While I was completing my MBA a couple years ago, I spent a good bit of time thinking and writing about management philosophies and theories. Since then, I kind of fell back into the mindset that everyone should just build their careers with a good company. Fortunately, things in my career have changed in recent months to get me again researching and thinking on ways to manage people and businesses.
There is the big problem where "managing" takes the manager down a path of having to motivate workers or, even worse, demonstrating their power over their workers. I am sure there are places where this style/practice works very well, but when it comes to highly skilled consultants, developers, or IT personnel I don't think those approaches get too far. That is, unless you want your highly skilled people to become lathargic and non-responsive.
Take a look at these couple of blog posts/articles I ran across the last few days. These really get to some of the ideas I think should be used when trying to "manage" skilled information technology workers. Once you are done with those, I will have one more for you that really fits with my philospohy, which is: The only task a manager of highly skilled IT people should focus on is to facilitate the efforts of their employees. Even more simply phrased: Stop de-motivating your workers with too much of your involvement!
First two articles:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/05/not-managing-software-developers.html (his political views are not necessarily consistent with my own - just read the article)
And THEN read this one from CIO Magazine: http://cio.com/article/123406/Stop_Demotivating_Me_/
And just saw a post from my friend the SimpleCoder that fits in here a litte too: http://www.simplecoder.com/blog/?p=61
Basically, if you have good people, let them do their jobs and trust them to do it. They likely don't need you to "help" them very often. And guess what, when they do need your help, they will ask for it. That is when you, as a manager, can (and better) really shine for your team. I think my favorite line in the "not managing software developers" article is this (paraphrased), "be a leader, don't be a pecker". If your goal is to wield power, don't be a manager of IT people. They will HATE you. Lead them by showing your trust in them and working hard to remove all barriers that hold them up from doing their work the way they want. Then, they will love you forever, even after they move on to the next company.