Are you a snowplow manager? How do you know? There are an awful lot of cute names for bad leadership out there. You know about micro-managers, seagull managers, and fireman managers. Now the adorable list of bad ways to lead people has a new entrant.
A snowplow manager is one who spends too much time moving every possible obstacle out of their team’s way. At first, when I heard the term I thought, what’s the big deal? Isn’t that what a manager is supposed to do? We might be doing our people a great disservice and killing ourselves (literally) in the process.
This re-examination came when I found out where the term came from. It started as “snow plow parents.” These folks do everything possible to eliminate any obstacles to their kids, and in their wake the children don’t learn to overcome difficulties, experience disappointment, or really learn to tackle problems in an inventive way. If you don’t know a parent like this, there’s zero doubt you’ve met their offspring.
Being a snowplow manager has a negative impact on both your own work and that of your team.
The impact on your team is the same as it is on kids: They often don’t lean their jobs like they should. How do they solve problems? Who else can they turn to for help? What should they do if you aren’t there to help them? (Around here, we call it the “what would happen if Kevin Eikenberry got hit by a bus” problem.)
Those problems are bad enough, and we could have an entire discussion on why it’s not a great way to manage. But let’s forget about others for a while and focus on ourselves.
Being a snowplow manager is bad for you. As a manager and a human being, this behavior can be extremely corrosive. The most obvious proof came in the early days of the Covid pandemic.
As people struggled to adjust to working remotely (or working with their remote peers), managers experienced higher rates of burnout than their team members. In some cases, leaders reported being “partly or completely burned out” at a rate 10-15% higher than the people who report to them.
Some of this was the stress and strain of working in new ways. There were plenty of reasons managers were exhausted, including adapting to working across time zones and spending too much time on Zoom meetings.
There’s a more insidious reason, and it comes from the best of intentions. (Full disclosure, I fell victim to this myself at one point in my management career.) When things are constantly changing, and stress levels rise, many of us feel our paternal instincts kick in. We want to protect our people from problems. We want to be “the good guy.” Sometimes, it’s just easier to do it ourselves and not have to train or coach people to do something we could easily do ourselves.
A lot of this falls under the heading of, “taking one for the team.” If someone has to endure an uncomfortable experience, we don’t want to be responsible for their discomfort. We “take one for the team.”
This happened more than usual during Covid. People were not only dealing with upheaval in their work, but at home, their kids’ schools and the world in general. Many managers tried to be empathetic to their team and wound up taking on more than they should.
Eventually, snowplow managers burn out. Either they are exhausted from doing work that should be done by others, or they get tired of cleaning up after work that wasn’t properly trained or coached and has to be redone. Then there’s explaining to their managers why things aren’t right.
I remember talking to a class of leaders during our Long Distance Leadership series, who asked in all seriousness, “Does this mean we can go back to expecting people to do their darned jobs again?”
What he meant was that he’d been so keenly aware of how Covid impacted their team members, they went too far. They didn’t coach as hard as they might have. Legitimate reasons for late work were forgiven and often overlooked because “things are hard right now.”
Fact is, he was being a snowplow manager and was tired. Nobody can blame him. He needed to get people to pick up their own slack in order to save his own sanity.
Are you a snowplow manager? What are you doing that should or could be done by others? That doesn’t mean we delegate all the terrible jobs or things we don’t want to do. It means we look at what needs to be done, how employees can learn and improve, and allow them to have those experiences.
If you are wondering how to help avoid being a snowplow manager, especially on remote or hybrid teams, check out our Long Distance Leadership Series.
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