You know the type. They announce a bold new priority in the all-hands meeting with zero warning. Two weeks later, it's a completely different priority. They run on urgency, change, and a little chaos — sometimes a lot of it.

When you were an individual contributor, that kind of leader was mostly a problem for happy hour. Once you became a manager, their chaos became your job. You're now the buffer between the noise at the top and the people counting on you to help them do good work — whether you signed up for that part of the role or not.

Most new managers default to one of two instincts here, and both backfire. Relay everything down, unfiltered, and you turn yourself into a megaphone for someone else's dysfunction. Hide everything, and your team — who can read a room just fine — stops trusting you the moment the cracks show. Neither one actually protects anyone. And there's a real cost to getting it wrong: stress measurably impairs the part of the brain responsible for focus and judgment, so an anxious, unfiltered team isn't just uncomfortable — it's less capable of doing good work.

The better path is to actively manage what moves between the top of the org and the people you lead. Here's how:

• Be the shock absorber, not the relay. Before passing anything down, ask whether your team actually needs to know it right now, or whether you're just letting the chaos above turn you into more chaos below.
• Be transparent, but know the limit. Your team deserves honesty about real uncertainty. They don't need your commentary on how dysfunctional leadership is — that just puts them in an awkward spot.
• Build a micro-culture. Your team's stability doesn't have to come from the top. Rituals, clear norms, and a strong immediate team environment matter just as much as company culture — often more.
• Keep your team anchored to the work. Anxiety is contagious, so redirect attention to what's actually within your team's control: the work, the purpose, and what success looks like this week.
• Know when to escalate. Protecting your team isn't the same as enabling bad leadership. When you do speak up, frame it around business impact — specific costs and outcomes — rather than personal frustration.

Being a manager under a chaotic senior leader is hard. You're protecting from above, executing from below, and trying to hold onto your own sanity in the middle of it. But managers who act as a buffer, communicate honestly within limits, and protect the work are the reason good teams survive even under bad leadership. I break all of this down in more detail in this week's video — worth a watch if any of this sounds familiar.

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