Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?

A good manager knows this and will give you room to find that balance yourself, unless you have demonstrated you need help with that.

IMO, good judgement about the things that need to be right enhances the ability to make money. Too often I see manager-type people disregard the technical grievances of a team as ambiguous/unimportant things, while at the same time wondering why nobody can deliver and get things done. There is very often a direct connection!

But, let me focus on the two most of important purely selfish things for me. I want a manager who provides an environment for me to grow technically and fights for me to make more money. Everything else is secondary.

I’ve had good technical managers that I learned a lot from but had no political abilities to get thier team raises so I had to take the skills I learned and get another job and I’ve had overly political managers that would throw you under the bus to get ahead but if you made them look good, you could enjoy the ride until they stabbed you in the back.

-Intellectually curious / stimulating - This gave the team the time and awareness that science mattered in our jobs, pursue intellectual journeys that actually made our work better and more rewarding. I got to learn R in the aughts, work with academia and create products the company didn't have a real use for at the time, but are their bread and butter nowadays.

-Being totally lean (in the Toyota sense) - There's so much support you can get from a manager that is aware of the hidden cost to rework and not first-time right. He would actually go out on a limb talking to other departments and managers who would make our work less productive. This guy actually bought and brought a pie to another team after they failed us multiple times to try and help them to remember there were others dependant on their work.

-Being appreciative of outsiders trying to suggest changes to the status-quo. This is a big one. You could call this humility. Teams, roles and the surroundings change constantly. Better to change from the inside out, than only when faced with external threats. But it's a hard one since the status-quo and office politics on a day to day basis seem so important.

Whether or not these skills help the manager up the corporate chain depends. For the first one to succeed you need a surrounding that's appreciative for research and new things to come out of the team. The second is a awesome middle manager skill that will be mostly in demand in change roles, but not so much in regular management roles. I am sad about this, but most environments the one who rocks the boat is the one the outside. The third is a more common subset of the second and a true leadership skill, but again managing change in a stagnant environment is hard. People expect your team to do the same thing every day.

What trumps all these great traits is: communication. Each manager should have the skill to communicating what he is doing with his team to his higher ups and surroundings. Only then can what he brings to the team flourish in the corporate environment.