[itronitron]

Best style I have seen is 'people' manager that has the soft skills and interest to do the organizational performance stuff, and separate 'project' managers that manage the work and teams. This allows technical staff to easily move around as needed to different projects without it being a big deal. That also encourages the project managers to be good so that people will be interested in working on their projects.

[ionforce]

Most organizations don't have the foresight or bandwidth to organize things this way. It's always just one person do everything. I hate it.

[wool_gather]

Same. My current org actually got rid of our project managers over the last year and a half. So now my direct (engineering) manager is basically an overburdened full-time PjM, with spillover landing in my lap constantly (I'm an engineer and a team lead). It's extremely frustrating. And I can't even remember the last time he and I had a one-on-one.