My favorite manager was a new store manager at a box store I worked at while finishing my degree. I generally haven't had great tech managers. This store manage

My favorite manager was a new store manager at a box store I worked at while finishing my degree. I generally haven't had great tech managers. This store manager was great because he was an outstanding team player who knew the rules of the game and who identified and trusted the strengths of his employees. He didn't micromanage. Sometimes he let you fail. As a team player, he was out on the floor during the busiest retail times. The best floor associates in retail work well with each other as team players and pass tasks around, but you have to know which other members are competent and reliable. This guy was 100% both and let you know he was another team member and available for anything; if you were running to get a forklift, you could send him to an aisle where you saw a customer looking lost, have him haul goods to checkout, grab him to help load a car. He trusted his employees and identified and rewarded excellence. I was a customer service queen at my store, and he saw that and told me, then gave me an award for it, and a raise based on it. One time when we had an unusual customer mess-up and a cashier called me to fix it (because she knew I would do everything to make it work), I pulled a team together and got it done, but he gave just me, not my team, an award for it, when I really thought it was team work. Later I realized he was right, that the task had first required a team builder (and, yeah, I got my teammates awards, also). The few times I called him as a manager to resolve a customer issue, he just stepped in and took over, never requiring me to explain my side (which didn't matter, the customer wanted something I couldn't provide, so I got them a manager), because he not only let you do your job, he understood what his was. He paid attention. He knew who was contributing and how much. Mostly though, if you were good at your job, he knew it, he acknowledged it through opportunities, awards, and raises in addition to telling you, and he let you do it, while he did his job. Oh, eventually some startup snagged him.