There are a lot of thankless things you get to deal with when you become a manager, and generally they are things you don’t find out until after you take the job.

Here’s one of them, and a question that every manager has to come to terms with: How much managing does a manager actually do?

In my view, anyone who is a manager is probably always managing at some level, but I am talking more about the outward signs of management and how aggressively you control your employees, or how much leeway your staff gets to work and make decisions on their own.

Yes, how you approach this has a lot to do with your personal outlook on life, but it also speaks to a lot of other factors—experience, confidence, the industry you work in and/or the type of work you do, and sometimes, company culture. For example, I once worked for a large media company that believed in aggressively managing everything and was top-down driven.

This worked pretty well for them most of the time, but it meant that managers were micromanaged from above so they in turn micromanaged those below them. That doesn’t make for the happiest working environment, I quickly found.

This leads to the question that I don’t think enough managers ask themselves: Should I overmanage or undermanage, and why do I do it that way?

For example, New York Yankees Manager Joe Girardi has been raked over the coals for his tendency to overmanage in the recent American League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Slate had a story saying that not only does Girardi overmanage, but that his tendency to do so shows that he’s “too smart for his own good.”

I’ve known lots of managers and executives who, like Joe Girardi, seemed to be more focused on showing off how smart they were rather than doing the right thing by their staff, and that’s certainly an occupational hazard when it comes to managing.

But here’s the thing—managing is also about leading, about coaching, about nurturing, about helping your people to do their absolute best. Some do it with a lot of drama, but in my book, the best managers do it quietly, without a lot of fanfare, and without feeling the need to draw attention to themselves.

I’ve written about a lot of good managers here, from the quietly reserved Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Joe Torre, to hands-off Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett (the world’s greatest manager I called him), to former Southwest Airlines CEO  Herb Kelleher.

Each has their own unique style, but each is also focused on one critical thing: helping their people so that they have the freedom and the opportunity to do their very best. In short, it’s not about overmanaging or undermanaging, but rather, about supportive managing that lets people reach their full potential for the good of the entire organization.

If that’s what you’re doing as a manager, well, congratulations, because you’re doing it right. If that’s NOT how you’re doing it, well, you had better step back and take a good look at yourself and figure out how you can be more like Warren Buffett than Joe Girardi.

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