MEL #058 | From Electrical Engineering Student to Mission Director Through Be Fierce Leadership Under Pressure with Erin Gulden

GULDEN (00:00)

We had to find that fierceness inside of us to do the hard things. And I didn’t mean the engineering hard things, like the technical math hard things, because I know they could do those. But it was the hard conversations that we had to have, the honesty, the don’t leave something unsaid that continues to fester type of conversations.

ADAMS (02:40)

In this episode, I speak with Erin GULDEN, a senior executive leader, engineer, and mentor with experience guiding complex, high-impact programs in the national security and space domains.

Erin started out thinking she would become an architect, but an early bridge design project helped her realize she was wired for function over aesthetics. She switched from civil to electrical engineering, kept her Air Force ROTC scholarship, and stepped into a career where five years of service turned into twenty-five. 

Over time, she moved from technical work to major satellite programs, policy, and budgeting at the Pentagon, and eventually leadership roles during the stand-up of the Space Force, then shifted her focus to mentoring and developing the next generation.

In our leadership segment, Erin describes leading a high-stakes national defense space program where the technical problem was real, but the bigger challenge was trust, honesty, and team behavior under pressure. She chose an authentic leadership approach instead of the aggressive style she was advised to use, and introduced a simple rallying motto: Be Fierce. The turning point was not just solving engineering risks, it was creating psychological safety so teams could surface issues early, ask questions without fear, and collaborate across organizations.

Erin’s advice to aspiring engineering leaders is based on three pillars.  One: build a strong foundation that can carry the load of change. Two: be fierce by choosing courage over comfort, and three: learn something new every day through deliberate reflection and support from coaches, mentors, and champions. She also offers a practical reminder she used in senior roles: WAIT, which stands for “Why am I talking?”

Without further delay, here is my conversation with Erin Gulden

Hi Erin, welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

GULDEN (02:42)

Hi Angelique thank you so much for letting me be a part of this. I’m excited to start a conversation with you.

ADAMS (02:48)

Yeah, I’m excited too. Can you start out by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

GULDEN (02:52)

Sure, so so from the time I was little I I liked to build and create things like we lived kind of out on Five acres of land in the woods. I had two younger brothers But I seem to always be playing outside like digging in the dirt with trucks or whatever and I like to explore and I loved the To kind of maybe even the discipline and flow behind things. I wasn’t really a free flow kid when I like think back on my childhood I love kind of the logic behind it, which I

still do today, but I originally thought I was going to be an architect. Like I had always loved building and architecture still kind of do today, but I had this great opportunity in high school to take an introduction to architecture set of courses at a local university one summer. I think it was like before my junior year. And I remember this one specific project. It’s maybe a standard balsa wood bridge.

has two requirements, you have to build like a strong load to weight ratio and you had to make it aesthetically pleasing. So I take this class, I’m all excited. My design actually carried the, had the best load to weight ratio, carried the most, stayed totally sound. And I vividly remember my professor saying, well, that’s great, but I didn’t get a good feeling as I walked across your bridge.

I ended up getting kind of a C if you want to call it, if we were graded on that project, an A for structure and basically an F for aesthetic beauty. And in my head I’m saying, yeah, but you survived going across the bridge. Everyone else in the class, you would have died. So I kind of learned through that that I tended to like the design for functionality and structural integrity, not.

I don’t know, experiences in beauty or whatever. So I said, all right, well, let me go to apply to university and let’s study civil engineering. Cause I felt like maybe that was the closest to architecture, but I started doing civil engineering, coursework stuff, across the board. And, and I just started finding like my heart wasn’t in it the way I thought it was going to be. I don’t know, like statics and structural dynamics, they were fine, whatever. But then I became even less excited about.

having to start materials sciences classes. And I joke, I’m sure this was not really the title of the course, but it was something like concrete 101. I’m sure it had a real material science title to it, but that was the moment that I was like, I can’t do this. Like I can’t be a civil engineer because this is so not interesting to me. So right around like the same time I had a really good friend who was taking some senior level courses in like satellite design and optics and lasers and

I kept looking over at him going like, what are you studying again? Because that stuff sounds really cool. And I felt like that was exciting. Whereas the classes that I was supposedly to look forward to in civil engineering were so not exciting. Found out he was studying electrical engineering. So I was in Air Force ROTC at the time and on a scholarship. So I kind of had to go back to the Air Force and say,

