That's certainly true, and I apologize if I made it seem like I was encouraging type #1, in particular the "tends to micro-manage, frequently overrules consensu

That's certainly true, and I apologize if I made it seem like I was encouraging type #1, in particular the "tends to micro-manage, frequently overrules consensus with his own views." Micro-managing your reports is a sign that you're either working on the wrong problems, your organization has span of control issues (i.e. you only have three directs), or you've got too many extremely junior/new-college hires who aren't yet capable of independent work. And if you need to overrule consensus, you failed to be clear about what success would be measured against when you delegated. These are pretty basic issues, but shops can certainly get them wrong. I guess, if nothing else, I'd argue that managers need training. I'm of course biased, but the training they provided at MSFT, particularly at the manager-of-managers level, was just fantastic. I only wish it had been available to people lower on the hierarchy so they could have learned about these mistakes as their scope grew and not after it had!