Bob,

I think the most legitimate role of "buffer managers" is to listen to complaints and feedback from their direct reports and make a judgement about which of these are legitimate enough to warrant raising at a higher level.

Done right, this ensures all issues are checked for relevance and importance before being passed on to senior managers. This allows them concentrate on important strategic issues rather than wasting time handling trivialities.

Done wrong, of course, it means that managers have carte-blanche to avoid reporting anything which might make them look bad.

This is one of the major differences between a good manager and a bad manager.

"buffer" is a euphemism for "linebacker."
And linebacker is an analogy for: hang on, I'll look it up in Google. Ah, 'Linebackers are members of the defensive team, and line up approximately five to seven yards behind the line of scrimmage, behind the defensive linemen.' I'll understand in a second, just look up scrimmage, linemen ad infinitum.

Ok, this is an American column written for Americans. It is deliberately obfuscated to preclude 'foreign' comprehension. I work for the world's largest audio company which happens to be American, but that company won't benefit from my understanding of your wise words.

I've commented before on your xenophobia and I'll stop commenting after this one. I'll just accept that you have chosen your audience and I'm not in the crew.

Bob,

I'm one of the people who described a good manager as a buffer between his or her reports and upper management (UM). I also tied it to managers who let their reports do their jobs, as opposed to managers who feel compelled to make their reports do their jobs.

As usual, it comes down to to the judgment and sense of the manager. Better managers know when to keep UM off their reports' backs, when and how to temper UM's dicta, and when to pass things along as given. That's one difference between a bottleneck and a buffer.

It works in reverse, too. A good manager/buffer will pass upwards whatever is needed from his or her reports, deal with whatever would benefit from personal attention him or herself, and stop things that shouldn't be passed upward, at least at that time. Again, it's a matter of judgment.

As you say, all these judgments will vary with the nature of UM. If UM is open to the flow of information, ideas, or suggestions, the manager will pass them along; if not he or she won't pass much along, at least not as readily as with open UM. Hence, the buffer function.

Maybe I've just been lucky, even spoiled. Although I work for the military, and my installation has to follow sometimes counterproductive guidance from above, it has always been open to ideas, often aggressively soliciting them, my direct line of management has passed ideas and info both ways openly and timely, and generally just let us get on with our work.

Heck, we were even the first in our branch to suggest and use flexitime, before it was even formally available to the rest of the federal government. I guess you can't get much more spolied than that.

My old boss told me once, "I'm a bulldozer. You point me at the things that are keeping you from doing your job and then get out of the way." Obviously it got more complex than that-- sometimes he was the guy who had to tell me that what was sub-optimal for IT was optimal for the whole business and I needed to suck it up. Most of the time he served as a filter for feedback coming down at me-- defending me against upper management criticism when it was unwarranted and passing on criticism and praise when either was justified-- and as a liaison with upper management when I needed somebody to champion changes that had to happen above my pay grade.

He's now doing management consulting, and I hope a lot of companies are learning from him.

I generally viewed middle management as a sponge. They either slowed communication or twisted it to their own benefit. But rarely contributed much to the bottomline effort. Fortunately I left that company, and am in a small business with no middle management sponge. We're two levels top to bottom. It's much more responsive and communication is optimal. Obviously, that won't work for a larger organization, but I feel much more motivated to excel now. And, sorry, Xenophobic, I don't use football terminology either, but many do in this business world. Has to do with some peculiar notion that business is a game, I surmise......

RE: Antony Pace's May 30th 'xenophobic' comment

Antony -

Of all the pundits you may read, Bob is one of the few who takes the time to clarify what he means. If you didn't understand what "buffer" or "linebacker" meant, you only had to read the next sentence to receive a jargon/slang/analogy-free explanation.

I once worked for a company that had an owner, CEO, VPs, manager, then indians.

It got bought out. Please don't ask me how many layers of management there are, because I haven't the faintest idea, but most of the people who built the company are no longer there.