Many pieces of management advice tell new managers that part of their job, if they are effective, is to be a shield (or, less politely, a “bullshit umbrella”). They should help their team focus on what they need to get done without being distracted by the wider drama, politics, and changes happening in the company around them.
I have mixed feelings about this take on management. I do think that teams who are unnecessarily exposed to toxic drama that doesn’t concern them tend to get distracted and stressed out. If you’re managing an engineering team, they don’t need to be concerned with interpersonal incidents in the customer service organization. I’ve watched with mixed pride as my own teams continue to function smoothly when it seems to me like the world is burning down around my ears. It’s valuable for everyone to realize that they can and should focus on the things they can impact and change, and ignore the things they can’t. Drama in the workplace is usually little more than an ego-entertaining drain.
So, yes, shielding your teams from distraction is important. Or, to put it another way, helping them understand the key important goals and focusing them on those goals is important. However, it’s unrealistic to expect that you can or should shield your team from everything. Sometimes it’s appropriate to let some of the stress through to the team. The goal is not to stress them out, but to help them get context into what they’re dealing with. The extreme shielders think they can best focus and motivate their teams by giving clear goals. But humans usually need some sort of context into why these goals have been set, and thereby into what problems they’re working to solve. If you’re going to have operational issues in November if a particular system isn’t up and running, your team deserves to understand that consequence. Appropriate context is what helps teams make good decisions about how and where to focus their energy. As the manager, it’s not your job to make all of those decisions by yourself.
Another error that the shield sometimes makes is denying that any drama exists in the outside world. If layoffs happen in another part of the company and the team finds out from someone else, rather than shielding your team from drama, you’ve created a situation where they feel like something bad is happening and no one wants to admit it. If you instead communicate information about such events in a straightforward, low-emotion way, you alleviate the gossip and quickly neutralize the impact on your team.
You may be a shield, but you are not a parent. Sometimes, in combining the roles of shield and mentor we end up in a parenting-style relationship with our team, and treat them like fragile children to be protected, nurtured, and chided as appropriate. You are not their parent. Your team is made up of adults who need to be treated with appropriate respect. This respect is important for your sanity as well as for theirs. It’s too easy to take their mistakes personally when you view them as a child-like extension of yourself, or to get so emotionally invested that you take every disagreement they have with you personally.