All of the points in your article are very true. However, you fail to note that even when a manager who attempts to both protect and lead their team they are actively discouraged from this practice. I spent three years attempting management; my primary goal was to get obstacles out of the way of the people I was managing. The second was to keep the crap that rolled down from the next level from hitting any of them, Third was to make the customer happy, and only a distant fourth was any thought of advancing myself. The result was tremendous pressure to force additional tasks on my department, arbitrary changes to both my responsibilities and reductions in my authority and political maneuvering to move some of my direct reports to other managers.

The long term impact was that I gave up on being a manager moving back to being an engineer rather than trying to compete in the shark tank that is the american management style in the twenty-first century.