When you’re thinking about your management style, there are two questions: how much to involve people in the planning (depends on their knowledge and brainpower) and how much freedom to give them during the execution of the job (which depends on how much you can trust them).
So you probably have people who are clever but you can’t entirely trust (“cats”) and people who don’t know very much but who you can totally trust to carry out your instructions (“dogs”).
Of course there are also people who are clever and trustworthy – we don’t need to think much about them, they are just great – and people who are neither, who are a whole different problem!
So with the “cats” the key is to involve them in the planning, maybe share it our even delegate it to them, but keep a close rein on the implementation: they have to either check before they do anything or at least report straight after they have done things.
With the “dogs” (my preferred animal in life, but maybe not at work, I’m not sure) you’ll have to do most of the planning (although, maybe involve them so they can learn, depending now whether the problem is lack of knowledge or lack of brainpower: one can be fixed and one can’t) and then in the implementation you can give them a freer rein, perhaps reporting weekly or just monthly, or when parts of the job have been done.
