I work for a government research lab. Our business model is that we don't receive government-budgeted money, we actually sell our services to other parts of the government. So in effect we have a bunch of researchers and engineers who theoretically report to "management", but actually report to a local program manager, who reports to an external sponsor.
We had an official manager, a "branch head", who was worse than incompetent. He couldn't find his butt with both hands, but he also thought he was God's gift to management, and would forcefully and emphatically make bad decision after bad decision.
Eventually, he had screwed up the group's major program so thoroughly it looked like a sure fire failure, and he found another job, and didn't bother to tell anyone; he just stopped showing up for work one day.
The level of management above him had bigger problems to deal with than replacing him, so they made sure we had a competent secretary and left us alone for two and a half years. It turned out to be arguably the most productive period of my professional life. My buddy and I took over business development. THe team turned the big project around and made it a rousing success, and grew the funding from it by two orders of magnitude.
The point being: there's bad management, that acts randomly or not at all; and then there's really bad management, which takes up your days with constantly changing orders, fixing relationships with customers or sponsors that they've screwed up, and levying time-taxes in the form of training, reports, and morale boosting exercises.
If given a choice between bad management and really bad management, pick bad management.
Fifteen years later, my buddy runs the place and I'm the senior scientist.
I've really found this to be true; I've had just a small handful of great managers and most of them worked more like "team secretaries", with just two who would also deploy political capital in an expert way to keep things running well. Those were the best. Most of the good managers topped out at acting as personal assistants to the team, helping (not dictating) to keep things organized.
The just ok managers barely did anything, which was still not bad. They didn't make things worse but didn't make them much better either.
The worst would dictate, randomize and foist cleanup of their own making onto you. Those folks I often wished would just stop showing up to work even if they kept collecting a paycheck; things would have run smoother if they did.
> I've had just a small handful of great managers and most of them worked more like "team secretaries"
What if you have really passive team members? So somebody need to digest the big project into smaller pieces and assign people to them, you can't just throw the project and expect it to go smoothly. If you don't it will take extra 2-3 months to start things up. I suspect in your case the team is motivated and experienced and/or there are some engineering leads in the team who can do that instead.
We had an official manager, a "branch head", who was worse than incompetent. He couldn't find his butt with both hands, but he also thought he was God's gift to management, and would forcefully and emphatically make bad decision after bad decision.
Eventually, he had screwed up the group's major program so thoroughly it looked like a sure fire failure, and he found another job, and didn't bother to tell anyone; he just stopped showing up for work one day.
The level of management above him had bigger problems to deal with than replacing him, so they made sure we had a competent secretary and left us alone for two and a half years. It turned out to be arguably the most productive period of my professional life. My buddy and I took over business development. THe team turned the big project around and made it a rousing success, and grew the funding from it by two orders of magnitude.
The point being: there's bad management, that acts randomly or not at all; and then there's really bad management, which takes up your days with constantly changing orders, fixing relationships with customers or sponsors that they've screwed up, and levying time-taxes in the form of training, reports, and morale boosting exercises.
If given a choice between bad management and really bad management, pick bad management.
Fifteen years later, my buddy runs the place and I'm the senior scientist.