>Sometimes it means shielding your team from dumb shit.
I think this is a generally good advice, but can also be misused.
I liked my previous manager, he had a principle for that part. Shielding the team from those crap, especially paperwork stuff. The trouble was that I could see how it was grinding him down, and I knew I could help him with it (because this was Japan, he didn't speak Japanese, I do and language barrier create inefficiencies) but he refused. My manager before him (this time the opposite: Japanese but couldn't articulate himself on English so I took care of all the English team communication) did and it worked smoothly.
If you're a small team (in a startup) doubly so, since grasping the full context of your team & outside is not as big of a task.
Best is to at least be open if your team members are open to helping you with the trickling down bullshit.
I also have a counterpoint to that: manager "shielding" has previously led me into this telephone game sort of thing where I have to guess if there is something going politically wrong or if the ask is actually honest and straightforward. If I exactly understood the politics, or the bs going on, I could give better solutions without tiptoeing around it.
You sometimes hear this described as the "shit umbrella" but it needs to be more like a missle defense system. Similarly it's hard to hit everything you should and you will miss, but you still gotta try. I try to shield the team from the noise, but not the awareness. I'm still trying to get this right.
I think this is a generally good advice, but can also be misused.
I liked my previous manager, he had a principle for that part. Shielding the team from those crap, especially paperwork stuff. The trouble was that I could see how it was grinding him down, and I knew I could help him with it (because this was Japan, he didn't speak Japanese, I do and language barrier create inefficiencies) but he refused. My manager before him (this time the opposite: Japanese but couldn't articulate himself on English so I took care of all the English team communication) did and it worked smoothly.
If you're a small team (in a startup) doubly so, since grasping the full context of your team & outside is not as big of a task.
Best is to at least be open if your team members are open to helping you with the trickling down bullshit.