Manage Things, Lead People
Having recently been given the amazing opportunity to lead the SRE team at Glasswall I’ve had time to reflect on how best to lead the team. I’ve had experience of management before but never in such a specialised and creative environment. Here are some of the ideas I feel strongly about.
Trust
I fully trust my team and 100% believe in them and their work. I believe that if something goes sideways that they will have my back and I have theirs. This is incredibly important, we run production systems that handle the security around companies email and files and if we all aren’t there for each other then things can easily fall apart.
This allows everyone to be open with each other when mistakes happen or concerns are raised. If I’ve made a poor decision I want my team to hold me accountable without me pulling rank so we can all learn together.
Embrace Failure
With high levels of trust, it allows us to embrace failure and be open with everyone about it. We are all human and mistakes happen to the best of us.
When something goes wrong the questions to ask are what happened and how can we fix it? Some people can fixate on who the blame lies with and this can be very toxic. At the end of the day, we want to learn how we got to that mistake and as a team how can we prevent it from happening again. People need to learn from their mistakes and be enabled to grow as a person, that’s why we run blameless post-mortems at the core of our incident management.
Lead by example
This has always been a big thing for me. Being a leader doesn’t provide me with any special privileges, my only privilege is leading a group of incredibly talented and intelligent individuals.
Leading by example stretches from workflow and to in house benefits. If the team agrees we must be following a particular coding standard then I must follow that, if I have flexi-time so I can miss traffic then everyone from Junior to Senior will also have those benefits.
If you think you are above anyone in your team and deserve special treatment then you shouldn’t be leading them.
Vision, purpose and core values
Vision
As a leader of any team, you need to be able to share your vision and the direction the team will be going in. Within SRE, I’ve taken on what the team personally want to work on and what’s best for our customers and forged a 6-month road map. This is fluid as tech changes daily but it allows the team to plan for work, know what the priorities are and know what to expect.
Purpose
What’s my purpose? It’s a life long question a lot of us have. If your team members have it about their work then somethings gone wrong. At Glasswall our SRE teams purpose is:
Keep the services we own up and thriving!
This will help everyone in the team know what their key purpose is within the company.
Core Values
Core values are very important in creating a healthy culture within any team. They set out how we are to work and to interact with each other. This is why we have 3 simple values:
- First-class engineering.
- Continuous learning.
- Ownership.
Growth and learning
Within any tech-based job you always need to be learning and that’s no different within SRE. Learning is one of the core values and we instil it in everything we do.
We have 10% innovation time which is a closed-off day every two weeks where an SRE team member can complete training, try new tools or read books completely uninterrupted so they can maintain focus.
We also regularly explore new technologies and see if they can enhance our workflows. I make sure we never keep still and are always pushing the envelope.
My role
Within the team, I feel that my role is defined as a set of simple points:
- Make sure everyone is performing at their best.
- Be there for everyone in the good and bad times.
- Provide strong leadership with vision and decision making.
I’m there to enable the team to perform and provide the tools and resources to allow that to happen. I need to be able to provide reassurance and guidance during rough times and to share in our celebration.
As a leader knowing that my team are happy because they are using cutting edge technologies aren’t feeling burnt out because they're not expected to work late, are able to work from home or have flexi-time and can spend time with family or friends while not worrying about work.
For me, that’s the greatest reward.
