I don’t think this is right. Managers can be hands-on or hands-off, task-oriented, or people-oriented.
Very task-oriented + very hands-on = micromanager.
Very hands-off = a disengaged manager.
In my experience, the best managers can find a beneficial spot on those axes for each employee.
Give the technically competent people lacking confidence reassurance (be hands-on and people-oriented), micromanage a bit with people who aren’t doing their work effectively and not as a result of something that can be fixed with empathy or encouragement, and be disengaged when you’re working with competent self-motivated misanthropes.
IMO, saying one extreme is better than another tells you a bit about the author, nothing helpful about management in general.
Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate, i.e. be laissez-faire. If you’re forcing people to get your approval and you’re not around to give it, you’ve combined the most incompatible bits of micromanager and the disengaged manager.
That could make a fascinating 2x2. I wonder what other failure modes the other intersections could reveal. Have you thought about those other 3 quadrants?
I did the exercise for myself, and here's what I got:
hands-on + task-oriented = micromanager
hands-on + people-oriented = professional office politician (deeply involved, but only to the extent it enables shaping the org chart)
hands-off + task-oriented = scrum master (no technical background that would allow being hands-on, but still very concerned with tasks)
hands-off + people-oriented = HR rep, I guess? Relatively distant from the day-to-day of the team, but still concerned with "people."
On reflection, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch. But — definitely an interesting thought experiment overall.
David Allen's Making It All Work book has a 2x2 that fits TFAs scenario.
Captain and Commander - appropriate control and perspective, seen as that flow state in FFA chart
Micromanager - has too much control, not enough perspective, work gets out of control because it's being squeezed too hard
Crazymaker - has not enough control, but has lots of perspective. Work doesn't happen because new ideas pop up like fungus covering everything and nobody can iterate on anything because of all the context shifting.
Victim - not enough control or perspective, just responds to crises. Sounds like TFA version of the disengaged manager to me.
The thing is that the control and perspective axes change on the subject matter, so a person can be a Victim in one space and a crazy maker in another and a captain and commander in a third, at least at this point in time.
I think it requires a certain definition of "lazy" that basically translates to "delegate everything you possibly can" - which we all know can be hard work in itself.
Lazy clevers can be very useful in finding ineffeciencies and automating tasks
IME they are the first people to challenge assumptions about the way things are done, and the least happy with the answer "that's just the way we do it"
I would argue any hard working is not clever by definition. But the ones who are otherwise clever but have a blind spot on the hard working part - they are scary. How efficiently and how far they can get into completely wrong and unexpected direction before stopping to think the overall picture can be mindboggling. The hardworking idiots are useful as long as their direction is contained.
Lazy and clever can be very useful; sit around thinking about the potential break-down of a problem into aspects that generalise broadly and those specific to the work being done.
Spend the time that needs to be spent implementing the generalisable aspects, so that the work never needs to be repeated.
Implement the problem specific aspects (with minimal code) against those changes (and if any similar problems come up in the future, the changes can be made in minimal time and with minimal work).
Good managers can adapt the help they provide to the teams they manage.
A team of high-performing engineers needs something different from a manager than a team of low-performing juniors. A team building a new product in a fast-growing startup will have different needs to a maintenance team in a bluechip.
Nonetheless, I do like your thought experiment. It provides a model to think about what might be necessary.
Of these types, I find hands-off and task-oriented to be the most bothersome. I am definitely familiar with do nothing scrum masters, and "project managers" whose idea of management involves setting an arbitrary deadline, then wondering why it isn't met. The others I can work with.
"Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate"
I took the OPs point on this to be that, at a certain level of seniority, delegation isn't enough.
I.e. lots of decisions will require consensus with ones peers to actually implement. And when you don't have active engagement and coordination from the level above:
1) peer consensus can take a lot
more time and energy to achieve.
And 2) you can often end up with a compromise solution that's the worst of all options, because nobody has the authority to say - "we're doing it this way".
In general, I get the sense that at more senior levels management becomes much more about managing conflict between subordinates rather than managing individual activities. I think the article was written from that perspective.
I'd agree with this an don't see much point in trying to figure out which bad type of management is the least bad. Instead, the approach should focus on finding ways to make a bad manager better in a meaningful way.
I don't know where I'd fit. I'm very brain-process oriented. I want people to explore hypothesis / plans in a smart and organized way.. the rest I don't care. I feel people around me are being tired of that .. while I'm tired of all the back and forth due to improper discovery or information passing.
