I'll try to be brief.

Mid-90s. Mid-sized company. Very engineering driven. Founder President was unteachable, largely absent, prone to drive-by management (disruption). VP of Sales was a complete dink ("All I want is free, perfect, done yesterday. Is that too much to ask?"). "Visionary" VP of Engineering with goal of being Director or better at Microsoft, most of his time building a fiefdom, protected his power by encouraging infighting. Tech Support was very powerful and in open rebellion.

I got things done. Mostly by being a bulldozer. Not popular. Eventually promoted to Engineering Manager over a suite of products. I was very interested in empowerment, process, execution, shipping products customers wanted. Major influences were Luke Hohmann, Deming, Eli Goldratt, and so on.

I had a crazy notion: instead of engineering dominance, model team after quality circles (a la Ford Motors) and the US Constitution's balance of powers. So initially, Marketing role would own scope and price, Engineering would own cost and schedule, Quality Assurance would own releases. Eventually expanded to include Sales, Tech Support, Docs & I18N.

Through pure luck I got paired with a skilled Marketing person, who also had domain expertise, first time doing software. She wanted to learn "software" and I wanted to learn "marketing". So we taught each other, mostly by example and answering questions.

Empowering QA assurance was a lot more troubled. Wonderful person, we got along very well. But she struggled to balance my way of doing things with how her peers (and their teams) were doing SQA. In a nutshell, I wanted her to be in charge, whereas her peers were stuck in Kem Kaner's mentality of victimhood and self-disempowerment. For example, I insisted we have our own test lab, she balked when her peers insisted on a shared lab run by the test group. In other words, I wanted a product & team focused org chart, and the rest of the company wanted to keep functional silos.

[Per the E-Myth's advice, I served the role until I could hire someone. So I did my own thing. Think "The Joel Test" and Code Complete, back when that stuff was controversial. The lightest weight ticket tracking system. Automated builds and testing. Front loading as much work as possible (eg always have a shippable product instead of Big Bang integration at the end). I say to show I took SQA very seriously and walked the talk.]

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So the way that it played out, my Marketing Manager and I were on the same page. Meaning she could speak on behalf of both of us. She could make decisions without my input. She was savvy enough to know when I'd want to be in the loop. And vice-versa. In turn I went to trade shows, met with dealers and customers, and interacted with Marketing and Sales (in her absence) as her ambassador. We prepped each other, took notes, then debriefed.

I didn't have that relationship with my QA Manager, much as we tried. And we tried. Despite a great personal relationship, work wise we just ground gears.

When I switched to another team, to bring another troubled product back from the dead, my team was eager for my replacement, who was "nice" and very well liked.

New guy promptly disempowered everyone, threw away all of the team's processes (eg speed triage), became the sole gatekeeper (aka control freak), morale tanked, releases stalled.

About 3 months later my former SQA manager took me to lunch, told me she finally grokked what I was trying to do, and that she'd rather work her ass off shipping product with an asshole like me than be a drone working for a nice guy.

Bittersweet.

As for the people who worked for me, my job was to protect them, do whatever it takes to help them succeed. Most did great. Some excelled. Others were total time sinks, causing endless heart ache. Like I said previously, you'd have to ask them if any of them trusted me.

The managers I trusted treated me the same way. Just tell me what needs to be done, remove any blockers, help me stay on track. That's happened only 2 or 3 times. Everyone else needed constant upward managing, or worse.