To lead a team....

Well, as most of my readers know, I do not have tons of work experience. This is my third year and in these 3 years, I have worked under 3 – 4 GLs. Most of them were cut from the same cloth but there was one who stood out. Maybe he is not exceptional when compared to the other people I have not yet worked with, but for me he was someone special.
Consider this – am a new employee, barely in the company for 6 months and I get thrown into a new project. My team lead, let’s call him C, gives me small tasks in the beginning and then later he starts pushing me to do bigger better tasks. Soon, I was leading a small team from the client side into learning, and setting up their environments for a new project. He made me the focal point for the client to interact with. All that aside, he never questioned me about the status of the tasks assigned to me. I never felt I was working under pressure, even for the tiniest of the tasks and he trusted me implicitly. Whenever we faced issues, he would first make it sound like a joke and that set the mood for the whole team and made our work easy.
After 1.5 years of freedom in that team, I moved on to another team. It is the same product that am working with and the work is fairly similar. But here, the tables are turned. I feel as if am a novice and in our team, the team lead acts as if he is the only one who knows stuff. Well – R, the team lead, even goes so far as to review our mails before sending it to the onshore team! :O
Talk about trust. He goes to each and every person and checks what they are upto, sits with them to solve issues, sits up late debugging issues which we are supposed to solve!
Everyone calls R Super SME (SME being Subject Matter Expert which is the lowest rank of programmers!) OK – everyone appreciates his efforts and frankly – I think his team members are happy he does the work for them. I was horrified in the beginning. Thankfully, I was there with him only for one month and I moved to the US.
But this is what I felt during the whole time. When it has been proven over and over again that every member is capable of doing his job, why does he come and breathe down our necks? Is it lack of trust? Is that what makes people micro manage? If so – am sorry, but I find that whole concept repelling.
I was chatting on the messenger with C yesterday and I realized how much I miss him, and the work that we used to do. There, we were all equals because we were free to toss ideas around and he treated us with respect. A respect which we returned tenfold, because at the end of the day, we knew that he was the expert. Well, though R is an expert, am sure no once can say the say about him. He just does not let others grow.

Am not going to tell you what I learned from this…..coz I am not an expert, yet! But someday…..