> In my experience, the best managers can find a beneficial spot on those axes for each employee.
Agreed - I would also add that the "sweet spot" for a given employee is not fixed; it may be context/situation specific, may change over time, etc.
That is to say, you may have to be more hands-on with the self-motivated misanthrope when a situation requires close collaboration with colleagues, or be more task-oriented with the technically competent people when they're overwhelmed with tickets.
This reminds me of a story I heard at film school about some movie director (don't remember his name). Basically the guy was an alcoholic and was too dysfunctional to pretty much do anything. His crew loved being left to their own devices. Everybody got to do what they were good at. The sound person did the sound the way they wanted. The lights person did the lights they wanted. The costumes person did the costumes the way they wanted. No one around with lesser expertise to boss around the real experts. That way, the director had a stellar career winning lots of awards for being drunk at the pub while his crew made great movies. So, guess what happens next. The director eventually sobers up, starts involving himself in his movies, and watches his career go down the tubes. It turns out, he was actually a pretty bad director.
So what's the lesson here?
If the manager is actually shitty at what they do/manage and has great people working for them, then being at the pub might actually be the most constructive / least destructive thing they could be doing.
The problem is: No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true.
The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
> No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true.
Not every manager is like this.
Good managers will be able to evaluate their team members' actual abilities, and adjust their approach based on what is actually going on. As a manager, if you are able to hire experts who know how to successfully coordinate amongst themselves—and want to coordinate without sabotaging each other in some way, and are able to stay on-task, and prioritize things properly—then you can and should leave them alone to work, after pointing everyone in the right direction.
But who gets to decide if the people doing the work are really as good as they think they are? It's not just bad managers that delude themselves about their own abilities. Sometimes people need guidance or can benefit from guidance, but don't think they need it and are offended that you would even think they could benefit from it.
A lot of people you hear complaining about micromanagement fall into this category. Not everyone who resents being closely supervised can be successful without close supervision.
> The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
Same here. I would wager, though, that the best co-workers and subordinates you've had also were those who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
Far from it. The times I've been put in charge of producing commercials or large art projects where I wasn't personally doing the work, I've done it by phone, mostly from a bar, and only intervened when someone made someone else cry on the set. This is the way to do it. Find the best people you can find, tell them what you want, give them a budget and let them do their best.
The great part is that the client will never have any idea if it could have been better. It probably couldn't have been better anyway.
Another problem you didn't identify: it requires their crew to be composed entirely of fairly senior, talented people. Hire a bunch of junior (even good juniors) and see how this "self-managing" crew never finishes a film, let along a good film.
You have to hire senior people anyway if you want to measure by quality/quantity of work output.
The software engineering crew composed of 5 people straight out of college plus one grown-up to play the role of kindergarden teacher is quite common in our industry, but I very much doubt that such a team produces more/better stuff than if you just had one senior person do it all by themselves with zero communication/management overhead.
The real reason for having such teams is that you have to have some way of progressing these junior people to become senior and of progressing ICs to first-time managers.
In those teams, the manager is at least part-way a teacher/mentor. And, in some cases, they might best teach a lesson by letting their subordinate make a mistake, so they experience the consequences first hand and have the bad experience of having to dig themselves out of it. ...so, even in such uneven teams, there might be surprisingly good reasons for being less involved than a manager's impulse might naturally be. And the first-time manager gets to develop certain mindsets like reflecting on the right level and kind of involvement and so forth.
Department heads on a film set are usually people with long and proven track records. So are the people who work directly below a CEO, which the original article talks about.
I agree you get better return from seniors, which is why everybody wants to hire seniors. But we get new seniors by training juniors/letting them get experience. I think 5 juniors + 1 senior isn’t the way to do it, you should have at least 1 senior per junior (better still more seniors than juniors). Then you still get stuff done (maybe a bit less than if you didn’t have the juniors) and a few years later you have a couple new useful intermediate developers (and a few years after that they’ll be experienced seniors).
> The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
I agree with the conclusions and overall thinking. I would however regard the example as an exception rather than the rule.
Furthermore I think the creative industry has some peculiarities of its own (ie. most people would do creative work or hobbies without being paid, Justice as a rewarding activity).
My point is that in a company or startups the intrinsic motivations might be very different.