Hey, like I really don’t like the civil engineering. Could I keep my scholarship? But could I switch to electrical engineering? And it’s funny because at the time the air force could not get enough electrical engineers. So it was pretty much without hesitation. They said, sure, go be an electrical engineer. We’d love to have you. So it fortuitously worked out again. You know, I won’t say my path to graduation was super easy. I had some family challenges I had to deal with at the time.

work through and academics was still tough. Electrical was challenging as you can’t really necessarily always see it tactically. But I really learned a lot about myself then and things like just I had to admit that I didn’t always have the answers and teamwork became critical not only for studying but to get projects completed. And so both like professionally or personally and academically and if you call that professionally, I don’t know.

I really started to think about what it took to be successful. It’s maybe really the first time in my life I did. But then now professionally I said, all right, well, I’m going to go enter the Air Force. My strategy, not knowing much, was that I was going to do like four or five years, meet my commitment. And then I transitioned to industry and worked for some big engineering company or something. But I found that the opportunities just…

kept expanding in the Air Force. And so somehow before I knew it, five years turned into 25 years. And I found myself just like really enjoying all the different assignments. I mean, I got to do like ground systems and tech development early in my career. Then I like switched to strategic policy and budgeting in the Pentagon. And then I got to finally like lead some large scale satellite production teams and big.

launch campaigns as a mission director. So I had all these unique opportunities and I was challenging both my engineering and leadership along the way. Eventually we got to stand up a brand new military service, which was a huge challenge in leadership. then when we stood up the space force in 2019, so kind of every one of those new opportunities was challenging. It was rewarding and I really just kind of loved what I was doing. I loved working with the people and I, I think overall I just found that.

passion that I in my heart loved, which was serving others. So when I retired from the Air Force, Space Force, guess, started Air Force, ended Space Force, but when I retired, I kept that passion going. So now it just shows up, I think a little differently. And I volunteer on engineering leadership and alumni boards here at Penn State University, mentor students, I guest lecture in some undergraduate and graduate courses.

I think now I guess my focus is more on developing the next generation of technical leaders while kind of continually growing myself. So I guess that’s why I got into and maybe why I’m still learning and enjoying the whole engineering and engineering leadership journey that I’m on in life.

ADAMS (08:30)

That’s a great recap of your career trajectory. I really appreciate a couple of things about we said early on.

you seem to be able to tap into, actually, I don’t really like this. I want to do something different. This really isn’t for me. And I’m just curious are you,

conscious of sort of reflecting on the situations that you’re in and how you feel about staying the course or really changing things, in some cases pretty big, particularly even in the beginning, changing your major. mean, that’s a pretty big deal early on in an academic career before you’ve had the life experience to realize that actually it wasn’t that big a deal after all,

GULDEN (09:05)

Yeah, you know thinking back on it I I Don’t know when I was younger if I intentionally thought about it as much as maybe I Have in the latter half of my professional career, especially upon retirement. I probably went atypical Than most most folks that would retire when I did and you know you go and you do you run a program at a major major

industry company, It’s just kind of tradition. And I went very different and said, I’m moving away from this industry because it just didn’t, I loved it, but I wanted to do something else. Right. So I think in, at the beginning of my life, I wasn’t as deliberate about that self-awareness and self-actualization or whatever we want to call it. I don’t know what the, the academic term might be, but I think later on I,

I did spend a lot of time kind of reflecting and I had some mentors and coaches along my career that really taught me more about how to do that or the fact that you have to do it, Having the experience is one thing, but in order to learn from it, you actually have to reflect on it. Like you have to actually think about what has happened and where you want to go and maybe how you need to change your trajectory. I think someone once told me about

I’m not a sailor, I don’t sail, but right when you do sail, you don’t go in a straight line, right? The wind is gonna shift and you have to go right and left in order to go east or west or whatever direction you’re gonna go, but it’s not straight. So there’s little adjustments and course corrections you make along the way. And it stuck with me that I think I’m just making some little course corrections, but to do that, you have to look at the world around you and make those adjustments to what you’re doing. So I don’t know, that’s a great question.

really thought much about it as I was younger, but probably a lot more deliberate as I got older.

ADAMS (10:51)

Yeah, I think that’s really quite typical and sort of what we’re doing. And I imagine you’re doing it too in that kind of engineering leadership space at, you know, in academia now is trying to help the younger generation maybe come to that realization a little sooner, And give them some tools they can use.

