The New Manager Mindset

Chapter 2. The Daily Practices of Leadership

There are two kinds of managers.

“And only two,” said a project manager once, responding to my quip.

A client meeting had just ended. I was finishing up some notes. The client’s PM had stayed behind. Someone else on the client team had told a funny story a few minutes earlier about an old boss, and the PM and I were still chuckling over it. He knew what I meant when I said there were only two kinds of managers. He filled in the rest for me.

“The kind who want to control everything, and the kind who hire smart people and get out of the way.”

I’d first heard this from an old boss of my own. It stuck with me for a long time, and I sometimes found myself dropping every boss I’d ever had into one box or the other. It wasn’t hard to do. I don’t think I’d ever thought about it until my old boss had said it. Once I’d heard it, there was no escaping it. Every manager fell to one side or the other.

Not because it was true, but because someone had said it was true.

In truth, there are more than just two buckets.

There does seem to be a bucket that can be easily filled with people who want to micromanage everything. You know the type. They dish out strict instructions. They disappear for long periods of time while you work out all the details (there’s not enough time to micromanage you and everything else). Then they do drive-by management to tell you how wrong all your decisions were and how they would’ve done it all differently. Let’s face it; ...