My best managers have been umbrellas, but with transparency. If something was happening in the company we would be informed, but could rest assured that our manager would do their best to work the issue for us while keeping us informed.
The worst managers I’ve had were umbrellas, but to such an extreme that they kept us in an isolated island separate from the rest of the company. We didn’t know what was going on in the company and had no chance to integrate that content into our work. It felt good at first, but over time I realized that the umbrella manager was trying to keep us in the dark so they could keep exclusive control over our work and neutralize any possibility of us competing with them among management. The last manager I had like this went so far they they would praise us for our work and give nothing but positive feedback, right up until he cut people for low performance. It felt like everything he did was for equal parts performance (looking like the ideal, happy, positive manager) and control (keeping us isolated from the rest of the company so he was always in full control).
Ironically, that manager now posts frequent leadership thoughts on LinkedIn and has a newsletter.
I think it's a really hard balance to strike. There's so much company politics/etc that isn't beneficial for a team to experience, but equally, without being exposed to that noise you won't develop an intuition that helps you navigate the organisation.
Whatever the situation I think it's crucial you can trust your manager to be straight with you and give their unvarnished opinion of things if you ask them directly. That helps you trust they're communicating things accurately to you, which makes you feel more comfortable relying on them to provide you with the information instead of trying to seek it out some other way.
My current boss is this way and it’s almost certainly to prevent competition/control the narrative to upper management and other teams/save his own ass. As a result, I usually don’t know who I’m building software for or how they’re going to use the software. He’s a real detriment to the company and I hope he gets the ax.
The worst managers I’ve had were umbrellas, but to such an extreme that they kept us in an isolated island separate from the rest of the company. We didn’t know what was going on in the company and had no chance to integrate that content into our work. It felt good at first, but over time I realized that the umbrella manager was trying to keep us in the dark so they could keep exclusive control over our work and neutralize any possibility of us competing with them among management. The last manager I had like this went so far they they would praise us for our work and give nothing but positive feedback, right up until he cut people for low performance. It felt like everything he did was for equal parts performance (looking like the ideal, happy, positive manager) and control (keeping us isolated from the rest of the company so he was always in full control).
Ironically, that manager now posts frequent leadership thoughts on LinkedIn and has a newsletter.