The stateless manager is someone who prides himself on not knowing or understanding anything, and most importantly on not remembering anything.

Symptoms:

• the manager must be informed of the same issues over and over again. Clearly, by definition, a stateless manager cannot remember anything.

• the manager does not take any intiative and reacts only to outside stimuli. Clearly, taking initiative would require some sort of context or problem for which to take initiative, and doing this would require keeping some state (namely the state of the problem).
• the manager manages to delegate every issue back to you. If he would handle an issue himself it would require keeping state, which he cannot do because he is stateless.
  

Remedies:

• make sure you get a stateful manager between you and the stateless manager who takes care of all communication for you.
• try to convince the stateless manager that he should keep certain state himself. Typically, the stateless manager would solve this problem by delegating to someone else. Nevertheless, looking at it in a positive way, at least your own problem is gone.