Why, might you ask, is this a protest? Surely leadership is a good thing? Yes it is. My protest is about a view of leadership that is promoted in certain media channels and apparently believed by many people. I'll talk about what I think is good and bad leadership on this page.

I'm writing this in June 2017, just after the UK has been through a General Election in which a number of parties competed to get their candidates elected. Normally, the party with the most elected candidates gets to run the country for a few years.

During the run up to the election, some use personal insults to undermine their opponents, some focus on the issues about which they disagree. Party X (we'll call them) kept repeating that the leader of Party Y lacked leadership skills, and was unelectable, and would personally ruin the country if elected. Party Y stressed that the policies of Party X were damaging the country, causing strife and division. The leader of Party X claimed to be "Strong and Stable" taking a very dictatorial style over her own party and suggesting that her way was the best way to deal with allies and enemies alike. She avoided talking with her team and with the public. The leader of Party Y refused to make personal attacks on his opponents and instead focussed on positive policy initiatives to counter the bad effects that some of his opponents policies had caused.

There was a massive swing of support from Party X to Party Y.

My views come from 50 years of work experience, preceded by some passive observation of my father working as a manager of a small group of draughtsmen and as a youth leader.

Bad leadership is based on aggression, bullying, dictatorship and fear. That sounds blindingly obvious, but television programmes like The Apprentice, Hell's Kitchen and Dragons' Den promote this through the alpha-male sterotypes (perpetrated by men and women) who love to separate the "winners" from the "losers". These programmes are in a pseudo-business area. The message is repeated and amplified in programmes such as The Weakest Link and the X-Factor. We are teaching people that the way to succeed is to be bossy, mean and ruthless. What a terrible thing to do! Most of us have had managers like this. They are destructive and they should be given menial, low-paid, hard jobs with no control over their destiny, until they learn.

But, enough complaining; let's talk about good leadership. There is plenty of writing about this. Authors who immediately come to mind are DeMarco and Lister, Brooks, Gawande, Drucker and Mintzberg.

Too many managers are like Dumas. They don't read and they don't believe anything that challenges their own prejuduces. [Oops I'm complaining again, already!]

Good managers are collaborative, respectful, honest, keen to do a good job, want to help all their team members to do well and to feel good about it. They communicate well. Good managers are assertive in setting good objectives, but they consult with their teams to build and define these objectives. They help their team members to learn and grow. When someone is struggling, good managers don't just fire them, they spend time with them to help them do better.

The bad managers I have known will recognise themselves in aspects of Dumas's behaviour. I hope they are shamed, but I won't name them.

What I would like to do is to name and praise some of the best managers I have worked for. The organisations where I worked with them are in parentheses.

Steve Saxby (King's College Hospital Computer Centre), Dr Watkins (King's College Hospital Diabetic Clinic), John Howard (The British Library), Peter Breeze (Cincom), Candace Sestric (Ingres and Gupta), Nick Dunlavey (Halifax and Leeds Building Society, Network Rail, Worldpay), David Walker (Energis, Network Rail, Akbank, InsureTheBox, Yapı Kredi), Tony Sutton (Network Rail), Adrian Daniel (T-Mobile), Oliver Courtney (T-Mobile, Akbank), Seniz Gayde (Akbank and Yapı Kredi), Paul Beckford (Network Rail, InsureTheBox), Charlotte Halkett (InsureTheBox), Karl Funk (Worldpay).

All of these people were passionate about doing a good job. All of them were intelligent and honest. All of them listened to their team members. These people knew that their teams wanted to do good work. They worked hard themselves to get the obstacles out of the way so that the team could storm through the work.

There is a gender bias in this list but that is simply because I have had more male managers than female. That is a problem in the way people are given management roles, but I see no gender bias in ability of managers. The proportion of good managers I have had is the same for men and women as far as I can tell.

I worked with some of these people before Peopleware was written, and a couple of them even before The Mythical Man-Month was written. It became obvious to me who was helping me to get the job done and who wasn't. Demarco, Lister and Brooks helped me to understand what was going on.

There are some times when a manager needs to give orders and be obeyed. These are short-lived, extreme situations. An example would be when someone falls overboard from a sailing boat. Somebody shouts "Man Overboard" and the Skipper then takes absolute charge: "Helen, Throw Jo a life-belt; Sam, Point at Jo, don't take you eyes off her: Ann and Denzl, furl the jib" and so on. This is a standard emergency procedure and it must be followed; discussion is not appropriate. Once the person is back on board, wrapped in a blanket and clearly OK, the skipper can revert to a more collaborative approach again.

A less extreme example might be an orchestra conductor. During the performance the orchestra must follow the conductor, although, during a solo, the conductor will leave the soloist to manage that section of the music. But what a conductor spends most of her time doing is coaching the orchestra in the way of playing the piece and getting them all to work together in harmony (literally). Some famous conductors have been notoriously dictatorial, and brilliant as they may have been, I would suggest that this is not the best way.