Operational awareness <> domain knowledge <> professional expertise <> leadership skills. Operational awareness can be low if you have a lot of trust in your t

Operational awareness <> domain knowledge <> professional expertise <> leadership skills. Operational awareness can be low if you have a lot of trust in your team. You only need some control checkpoints, at which you can interfere if something goes wrong, but the team can deliver autonomously the rest of the time. In fact, very high OA can be a sign of micromanagement or of a too high cognitive load on the manager. Domain knowledge can be low if you have domain experts in the team and/or good documentation, so you could delegate sharing and accumulating the knowledge. Professional expertise can be low if you have senior people in the team and you gained authority by other means, so team can trust your decisions. The only skill that a good manager must demonstrate is the leadership, which I define as a collection skills to organize collaboration, build trust, optimize processes, enable, motivate and grow people. That skill is indeed often missing, especially in startups, where promotions to management positions often happen based on ownership, not on leadership.