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

He actually cared about me. Asked me how I was feeling, how life is besides work. Then from time to time he'd take us for lunch or dinner (we were a total of 6 people in his team). Felt great, everybody was really productive and happy to go to work.

He took blame for every bad thing that our team did. He gave credit to the individual team members for every good thing he did.

He understood that the success of his team was his success, and didn't need the praise.

Letting me get on with my job, no micro-managing; trust really.

Knowing they had my back if the shit hit the fan.

I've only experienced this once unfortunately.

Not my direct manager, but someone i worked with.

He approached problems from different angles than most. He understood what our business is and didnt get lost in details that didnt matter. Thanks to his decisions, efficiency on things he was involved improved significantly.

More importantly, he managed chaos. And he embraced it. From technical pov, he saw experiments as an opportunity, and set a goal to team to run as many as they can fit into cookie mods. This allowed team to learn what works and what doesnt, and gave them immediate feedback. Almost everyone else sees it only as a way to be conservative (slow roll out that is safe), this guy saw it as an opportunity.

I guess tl;dr; sees the bigger picture and doesnt get lost in details, embraces enthropy and sees it as an opportunity.