A good manager spends considerable time hiring so they can find the best possible people for the role. The manager then ensures their hires have clear objectives and goals and training and tools. Then the manager gets out of the way and lets them do what they were hired for. This takes the least “work” for the manager but can be the most difficult, especially if they are insecure at all.
It really helps if a manager more or less knows how to do the tasks they assign/delegate. But hopefully they’re hiring people better than them at a subset of tasks. The managers job is to understand how it all comes together and the bigger picture of the company.
In essence, a maestro. A maestro can play all the instruments but not anywhere near as well as each individual player. The maestros job is keep them all in harmony so they can all play their best within the confines the maestro provides them.
Ive been in situations like your drunk director and usually it just caused a power vacuum followed by power struggles. The headstrong people contested high level decisions and without some sort of final arbiter the result was a mess. It never ended well.
I'm kind of suspicious about this story. It sounds either apocryphal or like a key piece is missing.
Corollary: since the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle ensure that most managers will in fact be shitty at what they do/manage, as a general rule, most managers can best serve their team and employer by routinely ditching work for the pub.
When I was dealing with a micromanager I just stopped letting him know what I was actually doing - because bothering to communicate with him only ever made my job harder than it needed to be.
As an example, we had two very large ant build.xml files in our deployment tooling (~8000 lines each) - with inlined groovy scripts (why have compile time errors when they can be runtime errors instead?).
One was for deployments to JBoss 6 and 7, the other for EAP 6.4.
There were ~10 lines of difference between them. Being sane, I unified them - and came in the next day to the angry demand that I restore the second copy.
Luckily, he's a fuckwit, and failed to notice that when I restored the second copy I didn't actually revert the reference change; the second copy sat unused in the codebase until he left the company.
>> When I was dealing with a micromanager I just stopped letting him know what I was actually doing - because bothering to communicate with him only ever made my job harder than it needed to be.
Man, this. I was dealing with the same shit and just did what you did.
I stopped to show what I was doing in a low level, because he is a super technical guy and would try to find issues in things that don't matter and/or were not high priority.
And then I started to show and discuss only what matters. My mental health had a 100% improvement.
Another way is to bombard micromanagers with questions all the time and note each decision they give (in an excel sheet) and ask more questions about each decision and hold them responsible for every little thing they answer. When a decision is reverted re-ask all the questions again. Soon they’ll be avoiding you:)
As someone that manages I will usually push it back on the asker with rhetorical questions ie: we’ll how do you want to tackle it. I’ll waste just as much of their time as they want. And when if the project slips it’s on them or if I have to engage to keep it on track it may or may not be reflected in their eval.
I engage just as much as I need to and nothing more. My more senior guys I try and get them to focus on deliverables and seeing the forest for the trees. For some that’s natural and others less so.
I prefer not to micromanage and be hands off. But at the end of the day I’m deliverable oriented and if it’s not getting done I will engage with the team members to get there or get them on track.
Most of my better guys know this and do enough and come prepared enough that they have basically full autonomy.
Others will end up in follow up meetings with me until what needs doing is done. In the few times they have communicated frustration I’ll usually, again, tell them if they want me to disengage then they need to come to the table with problems identified and solutions and know which ones really need my input and which don’t.
My job is to teach them ways to work and manage their workloads and projects (as well as the skillsets of the trade). They are wasting their own time and mine by taking that tactic.
So yes, if they are clearly trying to shirk ownership of their projects and tasks and pass the buck that is on them.
Project deliverables are just one component of my job. Fostering skillsets and career progression are others.
If someone wants to try and be clever by purposefully being obtuse and shirking responsibility, that is 100% on them. I grant them the freedom of manuervability and decision making to not do that. They are in charge of their own destiny in that way.
And to be clear I have only had maybe 1-2 people that really brought that to their finish line. Most times as soon as we have some type of talk and communication opens of what I’m trying to do and why, it works out.
I get that this place is very anti-management. But the reality is in most orgs you do need some level of hierarchy and leadership.
> Luckily, he's a fuckwit, and failed to notice that when I restored the second copy I didn't actually revert the reference change; the second copy sat unused in the codebase until he left the company.
