Meetings as a solution to the need for manager and staff member to get together are useful under some circumstances, but they are not a substitute for working alongside a staff person to some extent. This lament or one like it is undoubtedly true enough. I work more purposefully at the tasks specifically assigned to me, and choose to let the staff operate on their own, without much direct input from me. Choosing to manage in the extremely popular hands off mode is the perfect arrangement for those employees over on the excellent edge of the spectrum. At the other end, where the truly bad employees congregate, an uninvolved approach will produce either workplace disasters or, more commonly, the deadwood employee who has broken so many dishes that she is no longer allowed to do dishes, or anything else.
Average employees require an average amount of direct involvement.
You do not need to hang over the bindery clerk every second of the day to prevent him from surfing the web or composing chat room ripostes. You need to spend enough time with him to understand how much work might reasonably be expected from a person in that job, how the particular employee might work better, what kinds of approaches and projects work best with him, and come by often enough to make the idea of blatant goofing off at least an occasion for potential embarrassment, if not outright fear. This analysis may be criticized as not saying enough about positive reinforcement as a good motivational carrot. People really do respond to the encouraging word and the job well done expressed in one form or another. But this cannot work effectively unless that encouragement comes somewhere near the point of performance.