the manager had it solved in less than two hours simply because he knew the right person to contact to discuss the matter. Another time, a team needed some server resources and just couldn’t get them allocated. Fortunately, the team’s manager was in communication with other teams across the company and managed to get the team exactly what it needed that very afternoon.
None of these examples showed the manager unblocking _because they were a manager_. These were successful examples simply because they knew the right people. Non-managers can do that to — sure, managers might sometimes be in a position to know more of such people, or correlated with having more tenure and thus know more people.
Better examples would be using their manager position to escalate the issue (e.g., your skip-level takes you more seriously than your she will take your report).
