5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Network Engineering Manager
The Reality Check Nobody Gives You
Two months into my first network engineering management role, and I'm learning more about people, politics, and patience than I ever did about BGP or SD-WAN. Don't get me wrong – I knew management would be different from being an individual contributor. But there's a massive gap between knowing something intellectually and experiencing it in real-time.
Here are five things I genuinely wish someone had told me before I accepted this role. Not the polished advice from management books, but the messy, uncomfortable truths that you only learn by living through them.
1. Your Old Manager's Bad Habits Are Now Your Autopilot
Here's something nobody warns you about: you'll unconsciously replicate the management behaviors you experienced, even the ones you hated.
I spent years frustrated by micromanagement, yet I caught myself last week asking a senior engineer to walk me through their troubleshooting approach for a routine issue. The irony hit hard – I was doing exactly what drove me crazy as an individual contributor.
The Reality: Breaking these habits is genuinely difficult. Your brain defaults to what it knows, especially under stress. That manager who never gave you autonomy? You'll find yourself hovering over your team's work. That boss who made unilateral decisions? You'll catch yourself doing the same.
What Actually Helps: I started asking my team directly: "Am I micromanaging this, or is my involvement actually helpful?" The answers were illuminating and sometimes uncomfortable. One team member said, "I appreciate that you care, but I've got this." That stung, but it was exactly the feedback I needed.
This connects to what I talked about in my post about the technical manager's dilemma – finding the balance between being available for technical guidance and giving your team the space to solve problems independently.
2. Culture Change Takes Forever, and Your Team Will Resist
I walked in with grand plans to transform how we work: better documentation practices, more collaboration, proactive rather than reactive operations. Six weeks later, I'm learning that culture change moves at geological speeds.
The Surprise: Your team will resist changes even when they agree that the current state isn't working. People prefer familiar dysfunction over uncertain improvement. I proposed moving to better documentation standards, and you'd think I suggested we all switch to using routers as doorstops.
Why It's Hard: Change feels like criticism of how they've been working, even when that's not your intent. Plus, your team has seen managers come and go with their "improvement initiatives" that fizzled out. They're waiting to see if you're different or if you'll give up like the last person.
What's Working: Start embarrassingly small. I wanted to revolutionize our documentation. Instead, I started with one simple template for network changes. Just one. Once people saw it actually made their lives easier, and adoption happened organically. Now I'm getting requests to create templates for other processes.
The lesson: your timeline for culture change is probably 5x too aggressive. Plan accordingly.
3. Nobody Teaches You How to Budget (And It Matters More Than You Think)
The first time I sat down to build the team's annual budget, I stared at a blank spreadsheet for 20 minutes. How do you predict what network equipment you'll need a year from now? What's reasonable for training budgets? How do you justify headcount requests?
The Uncomfortable Truth: Your budget decisions directly impact your team's ability to succeed, and nobody trains you how to do this well. Underfund training, and your team can't keep skills current. Underestimate equipment needs, and you're scrambling mid-year trying to get emergency approvals.
What I'm Learning: Budget planning is as much about politics as mathematics. You need to understand organizational priorities, speak the language of ROI, and build relationships with finance before you need emergency funding.
The skills I discussed in my post about managing up as a technical manager are critical here – you need to translate technical needs into business language and build credibility with senior leadership.
I also learned to build in a buffer without looking like I'm padding numbers. Things break, requirements change, and opportunities emerge. The budget needs flexibility.
Practical Tip: Find another manager who's been through a few budget cycles and buy them coffee. Their insights are worth more than any finance training course.
4. You're Now the Buffer Between Your Team and Organizational Chaos
Senior management has opinions—lots of them. Many are based on a limited understanding of how network engineering actually works. Your job is now to shield your team from unrealistic demands while somehow still delivering business value.
The Scenario: Executive leadership announces they want to "accelerate digital transformation" (whatever that means) and expects your team to support three major initiatives simultaneously. They have no concept of your team's capacity, current commitments, or the technical complexity involved.
The Impossible Position: You can't just say "no" to senior leadership. But you also can't accept commitments that will burn out your team and deliver poor results. Welcome to the uncomfortable middle ground of management.
What I'm Figuring Out: The art is in negotiation and education. I'm learning to respond with: "We can absolutely support this. Here are three approaches with different timelines and trade-offs." Then I explain the business impact of each option.
Sometimes I can influence priorities. Sometimes I can't, and I have to manage my team's workload and morale through difficult periods while being honest about constraints.
This protective buffer role connects to my thoughts on leading remote network engineering teams – you need to shield your team from organizational politics so they can focus on technical excellence.
The hardest part? Absorbing executive frustration without passing it down to your team. Your stress can't become their crisis.
