Translation, Not Transmission

I once knew a manager who told his team when he’d started applying for jobs elsewhere. He was really proud of how transparent he was with the team. What he was actually doing was making this everyone else’s problem. No one on the team knew exactly when he’d be leaving or who would replace him or what it would mean for the team. They only knew they had a manager who was jumping ship. What did it mean for them? No one knew. 

Radical transparency sounds virtuous. In practice it’s often abdication dressed up as honesty.

I often write about managers as translators. The role of a manager isn’t to pass raw information directly from the organization to our teams. That’s what email is for. The role is to filter information, contextualize it, and deliver it in a way that sets people up to do their best work. A pilot hitting turbulence doesn’t walk out of the cockpit to tell passengers whether or not it makes them nervous. They let the passengers know there’s turbulence ahead and roughly what to expect. That’s not withholding information. That’s professionalism. 

But the opposite failure is just as dangerous.

A leader who tells people everything is fine when they can see the water rising hasn’t protected anyone. They’ve just destroyed the one thing that actually keeps a team functional in hard times: trust. False certainty isn’t kindness. It’s a lie with good intentions. People make real decisions based on what managers tell them — whether to stay, whether to push back, whether to panic. I don’t get to decide those stakes are too small to matter.

These aren't opposite ends of the same spectrum. They're two different ways to fail your team. One through too little judgment, one through too little integrity. Being a leader requires both.

There’s information that’s mine to hold, not theirs to carry. Knowing the difference is the job. When I know something I can’t share yet, like a team change, a decision still being finalized, I don’t pretend it isn’t happening. I just ask myself a different question: how do I take care of my team right now, with what I’m able to do? If an engineer is transferring teams and that can’t be announced yet, I can still make sure there’s a transition plan. I can make sure the roadmap reflects the capacity change. I can do my job in ways that absorb the disruption before it hits them.

That’s what translation actually looks like. I take in the noise, I filter it, and what comes out the other side is clarity or at least steadiness. Not false certainty. Not chaos. Just a manager doing the hard, invisible work of holding what needs to be held and sharing what needs to be known.