No thank you. I absolutely detest micromanagement. It's borne from the idea that everyone is stupid and nobody knows how to do the tasks at hand, so they need to be handheld the entire way. People sometimes know just enough to be dangerous in this regard. I've had a long-term client for whom I've performed general tech support and creative work with Adobe software, for the last two decades or so. When it comes to something he doesn't know how to do at all? He lets me just "do it". However, he knows just enough Photoshop to make working with him sometimes annoying as all piss (although he has pulled back some from that as the years have gone by). It was like pulling teeth to convince him that "72dpi" was an obsolete concept in almost every single situation for web graphics. "Now make it 72dpi" is a phrase I hope I never, ever hear again.
Overseeing the final result? That's fine with me, especially if the working relationship is one-on-one versus part of an organization. It's the mindset of over-estimating one's own competency in the relevant area. We all do it to some degree, at some point in our life, but some are infested with it.
I still remember the day I got a micromanager when I was a programmer. Previously, I had a manager that was fairly hands off and just let me follow my own path with very little intervention. At that time I produced fairly good work.
The moment I got the micromanager my productivity dropped and I lost interest in the job. I hate having someone constantly check on what I am doing. I quit the job because I started hating it so much.
Now I have a boss who only ever communicates with me when I get something done and I come to them first. It's the best and I am very productive. So, I think one size definitely does not fit all.
It is a violation of trust, but it's more than that. It's also a violation of my mental space. I need space to think and not be herded like a lamb. I get that not everyone is like that but I am very independent so I don't work well in these environments.
However, to be fair, I don't work well in any corporate environment either so there's that.
Trust, but verify. Start off in a position of default trust, give people clear goals with a understood metric for success. If someone is not meeting expectations, then start more intensively managing for development with the explicit goal that you want to return to a place of trust.
Start with small wins to build trust that you can increasingly delegate larger and larger areas of responsibility.
The "but verify" here is the difficult bit. Calibrating the verification frequency and intensity is the art of balancing micromanaging vs disengagement.
The reality is you verify by being more hands on than you or your report want to in be long term - but a good manager explains what you're doing and that it is time limited intensity to build trust.
It's not difficult at all. If you find that someone needs constant micromanagement and doesn't get things done otherwise, it's probably best to part ways with that employee.
Assuming, of course, that you gave them a fair chance initially.
Most of the time I see micromanagement, its actually gatekeeping. Senior person/engineer is stopping lower level employees from learning the system by forcing them into these micro tasks. I really dont think it comes from lack of trust, it comes from fear of someone below you growing in scope
Maybe from the lower level employee not managing to get work done otherwise? I've on multiple occasions seen junior folks have negative contributions (causing more harm than good, by no fault of their own) by being left alone to "self-manage" when they're not yet ready for it.
I'm in academia. This is unquestionably bad advice. Micromanagers in the academia are able to virtue signal a lot, sweating and wringing their hands about all sorts of trivial stuff, bloviating over email and acting tense. However, in the medium run of about two decades, I've seen that thesis supervisors who take things easy achieve almost as much in terms of publications etc. while having the bonus of maintaining cordial relations which are important in the long run.
Contrarians view: micromanagment can be great — but like anything else, only when done right. A manager who trusts you, but has more scars than you and can help you avoid pitfalls, calls out when you’re making obvious (to them) mistakes, and who actually did your job 15 years ago and still has the chops to know what’s what. You could learn and grow from this person, who ideally would oversee multiple projects so they’re not on your back literally 24/7.
The author isn’t claiming that micromanaging is good - it’s not. But I wholeheartedly agree that it’s better than being absent. Good leaders create great things by caring about the small details and taking responsibility for them. It’s a fine line between that and micromanagement, but I guess one mark of a great leader is that they’re able to tread it
A type of traditional story about leaders is how they showed up anonymously to check what was going on. Literally going back thousands of years.
I was just reading a story about how a king pretended to be a wandering drunken lout, and when his guards stopped him, he bribed some of them with gold, but others whipped and beat him and put him in a cell. Then he revealed who he was, and the guards who didn't lock him up and beat him, were whipped and banished.
That's a visionary with control/esteem issues and an inability to communicate. Micromanaging is a lack of trust in yourself as a leader and your team's ability to deliver. Good/great leaders never micro manage because they trust the vision was communicated and received and seek feedback to confirm this. When I can't connect or trust my team I've failed at leadership.
