You make some good points, but it's important to keep in mind that as a manager, when you are task allocating and reprioritizing employee work, you need to keep

You make some good points, but it's important to keep in mind that as a manager, when you are task allocating and reprioritizing employee work, you need to keep your team's individual challenges in mind. The same way that a developer might need to manage server resources, or consider the impact of a new feature on future maintenance, a manager needs to solve the problem, except the resources available to solve the problem happen to be human. If a teammate has a sick parent, everyone on the team may choose to empathize. For the manager, every challenge that comes up, the parent sickness is one of your constraints to be dealt with. You need to compartmentalize sufficiently that you can think about this without stopping your work to solve the problem, but not so much that you treat the worker as a non-human resource. It can get a little tough.