First published in 1954, Peter Drucker’s book “The Practice of Management” is a great source of insights.

In chapter 12 “Managers Must Manage” he wrote: “The manager should be directed and controlled by the objectives of performance rather than by his boss,” and “If the manager is, however, controlled by the objective requirements of his own job and measured by his results, there is no need for the kind of supervision that consists of telling a subordinate what to do and then making sure that he does it.”

He further wrote: “If a one-word definition of this downward relationship [between a manager and a subordinate] be needed, ‘assistance’ would come closest,” and “The vision of a manager should always be upward–toward the enterprise as a whole. But his responsibility runs downward as well–to the managers on his team. That his relationship toward them be clearly understood as a duty rather than as supervision is perhaps the central requirement for organizing the manager’s job effectively.”

How true at startups, too.