I've been at a place with PM-driven standups. It was fine because: 1) If the team was like, "our team on this project is tiny and we all sit next to each other

I've been at a place with PM-driven standups. It was fine because: 1) If the team was like, "our team on this project is tiny and we all sit next to each other, so we don't need them", or "we'd rather do Slack messages for standups, on this particular project", he'd let that happen without a fuss, aside from ensuring that any communication he needed from it was still, somehow, happening. So it was still team-driven and very flexible. 2) He was very disciplined about not turning them into project status meetings, or making standup messages take the form of status updates. [EDIT] I should add that the benefit to him was that he got to hear a lot of unvarnished truth about what was going on, which micromanagers don't get, because he was at all times, in the face he presented to the team, on "our side". That put him in a much better position for polishing up the information he had for consumption outside the team(s), which benefited us, too. He might have questions or something, and it's not that he never pushed back on anything, but he let standups be standups, and kept that stuff separate and as non-confrontational as possible.