Laissez-Faire Management Is Best?

According to this post by Seth Roberts, maybe so:

I asked a friend of mine why she was a good boss. “I was nurturing,” she said. A big study of managers reached essentially the same conclusion: Good managers don’t try to make employees fit a pre-established box, the manager’s preconception about how to do the job. A good manager tries to encourage, to bring out, whatever strengths the employee already has. This wasn’t a philosophy or value judgment, it was what the data showed. The “good” managers were defined as the more productive ones — something like that. (My post about this.)

The reason for the study, as Veblen might say, was the need for it. Most managers failed to act this way.

I've served in both official and unofficial leadership capacities in work and in some of the volunteer organizations I've been a part of. Things have almost always gone better when I've tried to work with people's strengths instead of molding them or forcing them to behave in a certain way and to let them be a big part of shaping the direction or strategy we were heading. Generally speaking, the more I saw myself as an equipper and vision setter, rather than as a director or controller, the more smoothly and efficiently our work went, the more we got done, and the happier everyone was with the process and outcomes.

Roberts continues, explaining that this tendency to focus on what's wrong is not only found in management, but also in science:

I posted a few days ago about a similar tendency among scientists: When faced with new data, a tendency to focus on what’s wrong with it and ignore what’s right about it. To pay far more attention to limitations than strengths.

Sounds like terminally-ill Randy Pausch's advice is true for many areas of life. It's better to be a Tigger than an Eeyore.