Yep, a manager can focus on climbing the ladder once they offload their responsibilities onto the people beneath them. If their boss can't detect this abdication, or worse, doesn't want to see it, then the manager's opportunism will naturally be rewarded, and will encourage the opportunism of other managers in the org.

> It's those worst ones who end up in upper management precisely for those reasons.

And thus the rain of crap continues.

I think in general most companies, especially large ones, reward managers who push crap onto their directs. Anecdotally, the best manager I've ever had viciously protected us from executive nonsense, and he's also the most successful by far (and he was before I started). I don't think that's the norm, though.

Management isn't math. It's not a science, and there are successful managers who push as much crap onto their directs as they can, and there are successful managers who take as much of that crap as they can to prevent it from reaching their teams.