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Abstract

Every technology professional faces a choice at some point in their career: To move up, should I pursue a people manager role? If I don’t, does that limit my career growth? I have moved from senior management “back” to individual contributor twice in my career. People management and individual contributor roles have pros and cons, and the same person can succeed in both, but what matters is whether you feel satisfied in the role. I will discuss the differences between leadership and management roles, share my tips for people considering people management, and help you determine what matters to you and how to act on this knowledge. I’ll also talk about why I’m happy, 27 years into my UC career, that I’m once again an individual contributor.

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There and Back Again

Erik Wieland

A Manager’s/Individual Contributor’s Tale

UC Tech 2025

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Agenda

Career Paths
Acquiring Skills
Gaining Understanding
Leadership Lessons
Summary
Resources

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Career Paths

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Career Paths

The Plan: Leveling Up

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I’ll be referring to versions of this chart throughout this session. I’ve simplified it down to two swim lanes: individual contributor and people manager. Note that I am not using the term leader, because individual contributors can be fantastic leaders, and managing people doesn’t automatically make you a leader.
Caveat: I started in 1997. UCSF didn’t adopt career tracks until 2015. So if you don’t recognize some of these titles: you’re not confused, you’re just not old.
The original plan was simple: work my way up to lead the IT team for the Dept. of Medicine, the largest academic department at UCSF.
When I was hired, the department was consolidating IT staff from the larger divisions. I was IT staff member number 4, mostly supporting the division of general internal medicine. I was also working on websites, developing database solutions, and managing email, calendar, file, and remote access servers.
The dot-com boom happened early in my career, and most of the rest of the team bailed. I got a job offer from outside of UCSF, and my department countered with a promotion and a raise, so I stayed.
7 years later, I helped my director reclassify my position and three others, and I became a supervisor.
1 year after that, my director quit, and I applied for his job and got it! So I avoided the plight of the 4.
What’s the plight of the 4, you ask…?

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The Plight of the 4

People Management

?

Specialization

?

Architecture

?

Many IT staff get the 4 level and feel stuck. Think Application Programmer 4, Business Systems Analyst 4, etc.
Do they try to move into people management, specialize their skills and go for a 5, or broaden their knowledge and go into architecture? How do they figure out how to decide, without choosing something that will make them miserable?
The key is to talk to people in each role

There are lots of examples of high-performing individual contributors who have become supervisors and managers. Let’s just say that the skills you develop as a technical individual contributor almost never prepare you for people management. Take classes! Talk to people you admire and ask them what helped them succeed. Ask them about how they spend their day, and pay attention to their voice and body language as they tell you. It’s guaranteed that you will spend less time with technology. Managing people isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK!
Specialization sounds simple enough, but there are few 5s at most campuses, let alone in each department. Seek them out. Ask them what they work on and who they work with. Being a 5 can be exhilarating, but it can also be lonely and frustrating if you don’t have decision-making power.
Architecture is perfect if you’re interested in a lot of things, and you still want to stay technical. Architecture involves a lot of cross-functional work, which is fulfilling, but depending on the functions, it can also be very frustrating. Get used to hearing the phrase and living the reality of “influencing without authority.”

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Career Paths

The Plan: Leveling Up

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2 years

7 years

1 year

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Career Paths

The Reality: Leveling Up…and Moving Over

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Wait. Why did you change paths?

2007: Director of IT, Dept. of Medicine

2011-2012: Operational Excellence (OE, /ɔɪ/, “oy”)

OE IT Working groups: Email & Calendaring, Helpdesk, Network, IT Procurement, IT Field Service

Asked to write and apply for IT Director of Customer Service. Didn’t want it, but I was afraid they’d pick someone terrible, so I applied.
Recruited Sian Shumway from UC Berkeley. She got the job, and I offered to come work for her in central IT.

I loved the work, and I was good at it!

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The last job I’ll ever have?

…things change

The last job I’ll ever have!

