Earlier quoted context omitted.
An interesting reply to the GP comment. I finished reading the GP and immediately thought "so how do you learn to effectively manage people with more experience than yourself?", and then I read this comment. Hmm. I certainly don't want to end in the position of the manager you're referring to. I'm scared about/by the quantity of things I don't know, though, across the board, so there's that. (One of those things that…
> My understanding of management is of owning a summarized, > superset overview of a bunch of areas that I'm (ostensibly) > coordinating. I would most definitely agree with you. A manager doesn't need to have more "in the trenches" knowledge than those that report to them. In fact that's probably not even possible or even desirable. Most of my really good managers have been less technical than me. > Hmm. I certainly…
I think I now understand why micromanagement seems to be discussed so often with implied cringe. Ouch :/
It sounds like this person conflated coordination with (for want of better words) inspiration or direction. Or perhaps this person found their job, uh, insufficiently fulfilling and convinced themselves it would be okay to try and do something about this by being able to pat themselves on the back for the actual invention and inspiration process. Sounds like they unfortunately nailed looking like they knew what they were doing :/
I've read some sentiment on here to the effect that a good manager is the real catalyst to productivity and positivity. Perhaps the second level of good management is an accessible chain of busy but available ears - so weak links can be objectively identified and then fixed.
Of course, this is one of those mechanisms that only ever exists to convey bug reports - you implement it, suddenly the "problem report" count goes through the roof, with nothing else to counterbalance it. But I'd bet that if you tracked team productivity after said bug reports were followed up on... heheh (why does nobody do this ._.)