GULDEN (11:06)

Absolutely. Nobody talked to me about this back then. Right.

ADAMS (11:08)

Exactly.

GULDEN (11:09)

I was just trying to get through things and I don’t know, felt like there was a path that everybody took and it wasn’t until I started asking questions professionally and I realized, gosh, not everybody took the same path. So maybe there’s different paths for different people.

ADAMS (11:35)

All right, Erin, can you give us an example of how you’ve used leadership skills in your work?

GULDEN (11:39)

Of course. So I think when I look back on things, the moments that shaped my leadership most were when everything wasn’t maybe going well. They were when maybe the data wasn’t complete or the stakes were super high or people were looking at me for clarity that like I didn’t have at the time. And so maybe before I give my specific example, let me give a little bit of background just to set the context. Cause not everybody

potentially listening to this will have a good appreciation for what like a national defense space program, what the engineering means in that case, right? So national defense space programs are, the best way I can describe them is it’s engineering with significant consequences, The decisions are tied to national security, people’s lives, taxpayer trust, and the majority of the satellite systems that we design and put on orbit

Many of them are designed to operate continuously for a decade or more. You can’t bring back the hardware, you can’t replace it, you don’t do routine depo or maintenance or anything. And at best, maybe you can put up some small software adjustments. But because of this, the systems are like super complex. The stakes are really high and your responsibility from being like an individual contributor to a large scale team leader.

grow very quickly, very fast. You’re put in the big leadership roles, potentially much faster than you would in a traditional kind of engineering industry. so along that way, had lots of different learning, but I probably one of the biggest things was that maybe people don’t always need you as the leader to be perfectly certain. You just need to be honest and like authentic. It’s what people wanted to see as they were going through, you know, from their leader challenged.

whatever the challenging situation you’re working through. So one of the best examples that comes to mind of this was maybe mid-career. I kind of said at the beginning, right, I had done a lot of things early on and then I shifted into this. I was presented this opportunity to lead as a full program manager on a multi-million dollar satellite production and delivery program. So most of my experiences before that had been at the project level.

And when I first took over leadership then, I prepared to step into what I thought was gonna be like technically challenging leadership. I appreciated that there was a bigger picture there, but I really didn’t initially appreciate that this was really the first program in my career where that success or failure would be at the national or even international level. It was much more public, it was much more critically impacting. And I had never carried that type of weight on my shoulders before at that point.

So I walked in thinking that my like biggest hurdle was gonna be this kind of set of recent mistakes that had occurred. We had a parts control and hardware testing process, which like I said, the thing has to work for 10 years working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days. And so you have very robust parts controls and testing procedures. And we had some failures that occurred in that process. And I said, okay, that’s my big hurdle I’m walking into.

if only that was it. Right. Like I really realized on day one, right. I had this like trifecta of things that I had to tackle. new new new spacecraft program was behind schedule. We had this critical parts issue that I was just talking about the those parts, by the way, were part of many different subcomponents on the spacecraft. The spacecraft was already built.

They were very specialized parts, so I couldn’t just go buy new ones and pop them in somewhere. If we were going to sit there and replace them all, it would be a huge, major likely rebuild, delay the program, So I kind of had to walk into this with the idea that we might have to get comfortable with the current life expectancy and the risks of that component. But then we also had to integrate this new design spacecraft with a brand new ground system.

That was by the way being built by a different defense contractor, not the one building the spacecraft. And the Air Force at the time said, we want you guys to bring all this together and we want you to launch that spacecraft on a new rocket system that the government has never launched on before. So let’s integrate all that together. And so my little parts problem or my parts problem that I thought was a big problem became maybe the little problem amongst the big problems.

And all of that was, I called that like this integration trifecta. was all these firsts, all these new things. And it was like day one. So needless to say, I was like very intimidated as a new program manager. Up to that point, I had worked hard engineering problems, complex ones, but my scope of responsibility, I equate it to kind of, you know, they were

These things lived on whiteboards and design reviews and test reports. Like they were smaller. The impact was less. The decision now for me was a national critical program with military operations, civil impacts to civil infrastructure. And I didn’t really have an option not to be successful. It wasn’t a trial run. wasn’t a test case. was really, really real. And I was

finding myself sitting in rooms where all these big decisions were leading to be made, millions of dollars in cost and launch delays and ultimately impacting trust around ourselves, our stakeholders, the nation, that sort of thing. And it was the first time for me that engineering stopped feeling theoretical. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, I’m like, that to me was almost a turning point where it’s real.