In 2007 I had my dream job! (Remember these things?)
In 2009 the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit. We had furloughs, and UCSF started looking for economies of scale.
Enter operational excellence, which sought to centralize HR, IT, Research Administration, and Finance. Mostly, it meant the poorer departments would get better service, and hopefully, the richer departments’ service wouldn’t suffer.
I served on all of the OE IT planning committees and led some working groups, one of which was the group that created the Joint Administrative Computing Standards for UCSF and UC Berkeley. My partner in crime for that effort was Sian Shumway.
Because I worked on all of those committees, I was asked to apply for 8 different positions in the new central IT organization.
The campus and school of medicine CIOs specifically asked me to write the job description for the Director of Customer Service, which would create and lead the central IT field service team. I did not want this job. But I also worried about someone awful getting hired because then all our effort would have been wasted. So I applied for the job.
Late one afternoon, Sian and I were analyzing power supply failure rates for Dell ultrasmall form factor PCs (you know, for fun), and I asked her if she wanted to apply for a job I was writing. Like me, she had worked her way up from entry level, and she hadn’t really applied for jobs outside of her department in 11 years. She said sure, why not, I can use the practice.
I continued through the hiring process, and it came down to 3 finalists: me, Sian, and a candidate from Clorox. In my final interview the campus CIO told me he felt bad, because if I hadn’t recruited Sian the job would be mine. I said no problem there, because if he hired Sian he got us both. He shouted, “Sold!” and stood up and shook my hand.
I served on the committee to design the new IT field service, including a new role called a customer engagement manager. I applied for one of those roles and got it. It was hard work, but I loved it. And I was good at it!
OK, back to the career path…. Let’s talk about the skills I acquired to do all these different jobs.

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Acquiring Skills

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Acquiring Skills

Leveling up

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Coaching

Operations

Human Resources

Process improvement

Strategic Planning

Data analysis

Compliance

Mentoring

Root cause analysis

Development

Infrastructure

Database

Event planning

Customer success

Solutions architecture

Enterprise systems

Capital budgets

Negotiations

Health IT

Integrations

Managing managers

Platform architecture

In each position, I gained skills that would end up defining my future options. I’m highlighting the skills that I either relied on in future positions or that played a role in my future decisions
PA3 skills
PA4 skills
Director skills
2014 I ran this conference when UCSF hosted it. Jane Wong, director of business applications, acted as my co-chair and mentor. I learned a LOT about a lot of things, some of them positive.
It was Jane who also got me involved in solutions architecture. Standing maybe 4’9”, Jane would play a very large role in my career journey.
I went to work for Jane as an applications manager, and she started giving me more teams and more responsibilities, which came with a new title.
I was learning incredibly valuable skills, but this wasn't happening in a vacuum. There were important events and experiences that shaped my career more than any skills could.

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Gaining Understanding

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Gaining Understanding

Critical moments

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Coalitions

Managing someone out

Operational excellence

Mentoring

My first committee

Leadership Development Program

Moving�to central IT

Leaving UCSF?

Great manager

Leadership change

At specific points in my career, there were experiences that changed my view of myself and the organization, and therefore changed what I thought was possible.
Serving on my first committee helped me understand how important it was to learn the rules and use them to my advantage. That committee was the one that, before career tracks, reviewed all classification requests for IT job roles at level 3 and higher.
I took part in the UCSF School of Medicine’s Leadership Development Program. The program was originally designed to create an internal pipeline for department managers and covered organizational, professional, and interpersonal skills. I was one of two IT people in the program that year.
I became a supervisor, in part, because my director decided he was tired of managing junior staff. One of the staff members was having performance problems. I helped them understand their job description and how that translated to their day-to-day duties and success criteria. We documented the gaps in their performance together, and we met twice a week to review their progress. They resigned the day of their investigatory meeting. They later thanked me for helping them and used me as a reference(!).
At this time I also created my first campus-wide affinity group. This coalition successfully created standards and alignment across dozens of IT teams. The real success of this group was that we convinced central IT to adopt our standards, and the group died out when we turned that common enemy into an ally.
As a director representing the largest academic department at UCSF I was involved in a lot of cross-campus initiatives, including Operational Excellence. That gave me deep insight into how other teams operated.
I was asked to mentor an IT person from another department. That got me involved in our local Administrative and Management Professionals (AMP) chapter’s mentorship program, which had been operating since 1990. I still serve on that group’s steering committee today.
You all know why I moved to central IT. It was a huge culture shock. We were creating a new culture in IT Field Services, but other central IT units we much more set in their ways. The best part of this move was that I got to see how most other departments at UCSF operated.
At the end of my 2 years in IT Field Services I was going to move to the new Customer Solutions Management team to become a Solutions Architect, which I was excited about. I asked the director of that central unit if I could supervise the team, and she said she thought it would be best to bring in someone with experience to help shape the new team, which I agreed with. Then I saw who they brought in. The new supervisor was a disaster, and I and one of my colleagues started looking for the exit. I was applying for a job on the UC Berkeley IT team when Jane Wong found out and told me, “No, you’re not leaving. I have a role for you.”
Jane would become the best manager I’ve ever worked for. She helped me understand more about how IT operates, plans, and pays for things than I could ever imagine. She would challenge me with short questions that led to long answers.
One of those questions came about early in my work for her. A friend and colleague from IT Field Services (who had also gone through the School of Medicine LDP and had mentored for AMP) and I were presenting to the IT managers, trying to convince them to mentor for AMP. At the end of our presentation we heard...silence. Crickets. I thought I saw a tumbleweed roll through the conference room. Then, from the back of the room, I heard Jane say, “Why don’t we just have our own?” After work that day we went to our favorite local bar and designed the Tech LDP. I hope you all went to that presentation this morning.
In 2023 there was a huge change in UCSF IT’s leadership. We are a combined department, covering both campus and health, so our CIO has two bosses: the CEO of UCSF Health and the SVC of Financial and Administrative Services. In 2022 we got two new leaders in these roles, both of whom wanted to finish what OE started and centralize all IT staff. Over the next two years central IT grew from 25% of the ~1200 IT people on campus to over 90%, and we’re still growing. We hired a new layer of higher-level leaders (think Associate CIO and VP, where we used to report up to directors), and I started reporting to the new VP of Enterprise Systems.
My new VP wanted to give me an opportunity to level up to Director, so I wrote the JD (natch) and applied for the job. This was when I found out that my new VP and her boss didn’t see eye-to-eye about what the job required. So I didn’t get the job, and I ended up reporting to the new director they hired instead of me. Awkward.
My VP then asked me to write a JD for a new role and apply for it. And here we are.

