the first sign of all the bad managers i've met - s/he delegates. S/he aren't competent enough to perform his/her duties (including and especially - taking decisions) and covers it as delegation.
Status reports are second worst - they mean that the manager doesn't have enough competence/skills/interest in being continuously aware of what happens in his team. Frequently the team responds in kind :)
Not every technical manager can be an expert in all the fields he/she supervises. That's why they hire other, individual contributors who are more focused on the details or tactical implementation without having to worry about the strategic.
until the manager is specifically being paid to do delegation, the manager should do his work instead of delegating it.
>Not every technical manager can be an expert in all the fields he/she supervises.
that pretty much equivalent definition of a bad manager.
>the details or tactical implementation without having to worry about the strategic.
and the strategy BS they bring in.
A competent manager might argue that it would be a better use of his time to delegate to his resources to identify what in their distributed journal of bug closures, emails, wiki updates and notes represents signal and what represents noise.
I don't know any competent manager who isn't busy enough:
* managing multiple projects
* fighting fires with customers
* chasing down issues, managing expectations
* attending meetings he/she doesn't want to attend so that his/her resources can better spend their time on delivery tasks
* triaging his/her own inbox (when you're a manager, everyone who sends you an email expects you to treat it like it's an emergency)
* handholding the resources that for one reason or another he/she can't fire
* writing his/her own status reports to deliver to paying customers
Ideally, collecting status is great work for an administrative resource like a project coordinator, but that's usually a luxury item that managers can only dream of.