a convergence of a lot of risks, a lot of things, and they multiply and compound on each other. So if engineering was changing in my mind, I felt like I also had to change how I led. How I had been successful in the past wasn’t necessarily how I was probably gonna have to be successful in the future. So when we talked earlier about, know, did I do enough self-reflection or did I know that I had to make a change? This is probably my turning point.

where I started realizing I have to actually like deliberately think about things and deliberately grow in certain ways. And so it’s kind of a fortuitous that you asked that question earlier. So I’m sitting in all these meetings, tactical discussions, trade-offs being debated, nothing was a very easy yes or no, black and white. And I have my new

boss, my senior military officer supervisor. And of course there’s tons in the military structure, but the one that was immediately my senior leader, he was repeatedly telling me that I had to have this firm hand with the contractor and they made mistakes and I had to deliberately get them to demand that they remedy this parts issue and get us back on schedule. And it was, I don’t know, it was a little bit more rough and aggressive than probably my personality.

you know, really was. So my thoughts are going everywhere on what to do. My anxiety is increasing. My self doubt is dramatically increasing. And I’m approaching the point in that first month, right? Where I have to prepare to go in front of I’m addressing the entire government contractor team at that point. It’s like a big program management type review, large auditorium. And I’ve got my

leadership telling me one approach I’m supposed to take. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really sleeping very well. I was wrestling with my boss wanted me to say and how he wanted me to approach this problem. And I was quickly realizing that maybe it wasn’t for me. Cause I wasn’t just solving an engineering problem. And frankly, I wasn’t solving the engineering problem anyway. My job at that point and what I was leading was

being a steward of the responsibility to others, right? That responsibility to the mission and the people and who is going to operate the system and the taxpayers who are paying for the system and the engineers and teammates that are going to have to execute whatever it is that we decide to go do in somewhat this whole trifecta of programs that are converging together, We all have to work together, but we’ve got a team that has to move forward. So no matter what role people were playing on that team.

the team needed trust. They needed to effectively be able to communicate with each other without fear. And I felt like that without fear piece became huge. We had to have that integrity and that honesty to be, to get over the uncomfortable situations, what was uneasy or difficult to say because we couldn’t sit there and spend all day blaming and finger pointing or.

We just had to be transparent and honest in how we were gonna solve the problem. Didn’t matter if you were the government or industry or you were in the leadership or no matter where you were, right? We had to find a way and therefore I had to find a way to create that environment of honest, fair and encouraging. I just didn’t feel like the room needed a heavy hand at the time. Not to mention that’s also.

traditionally not my way of doing things. So don’t get me wrong. The team had to understand that, yes, like I was extremely disappointed in the situation we found ourselves in. I expected so much more from them. Never wanted to be in that situation. was risky. It was super precarious. I didn’t want to ever do that again, but I had to be genuine in how I got the team to feel that as well and how I was going to approach that.

And I’m kind of now thinking I’m gonna go against my supervisor in the way that he wants me to approach this problem. So that’s tough. I’m new in the job. My supervisor says, I want you to go one way. And I’m saying, that is not the way I think we need to go. So for people in the program at the time, I think they would probably describe my leadership style that day that I addressed everybody. I think they called it, someone once told me it was the disappointing mother speech.

ADAMS (21:00)

Interesting, yeah.

GULDEN (21:02)

And it was very different than what they were expecting. mean, some might have expected, but I think in general, they had been used to a different style. I wasn’t loud or dramatic. I just kind of calmly expressed what I said before, I’m disappointed. I knew the team could do better. We, I owned it. It was now my team, right? We had not met our shared values and those expectations. And I, we had to do better.

I was confident that they would meet those high standards and they had that professional pride because they have built large systems before, but that we really had to go back to basics in some ways. We had to pay attention to detail. had to have, we had to find that, I ended up calling it fierceness. We had to find that fierceness inside of us to do the hard things. And I didn’t mean the engineering hard things, like the technical math hard things, because I know they could do those.

but it was the hard conversations that we had to have, the honesty, the don’t leave something unsaid that continues to fester type of conversations. And so we ended up in the end of all this kind of creating this motto for the team that was called Be Fierce. was be fierce in your honesty, your integrity, the pride that you bring, what you deliver both internally to yourself.