5. Finding Your Management Style Takes Longer Than Finding Your Technical Voice
As a network engineer, I developed a problem-solving approach over the years. I knew my strengths, my knowledge gaps, and how I worked best. Becoming a manager reset all of that.
The Identity Crisis: I'm still figuring out what kind of manager I want to be. How hands-on should I be with technical decisions? How much should I share about organizational politics? When should I push back versus when should I accept direction from above?
The Pressure: Your team is watching, evaluating, and forming opinions about your management style from day one. Meanwhile, you're making it up as you go, trying different approaches, and learning from mistakes.
The Discovery Process: I'm learning that authenticity matters more than having it all figured out. When I tried to be the "always confident leader" I thought I should be, it felt forced. When I started being honest about uncertainty while still providing direction, the team responded better.
Some days I'm more hands-on with technical decisions. Some days I step back completely. I'm still finding that balance, and I'm starting to accept that maybe the balance shifts depending on the situation rather than being a fixed state.
This journey relates to what I wrote about in my first post on transitioning from network engineer to manager – the psychological shift from doing the work to enabling others to do the work.
The Unexpected Comfort: Talking to other new managers, I've learned everyone feels this way. The managers who seem to have it all figured out are often just better at hiding their uncertainty.
The Common Thread: Give Yourself Grace
If there's one meta-lesson from all of these, it's this: you're going to make mistakes, feel uncertain, and question your decisions. That's not a sign you're failing – it's a sign you care about doing the job well.
I wish someone had told me it's okay to:
Not have all the answers immediately
Try an approach, realize it's not working, and change course
Ask for help from other managers or your own leadership
Admit to your team when you're learning something for the first time
The managers I respect most aren't the ones who pretend they never struggled. They're the ones who are honest about the learning process while still moving forward.
What I'm Doing Differently Now
Building a Manager Network: I'm connecting with other technical managers, both inside and outside my organization. Having people I can text at 9 PM with "Is this normal or am I handling this wrong?" has been invaluable.
Documenting Lessons Learned: I'm keeping notes on what works and what doesn't. When I try a new approach to team meetings or performance conversations, I write down the results. It's creating a playbook for myself.
Regular Team Check-ins: I'm asking my team directly for feedback on my management approach. Not annually during performance reviews, but regularly in one-on-ones. "How am I doing as your manager?" is a scary question to ask, but the answers help me improve.
Permitting Myself to Evolve: The manager I am today won't be the manager I am in six months. I'm treating this as a learning journey rather than expecting to have everything mastered immediately.
For Those Considering Management
If you're thinking about making the jump to management, here's my honest take: it's harder than I expected in different ways than I anticipated. The technical challenges of network engineering feel straightforward compared to the human dynamics of team leadership.
But it's also rewarding in ways I didn't predict. Watching team members solve problems they couldn't have tackled six months ago. Removing obstacles so your team can do their best work. Building something larger than what you could accomplish individually.
Just know that you won't have it figured out on day one, month one, or probably even year one. And that's completely normal.
The question isn't whether you'll struggle with these challenges. The question is whether you're willing to work through them, learn from mistakes, and grow into the role over time.
For me, two months in, the answer is yes. Ask me again in six months, and I'll probably have five more things I wish I'd known.
Conclusion: The Messy Reality of Management Growth
Here's what I've learned in these first two months that nobody told me: becoming a good manager isn't about having all the answers or getting it right from day one. It's about being willing to learn in public, admit mistakes, and adjust your approach based on what actually works rather than what you thought would work.
The five lessons I've shared here – breaking old habits, navigating culture change, mastering budgets, buffering organizational chaos, and finding your management style – aren't challenges you solve once and move on. They're ongoing realities you get better at managing over time.
The truth about management is this: The discomfort you feel when you don't know the right answer, when you make a mistake, or when you have to have a difficult conversation – that's not a sign you're failing. It's a sign you're growing. The best managers I know are still figuring things out years into their careers. They've just gotten better at navigating uncertainty while still moving forward.
If you're in your first few months of management and feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or like you're making it up as you go, you're exactly where you should be. The goal isn't perfection; it's progress. Keep learning, stay humble, ask for help when you need it, and give yourself permission to be a work in progress.
Your team doesn't need you to be perfect. They need you to be authentic, supportive, and willing to learn alongside them. That's something you can deliver, even on the days when everything else feels uncertain.
Two months in, I'm still learning. Six months from now, I'll probably have a whole new list of things I wish I'd known. And you know what? That's exactly how this journey is supposed to work.
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What surprised you most about becoming a technical manager? What do you wish you'd known before taking on the role? Share your experiences in the comments or connect with me on LinkedIn – I'd love to hear your story!
