Former software dev manager here. My job was split roughly into thirds - babysitting and mediating team issues, running interference to keep the executives out

Former software dev manager here. My job was split roughly into thirds - babysitting and mediating team issues, running interference to keep the executives out of my team's hair and bird-dogging HR and payroll issues. I would walk around sometimes and see if anyone needed me to expedite something or clear a blocker and I would go do it. (We were lucky in that we were working on something interesting and kind of ground-breaking so we didn't need a lot of "team building" rah rah to get everyone to work up the enthusiasm to work on a product nobody really cared about.)