fighting the system.

This week, do not simply ask your team how things are going.

Ask:

Then ask:

The answer may reveal more about your team’s performance than any dashboard, report, or annual review.

Your people may not need another reminder to work harder.

They may need a manager willing to clear the path.
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Onward.
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The Boundless Team