Failing at team leadership doesn't mean you can't be a detailed product manager with a strong vision for a successful product. But you shouldn't be managing the team, those responsibilities need to go to someone focused on the team and not the vision
This has names like dual track, popular in larger organisations. Everyone reports to a technical lead (your first example) and a management one (the second). Having one person do both puts a lot of load on them, popular in smaller organisations.
Anyone notice a type of person who's always doing weird abstract fluffy meta analyses constantly? Their library is normally chalk full of self help books and they can go on at length about nothing. You can't really debate them because there's no concrete numbers and it's usually just a few experiences they've personally had.
Why is this pablum linked here? No evidence at all is presented. Most links point back to the same website, except for a link to Amazon and links to the author's own books.
Is this a discussion of micromanagement at the CEO level, or of general managers?
If the manager is the CEO (often referenced in article), then either the writer is high level, or in a small company. If this is about CEOs then it's really not quite a question of management style, but leadership style - at a pretty high level.
Micromanagement, depending on what it means, can be a valuable tool in fixing a broken system. e.g. you take over a team where everything's broken and shipping late. It can genuinely be very helpful for you to dive into the details of everybody's tasks and figure out where things are breaking down. You get a detailed look at the bottlenecks that senior people face (but may be reluctant to share for political/personal reasons); and you get a detailed look at the knowledge/skills gaps that hinder juniors.
It's not sustainable though. The idea is to dive in, figure out what to fix, then fix it into a system you can stop micromanaging. Otherwise you just won't have enough time to do the other important stuff.
The main point is disengaged managers can be a huge problem. I experienced a period of bullying when my manager got a lot more responsibility and disengaged. One of my peers started abusing his power, his people and me and there was no effective way to put a stop. Narcissists at the top are bad but on the side with deliberate ignorance from the too is hell. Forced me to learn more about boundary setting than I ever wanted. Eventually boss was fired due to lack of performance and shortly latter bully left to a place with fewer constraints.
Has anyone else reading this come up against the CEO who's both disengaged 6 days a week and micromanaging 1 day a week? Except you never know which day of the week that will be?
If the CEO was micromanaging all the time but cycling their attention through multiple different groups over time you'd get this appearance. I can imagine that being a reasonable time management policy from their side.
in the case I'm thinking of, a CEO was used to micromanaging 24/7 for years and needed to take some time off for sanity, health, family and travel, then decided to take months away to live in the islands; so eventually they just ignored all emails for a week or two and picked a day at random to unload a billion random micro-tasks.
Micromanagement only means either one of two things: a) You've not hired competent and responsible enough people to follow the high level directions and they need handholding. b) You've not hired confident and articulate enough people that they can trust others to be able to execute their vision.
Which usually boils down to hiring processes which are generally shallow and mediocre in our industry no matter how much pride we take in them.
The title is clickbait, and the point being made is just anecdotal, not based on evidence. But the point of the article is to not be either. To be honest, not sure the article actually says anything most people don't already know, I think the whole point was to write something clickbaity and say something sensible along side something that seems "bad"
As a manager I still struggle how to motivate people. There are very few people who just work because they would like to achieve something. The rest of people are using all kinds of excuses to just sit around and do nothing or go for easy wins which are flawed many way instead of putting in the effort to do things right.
Either you hired bad people or what you offer isn't all that abnormal in the marketplace (ie. you can be replaced fairly easily). Your bosses receive a larger proportion of the rewards of any particular initiative and they are considerably more motivated, that isn't a strange coincidence. Be prepared to move some of those rewards down the chain and watch the magic happen.
I hate micro management usually because they're more worried about slack time than building value is neither good for employee neither for shareholders
as employee I optimize "work rate" for value output
as shareholder I optimize spending for profit
In real life of software building value output is decoupled from "work rate" for other professions like factory where quantity and quality are metrics easily measured then value output can be coupled with work rate.
If the job is task oriented why bother having employees just pay per task but maintaining and evolving software is not task oriented even some structures consider software engineers as transpilers of (bad written) user stories :)
Because the transpiling part is gone in few years LLM will do it better than any average programmer
True, but as much as people talk about micromanangers, I’ve found that in reality they’re rare, meanwhile clueless disconnected “what the hell do they even do all day” managers are the norm
Maybe. But sometimes situations come up where inaction could cause problems that look like negligence, and action could be seen as micromanagement. An argument could be made that in these cases, negligence is worse than micromanagement.
But micromanagment is also not good. Just because boiling hot showers burn your skin off doesn't mean you have to shower ice cold all the time.
