It's good to be a transparent shit umbrella. The team should absolutely have visibility into what's going on, and understand why certain decisions are being made, but a good manager does need to step in to avoid the shit hitting them directly.
Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?
I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.
Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.
Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.
After deploying your transparent shit umbrella, your next problem is your own shitty boss or your boss's boss who will get pissed off you are using a transparent umbrella once that transparency starts blowingback on them. Because once your team learns that it's raining shit outside, they will want to know what you're doing to mitigate, reverse, or sidestep the shit. Some of the time, the things you confide to your team in the course of this feedback will piss off adjacent teams or some people up the ladder once they get wind of it (your opinion of some decisions, or the perceived negative consequences of your mitigation strategy on said people) Hence your umbrella being transparent makes what people euphemistically call "managing up" much more fucking annoying. I don't claim that there is an alternative, just that it's a fact of the principled life (one result being getting fired, often ironically for not being a "team player"). I don't have a fix, but would like to hear some if anyone has any.
You mean they need to smell it!
There's middle ground here.
Sometimes the culture of poor management is so ingrained and normalized people really don't understand what the problem is. That usually ends with me looking elsewhere, as taking on the responsibility other's won't while not having authority has lead to multiple full years lost to burnout.
For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)
In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.