At 21: managing a team of 5, ~10K devices, and my sanity, as a new people manager.

After spending years in my first district and growing to the bounds of that position, I was set on a few parameters for my search in a new position:

• Education technology related
• Knew I was motivated by helping people
• I wanted to mentor technicians or be a team lead over level 1's of sort
• Wanted to be in a larger district, coming from one of the states smallest and least funded

After a few weeks job searching I started to receive calls back for Systems Engineer, Linux Admin, and Network Admin individual contributor positions. I was interested and always took the interviews, which honed in a great interviewing skill, but I didn't want to firmly cement myself in one direction so early by becoming an IC in only one technology domain.

I received an email from my then future IT department secretary asking if I was available to come and interview for the Coordinator of Network Services position which oversaw ~10k devices, 12 locations, virtualization, networking, security, and a team of direct reports. Sounded like a perfect fit!

I ended up accepting that position and on the first day asked my CTO about my team members. Fortunately, nothing but great things, but for the first time I was sweating a bit at the challenge ahead of me.

I had both built trust and community, even worked with those several times my age before, but being the direct supervisor of 3 adults all at least 15-30 years my senior while coming into the overall department as the youngest by over a decade felt almost insurmountable to gain influence.

There were no sexy secrets to success here, but just the common theme of transparency and honesty. When I first took over, I scheduled an hour long 1:1 or lunch with my reports and took the time to get to know them. I didn't try to phone it in or pretend I was some prophet claiming to have all the answers. I took the time to find out what was motivating to them personally, what their pain points may have been or what external to work they might be affected by, and internally I thought about how I could enhance their ability to tackle the pipeline of work they had from such a dense environment.

Over my few years there we tackled many cool projects like automating our wireless SDN policies, creating an automated backup mechanism for switching/routing, securing our virtual and cloud environments, and rapidly finalizing a ticketing system implementation in March 2020 (you'll never guess why it was rushed).

My team later grew from 3 to 5 people, and I was directly in charge of all infrastructure, policy, and personnel that influenced thousands of users, ~10k devices network traffic and security. It was the perfect position at that stage in my career, and a much bigger environment taught me several lessons in technology/people complications, scalability, procurement, people management, technology law, and more I would have never otherwise gotten to experience and manage first hand.

My counterpart Coordinators in A/V, Data, and end user support as well as department secretary were phenomenal mentors and collaborators in this position. We met frequently and – just as I had singularly done in my last position – spent time trying to add value to each others silo'd workflow to break down the IT silos pretty much every organization has faced. We abstractly had to serve an end user base from K-12 and several thousand adult staff, which is always an interesting challenge that requires collaboration and intuitive problem solving.

I again tried to use the open source principles that was influential to me thus far and built a community of IT professionals with iterative constant feedback to the implemented solutions. I held regular calls (weekly, monthly, etc) to monitor status with various small stakeholders and groups and proactively used mass quantities of data to influence my decision making.

As a decision maker with purchasing authority, I would often see solutions pushed by vendors because they were so clearly incentivized by something intrinsic on their end, and not the customer's (my) end.

Now, as I sit on the other side of the table preparing solutions for customers operating sometimes in the tens or hundreds of thousands, of Linux, Windows, or even Unix/MacOS/etc endpoints, I try to factor in their external pressures, needs, goals, and ask myself how do I add value to or support to their organization? If I struggle to answer that, it helps me realign to best serve my collaborators needs.

It was transparency, honesty, and determination to work with students and staff to provide the easiest, most valuable solution that helped me find pockets of success in this position. It gave me the platform to evaluate several hundred tools, communicate with experts and consultants nationwide, and began solidifying the processes of technology and people I had learned in earlier years.