In lectures on management focusing on people (not necessarily strictly HR, like what traits you want in certain roles) you often hear that one of the worst thin

In lectures on management focusing on people (not necessarily strictly HR, like what traits you want in certain roles) you often hear that one of the worst thing you can do is to promote the best salesman to head of sales, best programmer to head of engineering, etc.. Their qualities make them good at production, not management. There is a lot of truth to it. The problem you describe is what some people call "excel managers" - managers who only juggle numbers and have no idea how processes work. I have seen some management course material and quite a lot of those focus entirely on production line management. There is nothing wrong with that. Problems arise when managers adept at controlling production line processes are given control over projects.