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Leadership Lessons

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Leadership Lessons

Learning to define my own success

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Hanlon’s razor

Saying yes, and

Learn the rules and use them to your advantage

Coalitions

Being mentored

Career options

Committees

Networking

Influencing

without authority

Strengths

Rediscovering product

Through all of these twists and turns, I learned some lessons that would influence how I operate throughout my career
After I’d been at UCSF for 5 years, I was beyond frustrated with my lack of growth. I got valuable advice from my department’s HR manager, who was referred to as The HR Oracle by her peers. She helped me understand the mechanics of classification and encouraged me to take people management classes. She also connected me with my first formal mentor.
Being mentored was a huge eye-opener. My early mentors taught me the importance of doing what you love, getting visibility into the way the organization works, putting your effort into something outside your normal job duties, and that relationships make UCSF function. My first formal mentor also got me involved in my first committee.
Perhaps ironically, it took supervising other people and helping the team through their conflicts with users to really understand the value of relationships. I’ll discuss Hanlon’s razor more in a moment, but learning how not to say yes to everything was a big turning point for me. Learning to say yes with conditions, and to effectively set expectations, completely changed my relationships with our most challenging customers.
That first committee I served on reviewed all classification requests for campus IT positions level 3 and higher. Again, this was before career tracks. Because of this experience, one of the first things I did as a Director was to create a version of career tracks. This helped me provide clear, consistent guidance to my team of 12 on what they should be working on and toward, and what their career progression might look like. Turnover plummeted, and engagement scores rose significantly. I ended up giving my first conference presentation on this effort at UCCSC (now called UC Tech) in 2009 at UC Davis.
I mentioned coalitions earlier, but here was where I really put them to use. I pulled together a coalition of IT managers from different departments, and we worked together to shape the new IT service areas that OE was building. Some of us presented on these efforts at UCCSC 2012 at UC Berkeley.
One of the hardest lessons to learn is that you even can influence without authority. It takes a special blend of skills, including storytelling, data analysis, networking, technical knowledge, and experience. But the single most important skill you need to influence without authority is active listening: unless someone trusts you to listen to their concerns and act in their best interests, you cannot influence them.
I’ll discuss Strengths at length in a few minutes, so lets move on to product.
I had studied product, Lean, and Agile in my graduate engineering program, so when academia started adopting it 25 years later as part of the "digital transformation" I was excited. Ignore the fact that industry had been practicing it for all of those 25 years. Academia never lacks problems to solves, and that's a good thing for a long career if you have the patience. In my last role I got to work with our amazing Web Services team, which aspired to a product management approach. I helped them bring analytical rigor to the practice, and we were able to show our leadership the real benefit of our products and enhancements with data. Rediscovering product was such a relief. It reminded me that I could be passionate about my work again.

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Product Methodology

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“Devil Theory” Fallacy

Don’t attribute conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

Robert A. Heinlein

Logic of Empire (1941)

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Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Robert J. Hanlon

Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong! (1980)

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Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance.

