It’s common practice to say it’s the leaders’ job to protect their team, be a buffer (Andy Grove), shield them (Rands), abstract things (Ben Horowitz), etc. Yes, however we overdo it. If you believe that’s a major part of your role as a leader and what you ask your managers to do, you might be overshooting and harming people’s growth, eroding trust, overwhelming the management team, and more. Let’s debug this.

Coddling and Capping Growth

Like engineers who first learn about clean code and design patterns and try to use them everywhere, managers often apply the abstraction principle to their team in a way that becomes detrimental. It’s very easy to spot that happening when leaders are overprotective of their teams, to the point people do not get enough healthy exposure to the ‘real world’ that they don’t grow as fast as they could have.

When I talk about ‘experience pressure cookers’ and accelerating seniority, a major part of that is exposing the team (in a controlled manner) instead of wrapping them in bubble wrap. Don’t create a fictional world around them.

Overwhelming Managers

Similarly, when doing all of this coddling and protection, we wear ourselves out faster. It’s hard enough to do your work, pretending everything is fine and putting on yourself the burden of ‘translating’ and ‘buffering’ everything can sometimes make it unbearable. First-time managers and executives often tell me they feel the pressure of making their team think everything is always doing great so no one gets worried.

That’s untenable and extremely exhausting. Yes, not every potential crisis should be communicated right away, but you’re not Atlas. Stop pretending to be.

Harming Context

Abstraction and buffering means, by definition, that people will lack some context and details. We don’t expect each person in the company to understand all the details about everything, but management abstraction frequently results in engineers not understanding the stakeholders and the business needs.

Product mastery is one of the most important things for engineering teams. When I talk about 10x teams, I can trace 50% of the practices we work on to product mastery. You cannot gain enough product mastery if you’re constantly being handled in a glove box isolator.

Manipulative and Erodes Trust

If you’re aware of some issue and try to make your team work toward it without letting them know about the problem itself, it can become manipulative. While most people don’t do this consciously and think it’s just what buffering means, the result is the same. With time, your team will pick up on this.

When that happens, it chafes away your credibility with time and the team won’t trust you. Sometimes it’s because they realized after the fact what was being hidden, other times it’s just because they get fed up doing things without being told the real reason. Either way, too much abstraction stands in the way of unleashing your team’s full potential and helping them become a 10x team. Stop it.