When you go home at the end of the day, are you proud of what you did? Are you proud of the work that you did? You should be. If you’re working hard, you’re being honest, you’re being a good team player, you’re doing the best that you can, you should be proud. And you should also be proud of the contributions that you’re contributing to national security and the technology that you’re bringing to the table and those high standards that I knew that we could achieve. But it was that transition for me both to my leader, my boss.

to say, I internally had to say, I hear what you’re saying and I’ve listened to you as a coach. I’m telling you that if you want me to lead this team, I have to lead it genuinely the way I feel it needs to be led. So trust me, give me a chance and let me do it this way. And he’d been around the block, as I remember too, he knew the different teams, different people. was new, I brought in, he said, all right, I’ll give you a shot.

Go for it, do it your way, because you’ve got to lead it. And the team did achieve success. And I think that be fierce attitude kind of followed folks as we moved forward in our lives doing the, not only the things that might be hard professionally, but just having that internal fortitude to choose courage over comfort, And pick the hard things. So it’s, I think that’s.

That was probably my biggest shift and the biggest thing I learned in how to lead people and leading the right way for the right situation.

ADAMS (23:30)

That’s a great example. It raises several questions for me that I want to just dig into because I’m really fascinated by how you approach this. The first question I have is, you said you went in thinking you had an engineering problem and you pretty quickly assessed that this was not just a small technical problem, that it is a much bigger situation, there’s all these variables and that you have to approach things differently.

And so I’m curious if that transition, that turning point in how you showed up as a leader, if you were primarily drawing upon the skills that you felt like you already had as a leader and you’re saying, okay, maybe I just need to reprioritize things or maybe I need to like amplify certain parts of how I show up as a leader and or were you finding yourself sort of like, ⁓ like I’ve got to try something different. Like Erin has to learn some new leadership.

skills here pretty quickly in order to be effective in this particular environment.

GULDEN (24:28)

Great question. I think it’s, this is not a cop out answer, but I think it’s a mix of both. There were some things that I maybe tapped into what I had done in the past, but it was probably maybe 30 % or something. I feel like a larger portion was truly me getting comfortable with being who I am and being honest to myself.

ADAMS (24:34)

Sure, yeah.

GULDEN (24:55)

about how I think I had to lead. You know, some people asked me later on if it was this, I was a female leader, is it imposter syndrome? Is it all these other like terms and words? And I don’t even know, I guess you could sit there and say, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I didn’t think about it in those terms back then. I just, I thought about it in the fact that I was confident because I had tried some things in the past that had.

either worked or didn’t. And I’m like, okay, well, that seemed to work in this scenario. So I’m going to use this, this and this. But then there were some things I hadn’t had the opportunity to try yet. Maybe I’d read it in a book or I tend to try to like, I like to read a lot. so I said, well, or I’d seen things that have worked or not worked. And, but I hadn’t had a been given the chance to try them. So I think this was the biggest opportunity for me to say I,

I had this gut feeling that I have to try to do something slightly different and I have to go against what I might’ve done in the past, which was while my boss said to do it this way. So he or she has more experience than I do. So I’m gonna follow because they have more experience. So I’ll just do it their way because we would inherently assume if they’re a supervisor that that experience would drive the right answer.

And so I think it was internally my shift to say maybe his experience in this case and my experience because they’re different. There’s no two people alike. There’s no two experiences that anyone ever has. And even if you live the same experience because of your past life and who you are, you’re gonna, you’re still gonna pull different things out of that moment in time. So I think that

That was when I said, I’ve got to try a couple of new things. I honestly didn’t know if this idea of be fierce. And these are seasoned engineers, they’re big professionals. I’m in the middle of my career and I’m talking to someone who’s been maybe working in this particular company for 20 or 30 years. And I’m like, they’re going to look at me in this auditorium and say, what is she doing? Really? That’s the phrase we’re to go with.

And I knew it and there was probably half the room that thought that and there was another half of the room That was maybe was excited. I don’t know but So I I knew I was cognizant enough to know that they fail completely But I It was that gut feeling that said there are some things here I’m gonna have to try because the environment I’m in now is very different than anything I’ve ever had a chance to try it in before so I think it

ADAMS (27:06)

It’s me.