“

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Institutional Culture

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Bureaucracy is a wall

Bureaucracy is a web

✓

⃠

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Mentoring: The Three Cs

Everyone is a mentor. Everyone needs a mentor.

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Competence

Professional knowledge and experience
Respect
Interpersonal skills and good judgment

Confidence

Shares network of contacts and resources
Allows protégé to develop their own terms
Demonstrates initiative, takes risks
Shares credit

Commitment

Invests time, energy and effort to mentoring
Shares personal experience

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Manager, Mentor, Sponsor

What’s the difference?

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Role	Responsibility	Relationship
Manager	Direct the work of the individual	Focused on performance, professional and career development Based on organizational needs Driven by learning agenda influenced by organizational needs Inside the hierarchy of direct reporting relationships Sometimes, but not always, confidential
Mentor	Guide and support the individual	Focused on professional and personal development Based on mentee’s expressed needs Driven by specific learning agenda identified by the mentee Outside the hierarchy of direct reporting relationships Confidential
Sponsor	Champion the individual	Focused on career development and advancement Driven by advancement goals rather than a learning agenda Inside or outside the hierarchy of direct reporting relationships Sometimes, but not always, confidential

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Manager, Mentor, Sponsor

What’s the difference?

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Role	Responsibility	Relationship
Manager	Direct the work of the individual	Focused on performance, professional and career development Based on organizational needs Driven by learning agenda influenced by organizational needs Inside the hierarchy of direct reporting relationships Sometimes, but not always, confidential
Mentor	Guide and support the individual	Focused on professional and personal development Based on mentee’s expressed needs Driven by specific learning agenda identified by the mentee Outside the hierarchy of direct reporting relationships Confidential
Sponsor	Champion the individual	Focused on career development and advancement Driven by advancement goals rather than a learning agenda Inside or outside the hierarchy of direct reporting relationships Sometimes, but not always, confidential

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Strengths

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Skills

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Coaching

Operations

Human Resources

Process improvement

Strategic Planning

Data analysis

Compliance

Mentoring

Root cause analysis

Development

Infrastructure

Database

Event planning

Customer success

Solutions architecture

Enterprise systems

Capital budgets

Health IT

Integrations

Managing managers

Platform architecture

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Aligning Work with Strengths

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Aligning Work with Strengths

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Pathfinder

These are my top 10 strengths. I can articulate exactly how each of these strengths manifests itself in my professional and personal life, but we’re at work so let’s look at that.
I looked at the work that I found most fulfilling, and compared it to my strengths. Eureka! This should not have been a surprise, but I attribute my reaction to ignorance, not malice. (Wink!)
The two formal job roles I’ve had where I felt the most fulfilled were Solutions Architecture and Customer Engagement. So when my VP asked me to write a new job description combining these two roles you won’t be surprised to hear that I was excited.
I can simplify the title down even further: pathfinder. It’s my job to determine what’s needed and then find a path from where we are to where we need to be. That might involve a new piece of technology, a new process, a strategy, a standard, or (in most cases) some combination of these things. Pathfinding involves research, analysis, conversations, listening, and designing.

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Final Thoughts

Be kind
Collaborate
Embed people in your processes, products
Find a mentor, build your circle, become a mentor
Lead from your strengths
Learn the rules and use them to your advantage

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There is no spoon

In the immortal words of Jerry Springer...no.
We’re all here to support the mission, so remember Hanlon’s Razor and don’t make assumptions about other people. Be kind, and expect kindness. If you look for kindness, you usually find it.
Bring people along with you on your journey. Be open to supporting and collaborating with others on their work.
We support people, not things. Embed them in your processes, and your results will improve dramatically.
Mentoring is necessary. Mentoring is for everyone. Being mentored is for everyone.
Investigate your strengths. They will help you figure out your best place to start and pick the right way for you to approach most things.
UC runs on rules and relationships. Learn the rules, and leverage your relationships to make them work for you.

And finally, a lesson from the Wachowskis: there is no spoon.

You are not defined by your current title. Don’t be afraid to explore who you could be.
There are no boundaries. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people. Everyone is at UC to help in some way.
You get a say in who you become. None of us is ever finished evolving, so it’s never too late to change who you are and how others perceive you.

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Resources

Career Tracks (UCnet)
The Monty Hall Problem (Wikipedia)
CliftonStrengths (Gallup)
Campus Access Program (Gartner)
Career Development Resources (UCSF example)
Reach out to me

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