The original two questions are great, but I would add one more:
“When your goal is very long-term, how do you…. re-charge your batteries?”

Being the steward of long-term goals can get lonely, and turn-over in management can be disruptive. Make sure to develop rituals that affirm the goal (be it language in various strategic plans, your own performance objectives, or semi-annual brown bag lunches). These rituals will foster new relationships and identify potential champions. It is also your responsibility to build and preserve the knowledge base of documents related to the goal (the half life of documents tends otherwise to be about 60 days).

I do think that in teams #1 is critical, and I love your perspective on not doing that all the time. Especially in management, greasing the wheels for others is only part of the job. Balance does seem to be the key here. Also structuring things to make sure that balance is possible–we need to make time for that vision piece that always gets usurped by the fire of the day.

And I also make a large distinction between getting people unstuck and doing their work for them. I like think my un-stucking style leans closer to the Socratic method than a Fixer role. Fixers are always going to be a bottleneck, but teachers expand capacity with each effort.

I’m not as sure about point #1 — helping people get unstuck. On the one hand I can guarantee that everyone on my team would LOVE to see my adopt this principle, because I can be a huge bottleneck for decision-making and even on some aspects of project implementation. On the other hand, I find that a focus on unsticking other people’s workflow is probably the number one way that I get blown off of long-term goals and trapped in short-term problem-solving. And whenever I have made a great effort to step out of that troubleshooting role, in order to focus on some longer-term priorities, I see the rest of the team stretching in new ways, and developing their own capacity to support one another or to unstick themselves.

Clearly this is a place where balance is crucial: listening and providing help when needed, but perhaps not so readily that you’re distracted from your own goals, or limiting your colleagues’ self-sufficiency. My gut and limited observation suggests there may be a bit of a gender line here: I’m betting women err on the side of doing too much unsticking, to the detriment of their own focus, while men may be more prone to under-un-sticking (TM).

But I’d be very curious to hear other people’s thoughts on that balance, and whether there’s a gender dimension here. The only people I don’t want to hear from are my immediate coworkers, who are probably wondering why I am commenting on someone’s blog when I could be getting them unstuck.

purpose/principles
vision
goals
responsibilities
projects
actions

each rolls up to the higher domain, keeping bridges that span the gap between actions and goals and purpose.