GULDEN (27:22)

turned out pretty good. mean, I’m pretty happy with the way that the whole program was able to move forward. I have no doubt that if I sat there and really dug into it all, that could have done something different. And somebody would say, well, if you’d have taken this approach or that approach, you might’ve gotten a better result. But I think it was a mix, probably 30 % comfort at what I was

ADAMS (27:41)

it.

GULDEN (27:48)

doing and and probably honestly that portion was in how I interacted deeper at the technical level because I had already done those types of things. I had already had technical conversations whether it was about a component or a part or a testing strategy or whatever. It was the 70 % that was bigger. It was how do I relate this? How do I talk to my big senior leadership? How do I talk to the general officers that

maybe are also disagreeing with my approach. And that was the part I never really had the chance to try until then. But I had some amazing leadership that let me try. And those coaches and those mentors around me said, you know, we trust you, go forth and conquer and let’s hope that this approach works. So I love it that they gave me those opportunities to try without that fear.

That… a failure, I guess.

ADAMS (28:37)

Another question that came up when you were talking about this situation is

how did you monitor going forward, whether or not the tactics that you were trying to work? So of course there’s the big auditorium and you’re setting the vision, you’re setting the tone and that maybe is it’s an event, It’s an opportunity to talk to everybody at one time and maybe change the thought pattern. But then you’ve got days, weeks, months, I don’t know how long this program went, but you’ve got this.

longer term monitoring and constant re-communicating And so I’m curious how you approached that aspect of it.

GULDEN (29:18)

Sure. along those lines, was probably more different phases. So I ended up about a three year run on that program before they shifted me to something else. And I said, we had multiple satellites to launch. that the scenario I gave was the first one, but we were building several of them. So there were engagements that I had with.

maybe the junior engineering teams and the junior integration teams. And I would watch the chiefs that were in charge of them, right? Branch chiefs, division chiefs, whatever. And if they were owning their space, the less that they came to me for every answer, I felt like the environment in their level was growing in the right direction. It didn’t happen overnight. There’s a fear associated with…

I don’t know, so I’m gonna run up my leadership chain wherever it is. But the less and less I saw them coming up the chains for answers, the more I realized that they had that safe space to operate. I would hear them having conversations. We’d actually be sitting in program management reviews where the more junior engineer felt comfortable enough in that big room of people to ask a question.

because they said, I don’t understand. And if I don’t understand, maybe someone else doesn’t understand. So I’m gonna raise my hand and ask this question. And nobody’s gonna look around the room and point at me and say, I can’t believe he doesn’t know that. Of course this is the right answer. Everyone was very respectful of each other. They were encouraging that learning environment and that we were gonna problem solve together. And then as I looked around me at my peer level, so the other,

⁓ program managers from the other defense contractors, the launch community. We ended up instituting like a Friday at noon meeting with just a few select of us. And it was kind of that situation very, very similar where we could say whatever was on our mind. There was no, it did not, I called it badge agnostic, right? When you work in that environment, everyone has a different color badge and…

I come from this company and this is my objective and or I’m from this government agency, blah, blah, blah. I said, throw your badges out the window. ⁓ you’re geographically separated all over the country Friday at whatever noon on the West coast or whatever time that was for folks. We’re to get together for one hour diligently every week. And you can say in that room, so-and-so your team is not performing or I loved how your team did this.

or I need this from you this week. And we didn’t then leave the room grumbling about each other, We said that was the one place where we did not have senior leadership for many of our organizations, nor did we have subordinates. It was just us. And sometimes in those senior leadership positions, you might not have friends to talk to, I found. People say it’s lonely. I don’t really know that lonely is the right word, but.

I created that safe space with just us. And the more open we were with each other, the more quickly we actually solved problems. They were like, wait, my team is doing what to your team? no, we’ll have that fixed. Well, I’ll tackle that problem. And then two days later, that roadblock is gone, whatever that was needed. So I felt it was at two different levels. When I started seeing success amongst the technically deep smart engineers that were

problem solving together collaboratively. And then I also saw it at the senior executive levels where we were transparent with each other and some days were fiercer than others, We had to, I think we did. I really think we all had to kind of come to grips with, no, I actually have to have a real conversation with the person. This is gonna be hard. But it was a safe space to do that. So I think as I saw those two things shift, I felt like

we were still heading on the right path. But I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t quite know what those metrics, you wanna look, engineers wanna find metrics, how it’s a metric of success. I didn’t necessarily have those metrics when I started. I wasn’t quite sure how I was gonna measure success. I had some ideas. But I think in the end, those were the two biggest metrics of success that…

that I knew we had the right environment to tackle any technical problem that got put in front of us.

