The Shield and The Ladder
Leaders protect the team and advocate for them at the same time. Those aren't opposites.
Here’s something nobody tells you when you become a manager / leader: your team doesn’t need another person doing the work.
They need two things that sound like opposites, but aren’t.
🛡️ They need you to be the shield — the person who stands between them and the distractions that would break their focus on their priorities.
🪜 They need you to be the ladder — the person who carries their work into rooms they aren’t and makes sure it is acknowledged and celebrated.
These two jobs together are some of the most underrated and highest-leverage work a leader does. They don’t show up in a job description. Nobody includes “shield and ladder” in a performance review. But the teams that feel most protected and most motivated are almost always led by someone who figured this out.
Here’s how both work in practice.
The shield 🛡️
There’s a common version of management where your job is to field every request that comes in, pass those requests down to your team, and measure success by how quickly things get done. This model treats your team like a factory: work arrives, gets processed, comes back out.
The problem is that this isn’t how complex technical or creative work actually works.
Constant context-switching is one of the fastest ways to destroy momentum, and nothing creates context-switching faster than a team whose priorities change based on whoever just sent an email.
The manager’s job is to hold the priorities. And to be the buffer when something tries to change them without good reason.
For my team, this looked like a system with a simple structure: we had clear priorities that we reviewed on a regular cadence (in 1:1s, as a team during our regular meetings). The intent was that everyone had clarity on what they were working on when and why it was the priority.
When a new request came in from a stakeholder, the team member had a choice: forward it to me for triage (so they could stay focused on current work), or bring it to me for a quick check-in before agreeing to any change in direction. Either way, the decision was conscious and clear, not just absorbing another “emergency request” because someone asked.
The effect was that most requests got answered, most priorities stayed stable, and the team wasn’t in a constant state of reactive scramble. They knew I was watching the incoming requests. Their job was to stay focused on the work.
Being the shield doesn’t mean saying no to everything. It means being the one who decides, strategically with your team, what gets through the filter and what can wait.
The ladder 🪜
The other side of this is what happens when we make progress visible upward.
Your team is doing excellent work. The question is whether anyone above you knows it. And the honest answer, for a lot of teams, is no — not because the work isn’t good but because visibility and advocacy take intentional effort.
Technical people do the work. Managers go to the stakeholder meetings. The connection between those two things doesn’t happen automatically.
The ladder is that connection. Your job is to be in the rooms your team isn’t in and make sure that their names, their accomplishments, and the specific positive impact of their work get said out loud in those rooms.
I started doing this systematically by publishing a weekly accomplishment summary for my engineering team. Every week I published a short data-backed summary of what we completed and the positive impact for the projects we supported. I sent it to the team directly (so they could get an instant dopamine hit!) and copied our organization’s director and the directors of the project teams our work had benefited that week.
The directors often responded. “Great job, thank you” on a email thread sounds like a small thing, but for a team that had been heads-down on gnarly work for months (even years) without much visibility into how it was landing, it wasn’t small.
It told them someone at that higher level knew their names and knew what they’d built. And it was consistent praise and validation, not just when someone did something extraordinary, but every single week.
That’s the ladder. You carry the work up. The visibility comes back down. Your team feels seen by the people with the power to reward them because they actually are seen and valued.
New managers tend to think of the bulk of their job as managing down: supporting the team, unblocking the work, setting priorities. That’s real and it’s important.
But some of the highest-leverage work you do runs in the other two directions: protecting focus below you by shielding laterally and making work visible above you.
The shield and the ladder. You’re both at the same time.
I’d love to hear your versions of these. What does protecting your team’s priorities look like for you? How do you carry their work upward? Leave a comment, send a note, or find me on Substack Notes. I read every comment and restack Note and I reply to them as well 🫶🏻
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See you next Tuesday,