> A good manager is more like a transparent umbrella. They protect the team from unnecessary stress and pressure, but don’t hide reality from them.

I'm absolutely going to steal this metaphor going forward.

Being a "transparent umbrella" does require knowing the personalities of your reports, some people do get distracted when they think higher-up decisions or unhappiness are going to affect their team. Most people, however, really appreciate the transparency. It helps them feel more in control when they know what is happening around them, and when things do change they can tie it back to something that was said previously.

> They protect the team from unnecessary stress and pressure, but don’t hide reality from them.

I was going to highlight this as well, but it is also one of the trickiest parts of the equation, because by definition this inevitably involves a lot of politics and social implications.

What I have learned over the years: let the overall direction, and also the overall competitive pressures, filter down through your umbrella. But shield them from the details and your specific efforts here, unless it is relevant.

Maybe even more important, though - recognize inflection points in your company and your group. How you manage during routine times and during stressful times may well be very different. If they're not, then you have a serious problem.

>> Being a "transparent umbrella" does require knowing the personalities of your reports, some people do get distracted when they think higher-up decisions or unhappiness are going to affect their team.

There is the expectation that the manager knows who will be distracted. This is a basic part of knowing your people. I know which of my colleagues is going to get distracted without having the level of communication that my manager has. On one extreme, they just forward information knowing a report can work with it. One the other, the manager has to translate and communicate every element.

Ideally, the manager is already working on a way to ensure their report can handle transparency because that means they can work autonomously. You can't have individual contributors lead, if they are going to run into issues as soon as they discover what is going on overhead. They may not understand it yet, but they should have coping and mitigation strategies.

Engineers can be the worst group you could deal with when it comes to overhead conversations when they expect things to be orderly. Your organization is failing when everything has to go through managers and people can't operate independently.

My favorite manager told me a similar analogy before I left, but with a caveat; a good manager has to provide cover for the team, but it's up to the team to hold the manager up - just like an umbrella.

That's true for a junior engineer, but the more senior engineers should be given a view into the organization's priorities and business challenges.

> require knowing the personalities of your reports

I think this an underrated quality.

I recall hearing that Google had a term similar to this:

A "shit umbrella" was a manager who protected the development team from all the politics, blame, and mismanagement coming from above.

A "shit funnel" was a manager who directed all the shit coming down, directly onto the team.

Honestly, I’m not sure.

If I know what was going on transparently I am stressed. As an ordinary employee, I don’t need to know everything and therefore don’t need to worry about it.

Kinda like; You got to do, what you got to do.