Software development topics I've changed my mind on

If the person at the top can come down for a coffee with people who endured some bad management, and ask honest, non-loaded three questions, it can be measured qualitatively but with very high accuracy.

The three questions are:

    - What should we start doing?
    - What should we continue doing?
    - What should we stop doing?

This is an immensely powerful tool. Thanks to the awesome person who introduced me this.

Addenda: "Theory X" is something really bad. If you're working with a team which responds positively to Theory X, you have much bigger problems IMHO.

sounds just like the advice in the book "The Coaching Habit" which i thought was great

What insight does an IC have on what the person at the top even does? I can basically only comment on my interactions with direct management and I otherwise don't know how they spend their day.

That's not important - you're not discussing how to do their job, but what your own view is of your part of the work and those around you. The leader can then synthesize all these views and see if there are any surprises.

(another case similar to "you should listen to a customer when they say there's something wrong with the design of your product, but you should absolutely not pay attention to what they think the solution should be")

By having a 5 min group meeting where only the manager speaks. Manager is not allowed to talk about what direction the team should go and what the team should do. Anything else will give instant insights on whats going on at the isolated top.

Good leadership doesn't have the ideas. It leverages the collective to extract the best ideas and facilitates them.

That's true. The tool I gave above does exactly that. You distribute these three questions to your team, collect answers anonymously, then pile them up and look at what you see to read your team.

Then you can see what's going well and what's not, and plan next steps accordingly.