I asked this in another channel before, but I wanted to ask this group as well. For me, it was my first manager, who taught me a very important lesson. She emphasized collaboration and work relationships much more than immediate output. She believed we couldn't achieve our goals without having good collaboration and culture among teams and team members. At that time, I worked at a finance company that had more engineers than finance people. Once, a project manager and I exchanged some unfriendly emails and CC'd our managers. Surprisingly, both managers told their reports (the project manager and me) separately that this was not how they wanted us to work, and requested that we hash it out.
My previous CEO is one of the best managers Iβve ever seen. First off I donβt know when he sleeps, heβs a dad of 4, new baby, running a startup and also a VC. He treated everyone on the team with kindness, genuinely caring about them as individuals, but he also knew when and how to push for excellence. He definitely had that tough and tender, no bull** approach. I miss working with him.
I want to work with a manager like him too!
I caused a stupid bug in our e-commerce product that led to a financial loss. My manager asked me to write a postmortem to learn from it and gave me some feedback. I knew upper management wasn't happy and had warned my manager. But he didn't say anything to me. When I asked him about it, he told me that since I already felt bad and knew how to prevent it in the future, there was no point in talking about it further. He's different from managers who only care about their own promotions.