Last week I wrote about what happens when governance creep turns a manager into a reporter — when the spreadsheets multiply and the capitalization language arrives and the job you took stops looking like the job you have.
The response I got, from managers who recognized themselves in that post, was some version of the same question: okay, but what do I actually do?
This post is my honest answer. Not a framework. Not a set of best practices. What I am actually doing right now, inside an organization that is figuring out what it wants to be, to keep my teams delivering while the swirl happens above them.
Your Job Is to Be the Filter
When an organization is in transition — when new governance is arriving, when leadership is asking questions that haven’t been answered yet, when processes are being proposed that may or may not become mandates — your primary job as a manager is to be the filter.
Not every piece of information that reaches your level needs to reach your team. Not every question that leadership is asking needs to become a concern the engineers are managing. Not every “we think we might” needs to be communicated as “here is what’s coming.”
The team needs to focus on delivery. That focus is fragile. Organizational uncertainty is one of the fastest ways to break it — because engineers who are worried about what’s coming next are not fully present in the sprint that’s happening now. They are managing their exposure, hedging their bets, waiting to see how things land before they invest fully in the work.
Your job is to hold that uncertainty at the boundary. To absorb it, process it, and only let clarity through.
That means managing the information that reaches the team. Massaging it. Working it into conversations carefully and at the right time. Preparing people for change as it becomes clear rather than as soon as you hear about it.
They will not be able to avoid all of it. But they do not need to deal with all of it now.
The Difference Between a Question and a Mandate
The most common mistake I see managers make when their organization is in chaos is treating everything as a mandate — even when leaders are asking questions.
A leader who asks “have you thought about how Lean Six Sigma might apply to your team?” is asking a question. They may be curious. They may be testing an idea. They may be floating something they read about. They may be genuinely exploring.
They are not mandating Lean Six Sigma.
The manager who goes back to the team and says “leadership is asking about Lean Six Sigma, we need to figure out how to comply” has turned a question into a directive. The team scrambles. Time gets spent on something that was never actually decided. Anxiety rises. Delivery slows.
The manager who sits in the question and says “noted, we’ll keep delivering” has done their job. They have filtered the noise. They have protected the team’s focus. And they have waited for the “we think” to become “we know” before acting on it.
There is always a lot of “we think” in a large organization. There is much less “we know.” The manager’s job is to know the difference — and to not pass the “we think” to the people who need to keep moving.
Until someone makes a decision that the organization will mandate, there are always opportunities to deliver and to show how things work. Use them.
Prepare, Don’t Surprise
When something does move from “we think” to “we know” — when a decision gets made and change is genuinely coming — the manager’s job shifts from filtering to preparing.
This does not mean announcing the change the moment you hear about it. It means working it into conversations over time. Planting seeds. Raising questions that help the team start thinking in the direction of where things are going, without triggering the anxiety of a formal announcement before you have answers.
“How do you think our team would handle more structured project tracking?” is a different conversation than “leadership has decided we’re moving to a project management framework and here’s the timeline.” Both are true eventually. The first one gives the team time to form their own thinking. The second one drops something on them they have no context for.
The manager who prepares their team for change before the change arrives makes the transition smoother for everyone — including the team members who will find it hardest. The manager who passes every piece of organizational news directly and immediately is not being transparent. They are passing their own anxiety along with the information.
Don’t Let Your Frustration Bleed Through
This is the hardest part and the most important part.
You are absorbing things that your team does not have to absorb. Governance overhead. Political maneuvering. Decisions made without engineering input that affect engineering directly. The exhaustion of filling out forms that produce nothing. The frustration of watching your job get smaller while the expectations stay the same.
That frustration is real and it is valid. And it cannot go to your team.
Not because your team cannot handle it. Because your job is to protect their ability to focus — and a manager who is visibly frustrated about the organization is a manager whose team starts spending energy managing the manager’s feelings rather than doing the work. They pick up on it. They worry about it. They adjust their behavior in response to it. None of that is useful.
Find somewhere else to put it.
I have a small group of peer managers who I meet with regularly specifically for this purpose. We vent. We help each other navigate. We remind each other that what we are experiencing is real and that we are not imagining it. Just having someone there to listen — someone who understands the same pressures and is not going to be affected by what you say — is more valuable than most management development programs.
If you do not have that group, build it. The filtering you are doing for your team is sustainable only if you have somewhere to process what you are filtering. Otherwise it accumulates. And eventually it bleeds through anyway — not in one conversation but in a hundred small ones, in the tone you take, in the energy you bring, in the way you answer a question about what’s happening above.
Find your people. Talk to them honestly. Come back to your team intact.
Show How to Deliver
The most powerful argument against governance creep is not a debate about governance. It is delivery.
Every time your team ships something meaningful and connects it to a result — every sprint review where a number moved and the team can explain why — you are making the case that this way of working produces something the governance framework does not. You are not arguing. You are demonstrating.
Leaders who are asking questions about Lean Six Sigma and capitalization and project governance are asking because they are not sure the current approach is working. The answer to that uncertainty is not to debate the methodology. It is to show that the methodology is working.
Keep the bus moving. Keep the results visible. Keep showing up to the conversations that matter with data rather than opinions.
If people want to jump in front of the bus, they get run over. Not because you did anything aggressive — because the momentum of consistent delivery is hard to stop once it is moving.
That is the protection. Not a shield against every organizational force that comes at your team. A record of results that makes it harder for those forces to justify themselves.
What to Do Today
If your organization is in swirl right now — if the governance is multiplying and the uncertainty is high and you are not sure what is coming next — here is what to do:
Keep the team focused on the sprint. Absorb the organizational noise at your level. Wait for questions to become decisions before you act on them. Prepare your team for change as it clarifies rather than as it swirls. Find your peer group and talk to them honestly. And keep delivering.
The organization will figure out what it wants. In the meantime, your job is to make sure your team’s answer to whatever comes next is a record of results that is hard to argue with.
That is how you protect your team when the organization is working against you. Not by fighting the organization. By keeping the work moving in spite of it.
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I publish every Tuesday at danielholt.substack.com
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