Every time I've seen this sentiment and asked for something concrete on what made them good managers I get answered with platitudes or "nice-isms."
At this point in my career, the emperor has no clothes. There are no good managers, only good peers.
To me, the best managers I've had have done a good job balancing what their team was able to do against what the org needed/wanted them to do. Sometimes that was pushing back against the org and doing the hard work of saying things weren't going to happen, and sometimes it was being clear and sympathetic about conveying difficult realities down to the team about what was needed. I've had managers convey things to me that ultimately led to me quitting and finding other work, but I hold them in high esteem because they clearly communicated what needed to be done to meet demands and I decided it wasn't for me and didn't hold it against me.
There are good managers. They're just also good peers who happen to be your manager and fulfill the role of a manager as best they can. Sometimes the system of the company rejects that, but that's also a sign you're maybe working somewhere that wants you to have no peers and no support, and maybe that should prompt some changes for you as an employee.
My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager.
With bad managers, I carefully select what I share, often downright lie to them just to limit my stress level. I know a bad manager will throw me under the bus to save their ass, so I behave accordingly. I essentially manipulate them as much as I can: it's politics.
With a good manager, I share all I can, reach out when I need their help, and have their back when stuff goes south. It's team work.
That's a great way to put it. I've had two managers I think of as good and this is definitely something they had in common.
As an IC, a good manager will shield you from the chaos, infighting, changing priorities and ever shifting timelines. They will ensure that you are aware of what’s going on, and have enough clarity to be able to proceed.
A bad manager will most likely try to help by exposing you to all of the above, and cause you get caught up in all of the confusion that comes with it.
Just one example.
Quite a sad state of affairs.
I’ve seen managers stand up for their teams and defend against those guys successfully.
It shows how managers often just base their opinions on vibes given in meetings and don't care to understand anything they're managing.
The problem I have with less hierarchical organizations is that when you have only one layer of middle management, middle management gets squeezed between executives and individual contributors and tends to burn out. Even worse with zero layers, where individual contributors are expected to self-manage. Communication overhead ends up eating most of the productive hours of the day.
The empire-building problem with more hierarchical organizations is already well explored in this thread, but communications are also a problem. With too many layers, organizational alignment suffers, and silos develop even if the managers involved are uniformly well-intentioned.
There's an underappreciated upside to silos, however, which is that functional parts of the organization can end up insulated from dysfunctional ones. In flat organizations, dysfunction anywhere is dysfunction everywhere.
I can imagine within gov contracting this same group of people are violently annoying instead, but I have never had the experience of that world.
* Coordinates actions between team members
* Actively removes things blocking their team
* Navigates the organizational bureaucracy for their team
* Technical enough to pitch in when things are running smoothly
* Personal enough relationship that you can be honest
Whose fault is the failure then?
When a manager doesn't understand the scope of the work or has not made the case for adequate resources, to the project's jeopardy or their team's, it's typically referred to as mismanagement.
If this culture of under-serving itself for no apparent benefit except to appear too busy to be assigned more work extends elsewhere, it could be an organizational issue. If it's a SNAFU principle situation, management needs to be brought in alignment and trust with leadership, or leadership needs to be replaced. I've encountered both at the same place at the same time, and thankfully the board agreed.
As for something concrete, I can think of managers fighting for my bonus allocations, fighting for comp days after a crunchy deadline, things like that. Estimation was earnest and not pushy. Problems were handled in a solution oriented way, not a blame game. You could argue that's just maintaining combat readiness but I'll take it.
The measure of a good manager is their willingness to do something difficult for them for the benefit of their team or reports, such as saying no to various pressures from upper management, not jumping into latest trends pushed down to the teams, not saying yes to every new pivot, etc. Most people in a work situation would not do that, which is why there are no good managers.