>Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.

One of the reasons I really like my current manager is he spends a lot more time reminding us he can/offering to "take care of any blockers." His whole management style can be summed up as "Why is it blocked? Ok, leave it to me." Frankly I love it. If it's something we should take care of he's very specific about it too.

My first manager at Amazon was like that. Loved him to pieces. He didn't micro-manage, he didn't even fully care about the scrum. Just said "I can see the ticket status myself. If you are blocked by something, need any info or resource, I'll hunt it down for you, otherwise you keep cooking".

I often describe myself as a bulldozer for my team. My job is to lay out clear expectations, do my best to steady the course free of external chaos, and bulldoze a clear path for the team to get stuff done.

Agree and follow this principle to certain degree, however there are caveats here - something being a blocker shouldn't prevent you from trying to resolve the blockers by yourself or work with your boss to resolve them ie - "hey boss, I'm blocked with task A with refactor of this code; are you happy for me to do XYZ?". Then I have options to say: "yes! excellent! go ahead!" or "no, we need to do ASD here" or "no, we cannot do XYZ right now". If every time people encountering blockers would come to me to resolve them, or wait until they're resolved I'd not get anything done. On the flipside, if every time a blocker is encountered people were to handle it themselves, then a) it might not align with my vision on what actually needs to be done here b) I'm blindsighted with what was actually done.

Clear boundaries and strategies eliminate these caveats = team members are aligned on what they can make decision for and general direction the team is heading towards.

Reminds me of something Joel Spolsky wrote about on his blog. The best managers were those who "moved the furniture out the way". Basically clear the way for the people working on the problem to do so.