Why are there so many bad bosses?

Delegate responsibility, Clarify deliverables, Request regular progress reports but at the same time give them the Freedom and Autonomy to do their job their own way.

Relevant Reading:

1) A radical article from HBR, First, Let’s Fire All the Managers : https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers

2) Speech by Dave Packard to HP Managers (1960) - https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-... (this is one of my favourites)

3) Also see the book Why we do what we do: Understanding Self-motivation by Edward Deci for insights.

Above all else, they must be nice and demonstrate a large capacity for empathy.

At the end of the day, their job is to get their team to efficiently get work done. Regardless of method used, fear,micromanagement and threats as a proverbial stick with your salary serving as the carrot, that never works.

Anyone can manage, but a good manager must be a leader. They must have the capacity to inspire their workers to want to excel in their work. For certain team types (like retail, manual labor, call centers,etc...) you can get away with a nasty task master yelling "the beatings will continue until morale improves" because your workers perform repetitive and simple tasks with critical thinking and creativity not being part of the job.

Lastly, I hope everyone tries to introspect and find out who you are and if you would make a good manager/leader. I have, and I am confident I will make a terrible manager (one of the many reasons being I would simply hate it!). I can't help thinking with the bad managers I have had to work with: Do they really lack self-awareness that much? Is their management not able to see their mess?

A theory I have is: There are two types of manangers, the first type will make excellent top or bottom level management, the second kind are great middle managers. I can't help wonder if some of the bad managers I have run into would make good middle managers and they're put there until a position opens up or something.

Very Very True. This is the main thing that matters, everything else is secondary. "Trust" implies that you "Respect and Recognize" them as "Intelligent Decision-making Individuals" and that's what one's ego needs to do their best.

What the manager should be doing is aligning the direction of higher-ups and developers. This takes being able to clearly understand and communicate interests and needs two-ways.

As an IC I've always been vocal about the technical needs of product or platform development as it grows and expands capabilities. There's no chance higher-ups would know these things without being exposed to situations as they develop. At the same time I have to learn about the longer-term product direction and how to sequence development, and in particular research that can uncover the unknown unknowns heading in that direction. I'm lucky to have access to information and background that lets me make good guesses. This is the kind of process that the manager should be creating and refining.

The problem is that too many 'technical' managers behave as middle managers, merely allocating developers to teams by skillset (or worse title Sr/Jr Frontend/Backend) to projects picked by product managers and let project managers try to make it work. Instead of remembering all those times as an engineer that a timely refactor would have saved the company so much money and pain and getting key ones 'in the books', they take the easy route agreeing with the hand that feeds and only aim to satisfy one side's requirements without trying to fully understand the other's.