I never understood the “encourage others to take ownership” manager thing. I mean, I can do the same and encourage others to do things and that would let me with very little actual work to do. Like, why would I even be necessary as “manager that encourage things” if we have to begin with engineers that are paid to take on ownership from the very beginning?
There's a good and bad way to be the manager that encourages taking ownership. You're skeptical of the lazy type. it's masked also as "delegation". ICs tasked with doing literally everything, and yes it can get ridiculous, but even then the ICs do learn outsized skills.
The good kind is in medium to large companies there's definitely middle management needs that must be done. A good manager is doing and shielding you from those things. The ownership is about domain, skill, and project expertise. People closest should be in positions of ownership. A manager is the grease in the machine.
A manager should be intercepting requests for your time and prioritizing your work. There are always more things that need doing than there are hours for you to do them in. They should know what is important, and steer the ship appropriately while you're out gathering requirements, analyzing, building, and iterating based on feedback.
They should also, depending on the engineer, periodically be checking in to make sure that you're on track and not spinning your wheels.
There's taking ownership of a project without being micro-managed and there's having to deal with everything from above and sideways in a large organization. I have certainly been in roles where I got insulated from a lot even if I had a lot of day-to-day autonomy.
