>> 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.