The best managers don’t just remove blockers. They build systems that surface them fast and also prevent them from happening again. Most teams treat blockers reactively. Someone gets stuck, Maybe they mention it in a Slack message or a DM.
And by then, you’ve already lost time or a day or week by by the time you’ve seen it. And that’s not really management. Right? That’s just whack-a-mole. So your job as a manager is, one, to create an environment where nothing stays blocked for long, and two, take steps to address the root cause.
So let me show you how we handle this in Steady. Here I am in my digest, my daily digest, but I will go to the check-ins page for the teams I’m involved with. And you can see we’ve surfaced blockers right away. I’ve got an email about this. I’ve got a DM about this. Pat Flores is blocked. She needs more detailed logs.
So we’ve addressed the speed problem.
But let me show you how you can create an Echo so that these same kind of blockers don’t happen again. So I’m going to start here with an empty prompt: “categorize the blockers from my teams over the last seven days, suggest steps for me to prevent them from happening again.” Okay. And I will hit go.
Here, Steady has surfaced the categories, these blockers for Jesse and Pat and Sam, and suggested preventative steps. And so what I’m going to do is make sure I get that weekly. I might want to get it on, I’d say, I guess Wednesday at nine thirty.
And there you have it. I’ll save it. And from now on, I’m going to get some steps to proactively address blockers. And I’ll include a link in the description so you can set this Echo up for yourself in one click.
Because clearing blockers fast is table stakes. Right? But spotting patterns so that you can prevent them from happening again, that’s how you actually enable your team.
