7 simple things that will improve your SRE engineering manager onboarding experience

The most valuable asset

Is the most valuable thing in the office the most expensive piece of hardware? wrong 🤦‍♀️

The most valuable asset in the office is the people that you lead – a good team, work toward goals in a unified way, meet deadlines, and delivers a better solid product.

You’re in focus

When you step into a manager role, people will put way more attention to what you do, what you say, and how you behave.

Having self-awareness of your own behavior is super important – giving a personal example can develop a very good and mature team.

It’s ok to say “I don’t know”

As the team grows and more responsibilities are introduced to the team (and SREs are involved in so many areas), it’s very likely that someone will ask you a question that you don’t know the answer to.

It’s absolutely fine to say that you don’t know, but with that – you MUST offer to find the answer or refer to someone that you think will know the answer.

Get a mentor(s)

Getting a mentor (or even a few) at an early stage is a key to success.
Find someone that you respect and trust – that inspires you in your organization.

A good mentor is better than any book or a guide.

There is no guide on how to be a manager

So if you will try to ask around if there is a manual or a guide on how to be a manager, in most cases the answer will be “no”.

Yes, some companies have a lot of templates on how to manage people (the 1:1, annual review, etc…) but it’s not about the needed soft skills needed to drive your team.

With that being said, there are plenty of books about management and leadership that will contribute a lot to your growth as a manager but that is only the basics.

Switch the job mentality

You need to understand that engineering manager and IC (Individual Contributor) are two different jobs – and this is especially if you got internally promoted for this role rather than being hired.

Engineering managers are more about planning, seeing the big picture, leadership, and mentoring.

Unlike IC which does the actual engineering work, as a manager, you drive and inspire others to do the work – your engineering experience is still important and will help a lot.

Technical problems are not the real problem

The real problems when you are a people manager are… people (shocking right? 🤨)

People are complex, and when you have plenty of them in a team, asking them to do tough work and pressure them to keep to milestones and release dates – things can get erratic.