> action could be seen as micromanagement
Micromanagement is a certain way of doing action — the typical micromanager is someone who wants to control all the details of everything, all the time.
Granted sometimes it is beneficial for a manager to go through something with their subordinates in all the detail, so the subordinates gain some implicit understanding how you would approach the thing on a detailed level. But this should be a one off, not something you do all the time.
Also: every act could be misunderstood as something else, that is in itself the reality of working in a team.
The best teams I have ever worked in intuitively did something similar to Crew Resource Managment (CRM as used in aviation, expeditions, ...) — the point is, the manager is a resource themselves if they micromanage they spread themselves too thin for when a real problem occurs — if they are not present, they waste their resource and have a team that might be used to work without management, so when a problem arises the new focus of the manager might or might not help. A manager is part of a team and a manager is a resource of the team. If your team will work better if you are gone, or collapses if you are gone, you are doing it wrong.
It never ceases to baffle me how people in the tech industry are completely unaware of everything that preceded them. The meandering exploration described in this article could have been short circuited by an understanding of things are standard topics in organizational psychology. There’s a wiki article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style
Will writes great stuff, but I feel this one is just taking the side of one extreme which has just as many challenges as its polar opposite.
You want someone who can generate energy and not always chase it. You want someone with skin in the game and drives ownership in others. You don’t want someone who never takes a watch apart only to put it back in the same exact way, but experiments regularly with the parts.
Either extreme you will resent them. With a balance however, you will respect them.
This doesn't resonate at all with me. If anything, the most disengaged decision makers are often the ones to resort to micromanagement to cover their incompetence. They don't have the skill or context to make the actual impactful decisions so they start filling up the backlog with useless (but tractable and measurable) tasks. Micromanagement seems to function as an excuse to keep people looking busy, so you can avoid hashing out the real macro issues.
disengaging without delegating power to decide seems to be the problem, a self driven senior without much hassle from above and importantly who understands the goals and values and has access to relevant data to go by can strive to the best. now, the alignment on goals and values can be more tricky than anything because its hard to detect subtle or even not so subtle drifts in alignment.
Without reference the way I understand it micromanaging means a manager goes too deep into the topics they are managing.
A manager should give the broad strokers and directions and their subordinates should work out the details. If a manager manages in such a way they basically end up doing the complete mental work themselves, they are micromanaging.
This might be bad for two reasons: first the manager themselves might loose the big picture, second the subordinates loose interest in their job because there is no challenge, no creative freedom, no wiggle room and no trust in their work. If you want your subordinates to grow and improve you need to give them work with which they can learn and grow and you need to have a certain level of trust in their ability — all things a micromanaging manager will not need to do.
That being said it is not micromanagement if a manager goes into the topic deep once in order to explain it to their subordinates — if they do it constantly then it becomes micromanaging.
My best managers have encouraged and enabled me to be more than I was. No micromanager has ever come close to doing that for me and probably not anyone else either.
Rampant false choices – in the article and in this thread.
When things are getting done on time and on budget, let the team run free.
When they don't, step in; if in the course of inquiry there's a bunch of bad decision-making, dysfunctional team, shoddy results, or an otherwise drastic departure from best practices, then it's time to micro-manage.
In general, I agree with you. I see it as a ladder of autonomy. The more effective you are operating as an individual, the more you can make decisions for yourself.
But there is a lot more nuance than that in the day-to-day life of a business.
What if things are getting done in an unsustainable way? Maybe there's a toxic individual on the team who's delivering lots of value, but building up a key person dependency by not collaborating. Maybe someone's burning themselves out and needs slowing down. Or there's a big upcoming change where the team will need hands-on help to deal with it.
Very task-oriented + very hands-on = micromanager.
Very hands-off = a disengaged manager.
In my experience, the best managers can find a beneficial spot on those axes for each employee.
Give the technically competent people lacking confidence reassurance (be hands-on and people-oriented), micromanage a bit with people who aren’t doing their work effectively and not as a result of something that can be fixed with empathy or encouragement, and be disengaged when you’re working with competent self-motivated misanthropes.
IMO, saying one extreme is better than another tells you a bit about the author, nothing helpful about management in general.
Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate, i.e. be laissez-faire. If you’re forcing people to get your approval and you’re not around to give it, you’ve combined the most incompatible bits of micromanager and the disengaged manager.