Shit umbrella is the destroyer of trust

My new manager spent her first day telling us she was our shit umbrella. Her job, as she saw it, was to catch everything flung at us from above so we could do our work. She meant it, and she turned out to be very good at it.

I’d spent the previous year dodging requests that made no sense, buffering my team from direction changes, and hiding some unpopular work we were doing. Now here was someone telling us our work mattered and she’d keep the noise off us. I could stop refereeing and start building. I was relieved.

A few months later she was let go, after her reports revolted. In that short time she’d done real damage to the trust inside our team and with the teams around us.

Here’s what went wrong.

To keep the distractions off us, she had to decide what reached us. Which messages came through, which got softened, which got dropped. That made her a filter on every conversation between us and the rest of the company. She distorted some things, delayed others, and lost a few. And she wasn’t a perfect shield. Things leaked through anyway, and now they arrived with no context, which was worse.

The filter ran both ways. The rest of the company saw less of what we were doing too.

Trust is mostly transparency and predictability. Cut transparency and trust goes with it.

Some of what she filtered out was feedback. Shielding people from hard feedback is like shielding a plant from the sun. Nothing grows in the shade. Without it, conflicts got swept under the rug, we lost the thread of what the larger org was doing, and we stopped having a voice in it.

Then the micromanagement started, and it was structural, not personal. She had made herself the only channel to our partner teams, so she was now the one taking their requests and turning them into our work. Everything got granular and transactional. Context disappeared. Quality dropped. We stopped trusting that the company knew what it was doing, and I’m sure they stopped trusting us.

The worst of it was slower. Low trust was becoming the expectation. Conflicts were things you gossiped about instead of raised. Had it gone on, people would have concluded that pushing back is pointless, that this is just how it is, and they would have gone quiet.

So what do you do when the leadership above you is actually bad? I’ll tell you what not to do, because I did it.

Earlier in my career, my leadership made a call I strongly disagreed with. I knew it sent a dangerous message and had people worried about their jobs. So I distanced myself from it. I sided with my reports, and I thought that was solidarity.

To me, the decision came from leadership. To my team, I was leadership. When I wouldn’t own it, what they saw was their manager not doing his job.

The decision wasn’t my fault. What it did to my people was still mine to deal with.

That’s the difference between a shield and a leader. A shield cuts the flow of information to protect you. A leader does the opposite: connects you to the people you need, as directly as possible, and when there’s a conflict, puts everyone in the same conversation instead of carrying messages between them.

A shield keeps politics and hard feedback away from you. A leader teaches you to handle both yourself. To take feedback without falling apart. To speak up for your own work.

And when a leader disagrees with the people above them, they get curious first, then say so out loud. They don’t open an umbrella.