ADAMS (33:19)

Yeah, and think that’s really important. And mean, astute on your part and often something that emerging leaders, don’t think really truly understand is that it is often these behavioral signals. It’s how people are working together. It’s what they’re saying to each other that can be really important indicators. And so learning how to listen for those things and interpret those signals is really important as you grow into leadership.

GULDEN (33:46)

sometimes I think engineering leadership is about that, just like you said, those signals that judgment and the trust and courage, like long before it’s about technology. It’s the other things too. So that’s good.

ADAMS (33:59)

And now turning back to you and sort of how you are personally managing kind of your own state, cause you said, you felt like you maybe had 30 % of the skills and now, so you’re taking on, you’re trying all these new things in a super high risk environment, much more publicly facing in terms of, other leadership, other bits. So this is a lot for you to manage. And I’m just curious, were there any strategies that you

found yourself relying upon So three years of this is a long time. When we talk about crisis, you know, crisis management, we tend to think of them at a little bit shorter duration, but.

You know, this was, this was a sustained high intensity engagement.

GULDEN (34:39)

That’s probably during this time in my life is probably where I I don’t like saying failed but where my self-care was the weakest sure. I don’t know it I Tried as often as I could to to kind of reset I think some of the biggest things I probably did so I number one I have amazingly supportive spouse I’ll say two daughters at the time they were I don’t know. I mean they were in school. were probably

junior, junior high, maybe elementary age. So life at home was dynamic and challenging. I could not cleanly do the separation of I’m at work when I’m at work and I’m at home when I’m at home. I started realizing then, and actually a mentor kind of shared this with me, it’s, I don’t even know if it’s priorities. It’s just, it’s, don’t like the, by the way, I don’t like the,

work-life balance, because as an engineer, balance means a scale that is equal. And I don’t really think work and life are equal. Like, I just don’t even comprehend that phrase. I look at all of this as life harmony. A great chief master sergeant gave me that, right? It’s life harmony. So there’s gonna be times when your professional life

takes a priority because there’s something that has to be done and the other parts of your life shift a little, right? Maybe they don’t take the priority. But then there’s other times when, no kidding, the family is coming first. I always had a rule on the program. So it’s probably the one thing I would say I did well is we celebrate and participate in firsts. And what I mean by that, course, we just talked about a whole bunch of engineering problems, the firsts of all these things we were tackling.

So we did celebrate that when we were successful. But I also told folks, if your kid is having their first day of kindergarten, stay home and be there for that hour and walk them to school on their first day. Or it’s graduation. Maybe I should call it first and onlys, right? They’re graduating from something. Be at the graduation. I guarantee you that the half a day you take to be at their graduation is way more important.

than any meeting that we’re gonna have on a topic. Because the meeting will be there or the conversation will be there tomorrow. So I think we did as a team and I then myself did a pretty good job of that harmony where we prioritize things that were first or only. I would try very hard on my way home to separate from what was work, I kind of…

Sometimes I was on the phone in the car on the way home, whatever, trying to finish up meetings. But when I got in the door, I tried really hard to at least for a short period of time before my kids went to bed, focus on them. So I would tell like my leadership chain, that group that would talk on maybe Fridays, I’d be like, look, we all have kids at all different phases of life. If we need to rehash a conversation or you wanna talk to me, please don’t call me between the hours of like five and eight. Like, let’s all go home and eat dinner.

spend time with our spouses or kids or friends or hit the gym or whatever it is you wanna do, just, okay, call me at nine. That’s fine, we’ll talk for 30 minutes at nine o’clock. But I felt like I had given the right amount of time to the family that they were important enough to me that I didn’t spend the six o’clock dinner time on the phone with somebody else, right? And de-prioritizing the time with them. So I was not perfect at it. No, by no stretch of the imagination.

I still kept trying and the jobs I’ve had after that, I was better at moments and worse at others. But I think that might’ve been it. It was that it’s life and it’s a life harmony and you’re gonna have to shift. I think my girls would say, my two daughters would probably say that I used the word promise only when I knew I really could deliver.

