Be a Heat Shield!

Being a manager or leader, you often have a lot more information than other individual contributors on the team. That information often involves a lot of politics and "noise". The consensus I have seen is that you want to be a "shit umbrella" for your team so that you can protects them from all the outside influences, which then allows them to focus.

Don't be a Shit Umbrella

I while ago I came across a talk by Nickolas Means where he advocated that we stop being the "shit umbrellas" for our teams. While our intentions for doing this are often good, it may cause more damage by trying to protect the team. Instead, he advocates for being a "heat shield".

The purpose of the heat shield is to protect an item from external heat. For example, the heat shields of space rockets protect the people and equipment inside from burning up on retry. While they do protect everything inside, they still radiate a bit of the heat on the inside. Applying this same analogy to the team, managers can still protect the team from most of the politics etc, but still trickle through a glimpse into what is going on.

This really resonated with me, as I'm a big believer that for a team to make the best decision possible, they require as much important context as possible. If we are being an umbrella, we are completely blocking the team out from all external issues, which may have some important context. Instead, if we are a heat shield, we could allow the valuable information to seep through.

A recent example of this that happened on my current project. We recently changed product owner and as a result they were pushing back on what they thought the MVP product should contain, even though we were mere weeks from releasing it. While there were a lot of discussions and talks behind the scenes, the team didn't need to know the finer details. However, by providing them with a high-level overview of the valuable information and status, allowed them to help identify ways in which we could make the approach that we had taken even leaner.

There are many articles that advocate for being that "shit umbrella". It's a noble thing to do, but if we take a step back and allow the team to have a glimpse behind the curtain to understand the real, current situation the team it will provide them with so much more context, so let's be that heat shield to them!

Until next time...keep learning!