Are you sweeping the ice for your team?

Sounds familiar, leaders? ...maybe a few parents? I was talking to a client last week (and she’s given me permission to write about it.🙏) Halfway through our session she started describing her team, and without meaning to, she described exactly why they weren’t growing.

She’s a senior leader, sharp, the kind of person everyone brings their problems to. And she told me what she does when one of her people hits a wall. When another team won’t cooperate, when a process is broken, when something is making their job harder than it should be.

She fixes it. She goes and talks to the other team. She smooths the process. She removes the obstacle, quickly and capably, before it can slow her person down.

She described this as supporting them. And she meant it. It feels, every time, like exactly what a good leader should do.

There’s a sport that shows what’s actually happening better than I can explain it. In curling, one player slides the stone, and two others skate ahead of it with brooms, frantically sweeping the ice smooth so the stone glides further with less friction.🧹

That’s what she’s doing. She’s sweeping the ice ahead of her people. Clearing every obstacle before they reach it, so the path is always smooth.

And here’s the problem with that, the one she couldn’t see from inside it.

Her people never learn to handle friction. Because they never reach any. Every time something gets hard (a difficult counterpart, a broken handoff, a conflict that needs navigating) she’s already there, broom in hand, smoothing it away before they have to deal with it themselves.

She thinks she’s developing them. She’s actually doing the opposite. She’s making sure they never build the one muscle that would let them grow: the ability to navigate hard things without her.

The hardest part for her to hear was this. The instinct comes from a good place. It’s protective. Almost maternal. She wants to make it okay for them, the way you would for someone you care about. But protection and development point in opposite directions here. Every obstacle she removes is a rep her person doesn’t get to take.

The work isn’t to stop caring. It’s to stop sweeping.

When someone comes to her now with a hard situation, her asignment from me is practicing a different first move. Not “I’ll handle it.” Instead: what have you tried, what do you think is driving it, what would you do if I weren’t available. And then comes the part that’s genuinely uncomfortable for a fixer: letting them go work through it, friction and all, while she sits on her hands.

Because the friction was never the thing in the way of their growth. The friction was the thing that would have grown them. And she’d been sweeping it off the ice for years. /Ulrika