His point was: be aware that to be a good manager you need to be effective in all three directions. From my experience, engineers stepping into the manager's ro

His point was: be aware that to be a good manager you need to be effective in all three directions. From my experience, engineers stepping into the manager's role will primarily want to make their team happy and productive. But if that becomes all they concern themselves with, they will tend to land their team in the soup! Call it what you will, I think steering managers away from this is sound advice. Interestingly, in my office's parlance, "manage down" is "make the boss happy (by making the team do what the boss wants)"...