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Comment by celim307 | Hacker News Reader

This 100%. The best manager I had I likened to a good platoon commander. Understood importance of morale, respected and trusted us, was transparent when he asked us to do something hard, and would never ask us to do something he wouldn't do himself. Many a times he went to bat for us against upper management and pushed back on death marches, and fought for resources like dinner and extra time off for us after a late night deploy.

He understood we were a team, and we weren't stupid. Your employees are working in a technical, educated field. They can smell bullshit a mile away. If you try to take advantage of them they will shit your bed and leave

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In the military junior leader's get taught Adair's theory of Action Centred Leadership: that Task, Team and Individual are separate things to deal with and yet mutually dependent.

Which to make the primary focus can and should switch up. If you are firefighting on a submarine all that matters is the task - the team are all dead if you fail. The individual does not matter there and then.

Back in the land of computers we have less extreme but analogous problems. There are times when you do need to focus on the task, however if you're a good leader you've used the times when that isn't the case to focus on building a Team and developing each Individual so that they can, and are willing, to dig out to achieve the Task.

My favorite managers were always similar to the one you describe. But I also noticed these managers didn't get promoted as the more "pointy haired boss" types.

That's the difference between "managing up" and "managing down". The PHBs and those who get promoted rapidly spend their time kissing ass...

I would disagree. My boss has the record of fastest promotion of junior developer to executive and he fights for us against other department/team heads and upper management on a regular basis. Its because he makes sure to deliver such value to the company that the management can't ignore him and his team

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