I've had to deal with this from several angles. At one job, my manager was the master of the artificial crisis. Everything was a crisis of biblical proportions. If he wanted to talk to you, he'd post a laser-printed note on official stationary on your office door for all to see. Every issue was an opportunity to threaten you with firing. He never saw how this made it difficult to set priorities and judge what was a real problem and what was pure ego.

At another job, I had a manager who could only communicate by yelling. His attitude was that his direct reports were morons who were actively trying to undermine him by doing their jobs badly. Over time, motivation to do good work devolved into an effort to minimize getting yelled at. He only realized there was a problem when four people from a team of eleven quit in one month. In his mind, however, the problem wasn't how to treat his people, but how to cover up his behavior towards these disloyal insects who were trying to destroy his career.

At the next job, I had a manager everyone loved, but she refused to crack the whip for fear of offending. This made it difficult to gauge how well you were doing because she'd never tell you if there was a problem. I still regard her as a friend, but as a manager she needed a backbone.

Over the course of my career, I've seen a simple truth borne out: You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Case in point: last year, my manager asked me to write a simple tool to parse netstat, log the data, and loop. I made a mistake in the loop such that the guts of the code would only execute once. Silly mistake.

Manager #1 would have scheduled a formal code review and told me how I needed to pay more attention to my work and that there were a thousand coders out there who would love to take my job at half the salary. Then he would have told me to fix it.

Manager #2 would have hauled me to his office, berated my intelligence at the top of his lungs in front of my teammates, then made me stare at the code until I realized on my own what the issue was, then sent me away to fix it right !@#$ing now.

Manager #3 would have hemmed and hawed for 10 minutes before hinting that there might be a problem with the loop.

What my actual manager did was far better. He came into my cube, and asked me to bring up the code. He told me there was a problem with the loop and asked if I could see it. I stared for a minute, and realized what it was. When I did, he chuckled and said something like "I can see the lightbulb over your head. Simple fix, right?" Copy, paste, bug fixed. While he was there, he took a moment to show me a trick with pattern matching that made the code more efficient, smiled, and exited. It was a minor bug, easily fixed. He took the opportunity not to berate me for making a simple mistake, or to make a big deal over a minor issue, but rather to fix the problem and teach me something along the way.

Looking back, I pity manager #1, despise #2, love #3 as a person, but not as a manager, and #4 is in my book as the best manager I ever had.

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

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