Am I hurting my team by shielding them from pressure and hard news?

You absorb the pressure, criticism, and ambiguity from above and hand your team a smoothed-over version. It comes from care; you want to protect them. But protection and preparation are not the same, and by shielding them fully, you may be leaving them unready for the reality they actually work in. A team that never feels the real weather cannot learn to handle it. When you buffer everything, they miss the context that would help them make better decisions, and they are blindsided when reality finally reaches them anyway. Some protection is leadership; total protection is a kind of underestimation of what they can bear. You do not have to dump every pressure on them. But start letting some reality through, honestly and calmly. Share the real constraints, the genuine uncertainty, the actual stakes, then trust them to rise to it. Treating them as capable adults is its own form of respect, and it is how they grow strong enough to share the load.