Your Job Isn't to Do the Work — It's to Remove the Blockers

Your Job Isn’t to Do the Work — It’s to Remove the Blockers

By Nelson Fernandes • 4 minutes of reading • February 19, 2026

TL;DR

Your job as a leader isn’t to do the work. It’s to make it possible for your team to do theirs. If they’re underdelivering, ask what’s blocking them before you ask what’s wrong with them.

There’s a question most managers never ask often enough:

“What’s slowing you down?”

It’s not a complicated question. But the answers change everything. Because behind most performance gaps there’s a blocker the manager either doesn’t know about or has stopped noticing.

Broken systems. Missing information. Delayed approvals. A process that made sense two years ago but now adds friction to every task. A dependency on another team that never delivers on time. These things accumulate silently. And capable people — people who want to do good work — become frustrated, then disengaged, then labelled as underperformers.

The fourth R in the 5R Leadership Framework is Resource. It means one thing: remove the obstacles between your team and their best work.

The Problem

Why People Stop Telling You What’s Wrong

Early on, they tell you. “This system doesn’t work.” “I’m waiting on approvals that take three days.” “I don’t have the information I need.” They flag it. They expect action.

If nothing changes, they stop flagging. Not because the problem went away — because they’ve learned that raising it achieves nothing. The blocker becomes the norm. Workarounds become standard practice. And performance settles at a level well below what’s possible.

As a manager, you may not even see this happening. The work still gets done — just slower, harder, and with less quality than it should. The frustration is invisible until someone either disengages completely or leaves.

The Method

How to Resource Your Team Effectively

Ask regularly — and act on what you hear

Make “What’s slowing you down?” a recurring question — not a one-off. In team meetings, in one-to-ones, casually on the floor. But only ask if you’re prepared to act. Asking and doing nothing is worse than not asking.

Chase on their behalf

Approvals stuck somewhere? Information not arriving? That’s your job to chase — not theirs. When you remove a blocker your team couldn’t shift themselves, you earn trust that no motivational speech can match.

Anticipate before they ask

The best resourcing is preventative. If you know a busy period is coming, prepare the team before it hits. If you know a system is fragile, have a backup plan. Don’t wait for the fire — remove the fuel.

Fix recurring blockers permanently

If the same issue comes up three times, it’s not an incident — it’s a system failure. Stop patching and fix the root cause. This is where Lean thinking and leadership overlap: remove waste from the process, not just effort from the person.

Scripts

How to Open the Conversation

✓ SAY THIS

→ “What’s the one thing slowing you down that I could help remove?”

→ “If you could fix one thing about how we work, what would it be?”

→ “I’ll chase that for you. You focus on the work.”

✗ AVOID THIS

✗ “Just work around it for now.”

✗ “Everyone else manages with the same tools.”

✗ “That’s not really my area.” (If it blocks your team, it is.)

From the Floor

What This Looks Like in Practice

Real Scenario

I noticed a team member was consistently finishing tasks late. Before I addressed the time management, I asked what their process looked like step by step. Turns out, a single approval step was adding a day to every task — and they’d been working around it for months.

I escalated the approval process, got it streamlined within a week, and suddenly the “underperformer” was the fastest person on the team. The problem was never the person. It was the bottleneck nobody had removed.

— Nelson Fernandes

Your Next 24 Hours

One Thing to Do Right Now

In your next team interaction, ask one person: “What’s the biggest thing slowing you down right now?” Listen to the answer. Write it down. Then do something about it within 48 hours — even if it’s small. The act of removing one blocker sends a message louder than any team meeting: “I’m here to help you do your best work.”