Chief Unblocking Officer
The CEO's real job isn't to have the answers. It's to remove whatever stands between great people and great work.
Intel was the world’s largest chipmaker for more than 30 years. Then, in less than a decade, it lost almost everything that made it Intel: manufacturing delays let TSMC take the lead in making the most advanced chips, Apple replaced Intel processors with its own, and AMD took share in both PCs and data centres.
But its biggest miss was mobile. Intel failed to see that mobile phones would come to dominate the market. When Apple was building the first iPhone, Intel passed on the chance to partner with it, and left the door wide open for ARM to become the clear choice for the entire mobile market. Almost every smartphone that followed was a sale Intel never got.
Boeing was once the undisputed name in commercial aviation, a company run by engineers where safety came first. Over the years its culture shifted, and financial efficiency started to win arguments that engineering used to win. Then came the 737 MAX crashes, which killed 346 people, a worldwide grounding of the aircraft, and years of investigations into how warnings from inside the company went unheard.
Neither company lacked money, talent or market power. Both had some of the best engineers in the world. What failed was leadership.
Leadership culture
A weak CEO, a failing leadership team or a broken corporate culture will kill a company. No matter how big or established it is, it will eventually cost the company its business.
It rarely happens in one dramatic decision. It happens slowly, in thousands of small moments: an engineer who raises a concern and is ignored, a team that waits three weeks for an approval, a good idea that dies in a meeting because it threatens someone’s budget. Each one seems small. Together, they become the company’s culture.
At some point, leadership stops enabling the work and starts blocking it.
It’s all about incentives. If a team is incentivised to pursue financial results relentlessly, it will deliver them. But eventually products will fail, marketing will run out of tricks and sales will collapse.
What a Chief Unblocking Officer does
The traditional picture of a CEO is someone at the top who has the answers and hands out decisions. CEOs are often praised as the smartest person in the room. This picture doesn’t scale. In a company of any size, the people closest to the problem almost always know more about it than the CEO does.
A Chief Unblocking Officer starts from a different question. Not “what should my team do?” but “what is stopping my team from doing it?”
Sometimes the blocker is a missing decision. Sometimes it’s a missing resource, a process nobody remembers the reason for, a conflict between two teams, or a person in the wrong seat. Very often, it’s the leader.
The job is to find those blockers and remove them, every day. In practice, that comes down to four things.
Hire and develop the best
You can’t unblock a team that isn’t capable of the work. The first job is to bring in people who are better than you at what they do, and then make them even better.
Great people don’t need to be managed closely. They need context, trust and room to work. If you hire well and still find yourself making every decision, you either hired the wrong people or you haven’t let them do their jobs.
Developing people matters as much as hiring them. The best leaders measure themselves by how many future leaders they create, not by how indispensable they are.
Embrace conflict
Perhaps the most incredible thing about a diverse group of smart people is that different ideas will rise. That’s the whole point of hiring them.
But different ideas mean disagreement, and many leaders treat disagreement as a problem to suppress. They value harmony, reward people who agree, and slowly build a room where nobody says what they really think.
That room is exactly what hurt Boeing. When the people who see the risk don’t feel safe raising it, or raise it and aren’t heard, the company is flying blind.
A Chief Unblocking Officer protects disagreement. Debate the idea hard, decide, and then commit together. Conflict about ideas is healthy; it’s silence that kills companies.
Focus on the end-user
Internal politics is one of the biggest blockers of all. When teams optimise for their manager, their budget or their metrics, they stop optimising for the customer.
The simplest way to unblock an organisation is to point everyone at the same thing: the person who uses the product. It settles arguments (“what’s better for the customer?”), it cuts through hierarchy, and it makes it obvious which processes add value and which only add delay.
Intel didn’t lose mobile because it lacked the technology. It lost because it was optimising for the business it already had, not for what customers were about to need.
Relentless passion
None of this works if the leader doesn’t care deeply. Unblocking is unglamorous work: chasing decisions, sitting in hard conversations, fixing broken processes, saying no to good ideas so great ones can move.
Passion is what keeps a leader doing that work every day, long after it stops being exciting. And it’s contagious. Teams can tell the difference between a leader who is managing a company and one who truly cares about what it builds.
The job
Intel and Boeing didn’t fail because their people stopped being good. They failed because their leadership stopped clearing the way for those people.
The best CEOs I know don’t think of themselves as the person with the answers. They think of themselves as the person who removes whatever stands between great people and great work.
Chief Executive Officer is a title. Chief Unblocking Officer is the job.