You don't want to protect the team from a foreign entity, having to understand the political structures around them or the actual value they bring to the organization.
You do want to protect them from pressures of working 60 hours a week. You want to protect them from feeling like their priorities are a shifting sand. You do want to protect them from a VIP who just goes to them and says,"can you do this for me?" which confounds another series of priorities unbeknownst to the cofounder.
If there are toxic elements of the business, you cannot completely shield them, but you do want to preserve an island of sanity.
The bigger the business, the more "protection" the job entails because the sheer number of moving pieces can subject a team to thrashing. The smaller the business, the more a manager needs to make a strong decision of if those toxic elements exist at all and stamp them out. If you need to "protect" a team at a small company, you are at the wrong company and need to get out.
This is the entire concept of Scrum, isolate the developers so the only contact is through the scrum master and the product owner. I agree it is a methodology for weak managers.
- Seeing their job as “protecting” their team from “the business” - Talking about “the business” like a foreign entity
I’ve had to clean up many teams whose weak managers tried to isolate them in mini-silos, tossing problems over the fence to nameless mythical entities.