Great leaders don't just vacuum up chaos. They also gracefully stay out of the way when they realize they've missed a big decision. If they were inappropriate

Great leaders don't just vacuum up chaos. They also gracefully stay out of the way when they realize they've missed a big decision. If they were inappropriately excluded from the decision or kept in the dark about it, maybe some individual or individuals need to be held responsible, but in the meantime, if they can see that the team has taken a direction and is comfortable with it, they don't insist on revisiting it. This is a pitfall for engineering managers that get promoted and end up spending a lot of their time unavailable to their teams because of travel, executive-level meetings, and dog and pony shows for customers. They have to get used to major technical decisions flying under their radar. It's also a hallmark of one type of toxic boss: the kind that wants everyone to think that he is the only smart person in engineering. On one hand, his big brain cannot be wasted on boring stuff. On the other hand, he always has to intervene in big meaty decisions in case his moronic minions are messing something up. When this kind of boss realize that a decision he delegated as not worth his time was actually strategically important, he will stop everything, halt work, and reopen the discussion. The resulting chaos is a collective punishment for his organization, and it gives him a chance to find some reason to choose a different solution. Then he can declare that he has averted disaster and prove (once again) that he is indispensable.