The best practice is the right balance giving you full confidence and control of what is going on and is being delivered as the result of the team's work. The strong bias towards any pole is a sign of management unprofessionalism.
Addition (all IMHO, subjective):
The interesting phenomenon is Scrum (similar practices were successfully employed in engineering companies in Soviet Union), a "pseudo-agile" approach, where the work is partitioned into a small "micro-agile" blocks but the sizes of blocks are so small and the progress is monitored so strictly that the resulting quality can be quite close to the one when the strict approach is used. In fact, with properly tuned "micro-agile" granularity individual contributors get the full illusion of the freedom (well, freedom indeed) in decision making while the team performance and stays under full control and is well manageble.