My point being, in case it’s still unclear, that “I’ll create pressure on everyone and then progress will happen,” is IMO bad management.

Sometimes the problem is not enough motivation, though I think that if you hire well, that’s rare—the best engineers are intrinsically creative and motivated. Often, lack of progress is due to some other organizational problem—too much toil, unclear priorities, conflict, etc—and just adding pressure until progress happens is the manager equivalent of whining until your sister does your chores for you.

Even if it works, either

1. the team is working around the problem (which the manager doesn’t know about or understand, and isn’t dealing with it) and will eventually get fed up and leave, or

2. someone pushes extra hard and solves the problem for everybody else. Now, that person the de-facto leader, though they’re not recognized, and in fact are often penalized for getting distracted from the paper priorities, since the managers who do this are rarely interested in the mechanics of how their problem was solved. Respect for management is lost, because they don’t understand what’s happening. Eventually everyone gets fed up and leaves.

Managers can’t solve every problem themselves, of course, but the manager needs to understand what the problems are, explicitly set the priority of solving them, and understand and celebrate the solutions when they’re found.