Comment by simonw
1 day ago
My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
There's a big difference between protecting a team from all the shit and hiding it from them completely.
It's good to be a transparent shit umbrella. The team should absolutely have visibility into what's going on, and understand why certain decisions are being made, but a good manager does need to step in to avoid the shit hitting them directly.
Love the idea of the transparent shit umbrella.
Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?
I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.
Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.
Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.
Yeah, show the storm, explain it, let people participate in navigating it. But if I walk away from a meeting understanding the situation less and sleeping worse, something went wrong
To your point about dysfunctional orgs:
After deploying your transparent shit umbrella, your next problem is your own shitty boss or your boss's boss who will get pissed off you are using a transparent umbrella once that transparency starts blowingback on them. Because once your team learns that it's raining shit outside, they will want to know what you're doing to mitigate, reverse, or sidestep the shit. Some of the time, the things you confide to your team in the course of this feedback will piss off adjacent teams or some people up the ladder once they get wind of it (your opinion of some decisions, or the perceived negative consequences of your mitigation strategy on said people) Hence your umbrella being transparent makes what people euphemistically call "managing up" much more fucking annoying. I don't claim that there is an alternative, just that it's a fact of the principled life (one result being getting fired, often ironically for not being a "team player"). I don't have a fix, but would like to hear some if anyone has any.
> But they need to FEEL the weather
You mean they need to smell it!
"Transparent shit umbrella" is indeed a much more useful metaphor.
You CAN tell the team it's raining and details of the weather without letting them get overly wet.
There's middle ground here.
Agree. team needs to know about the shit. It's important information that helps them prioritize their work and motivates them as they know that what they do is important for the bigger bosses. If manager shields me from everything I go apathetic, not knowing why I even do the boring stuff if manager doesn't tell me his manager is giving shit
I hate having to rely on my own sense of what happened in a meeting, or which executive is upset about something. While its usually accurate, it's been borne out of chaotic leadership and shouldn't be necessary, especially if its to try to get off the tracks when a freight train is coming.
Sometimes the culture of poor management is so ingrained and normalized people really don't understand what the problem is. That usually ends with me looking elsewhere, as taking on the responsibility other's won't while not having authority has lead to multiple full years lost to burnout.
I'm laughing because I used that exact same phrase: "shit umbrella". Like some of the other replies mentioned, telling your team it's raining is great. The balance I found was to let them know what's coming and why but to let leadership's "pivots" to stabilize for a few days before sharing the unfiltered shit stream with my reports. This meant that the team still knew what was going on early but didn't panic as much when there was a sudden crazy random request from leadership that would be highly disruptive.
People don't need to be protected from reality, they need to be protected from chaos. Those are not the same thing.
You do need to expose your team to some of the shit that's getting flung or else your team gets used to operating under clean conditions and loses its tolerance.
For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)
In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.
Shit umbrella is not a great analogy. More like a shit filter. Let through what needs to be let through and block all the distracting crap.
Distinguish between "seeing the shit" and "being hit by it all".
The metaphor I prefer is to be a transparent shit umbrella.
An opaque umbrella doesn't hide the rain, it just keeps it from falling on you.
A shit umbrella is not a two way block. It keeps shit from falling onto the employees but doesn’t prevent employees from knowing what is happening at higher leadership levels.