Promised those two something they knew that I would be there or do that thing if I Promised something to my husband kind of the same thing if I said I’m gonna try really hard They knew well Mom may or may not get to my play that day, but she promised she’d be there on the second showing But she might not be able to get to the afternoon Showing or whatever. I don’t know Or she hit the soccer game, but maybe not the next one

because I had to travel and all the other things in life, right? So I think I was careful with my words. I think promise was a big word. It meant a big thing in our family that we delivered on a promise. And so I hope that that also now as my daughters are older and adults of their own, I don’t know, I guess I hope that they take that into their own life and it’s not a balance, it’s a harmony in everything that’s conflicting in your life.

to make it work for you, whatever that is for you and your family unit. Because by the way, the family unit’s also what stays with you forever. There’s no job that’s gonna be with you forever. There’s no, as much as you might love your work colleagues, they’re also not gonna be with you forever, but that family is what is. The last moments of your life in theory, your family is with you, not the person you worked with on.

problem, whatever, whatever, 10 years ago, right? So I don’t know, maybe that was a little bit of rambling, but that’s, I think that’s kind of how I approach life in general and definitely how I approached life at that point in time.

ADAMS (39:52)

All right, Erin, as we wrap up, what advice do you have for engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

GULDEN (39:59)

Okay, so kind of to wrap up, think, and I think I’ve kind of said this a couple times throughout here, right? I get a sense that a lot of engineers, especially junior engineers and even maybe students, right? You aren’t quite engineers yet. They kind of believe that leadership starts when someone gives you a title. In my experience though, leadership really starts long before that. It’s personal. It shows up maybe when no one’s keeping score, right? When no one’s looking.

I think it’s John Maxwell. He was one of the first leadership writers that I ever read way, way long in my career. And he said that something along the lines of like leadership is influence. It’s not positional, it’s personal. And I found that to be absolutely true in engineering environments and other environments. So I think I’d like to leave the listeners with, I’ll call it three pillars. They’re centered around my theme of

Build a life, not a resume. So I’ve got three of them. One is, and I’ll talk a little bit about each one of these, but one of these is build a strong foundation, but one that can carry the load of change and development. Number two is be fierce. Choose courage over comfort. And then number three is learn something new every day, which is really about that deliberate growth and self-awareness that we.

talked about. So building that strong foundation, probably through our conversations, you probably get that this is the one I maybe wish I’d done a better job on sometimes. I didn’t realize the importance as much as I should have early on. But engineering leadership requires that strong foundation in both the technical domain as well as yourself to be able to continually expand.

you’re gonna have different jobs in different technical areas, different roles, different levels of responsibility. And kind of every time I transitioned to a new program or new organization, it added weight. And I had to reach back to those fundamentals. And sometimes my foundation in those was strong and sometimes it wasn’t. I took over launch programs, I had not done propulsion and…

know, liquid propulsion and solid rocket motors. I hadn’t even talked about them since college. I barely understood propulsion any even then and didn’t think I was ever going to have to do them. And now I’m running a billion dollar launch portfolio. So I had to go back. I had to sit down with engineers. I had to kind of dig back in and dust off the cobwebs and relearn some things. But you need to have a strong enough foundation. You don’t need to know everything, but you need to know enough to ask good questions.

So for students, would say that that means, like I translate that to, you your university time is not about just your GPA. It’s important to learn those technical things, but it’s also important to learn how you learn. The struggling, the overcoming the challenges, that’s part of how you build your foundation and that discipline that you start to build and create in your life is, it pays dividends later.

If you’re in the professional workforce, again, learning how you learn knowing that and how you ask questions, it continues to strengthen your foundation and how you rely on others and asking for help. But I think professionally, it’s how do you take that new knowledge and quickly and honestly implement it? Do you change something about your behavior? Do you employ something different? Did you learn something technical that you can now answer a question differently?

So it’s a step further is how you’re building that foundation. And every time you learn something and build upon it, right, that foundation keeps getting stronger and stronger and your life is also continually expanding. So build that foundation and one that can totally carry the load. So number two, be fierce, choose courage over comfort. And I think I’ve probably hit this one a lot.

But leadership is a choice, it’s not a title. It doesn’t mean being loud and authoritative, it means being intentional. Find the courage to speak up in the small moments, or find the courage in the small moments. Sometimes that might be speaking up. you know, if something just doesn’t seem right, that could be taking ownership of a mistake, even before that mistake’s visible to everybody else.

like acknowledging saying, I really think I made a mistake here. I just gotta, I gotta go tell somebody and we’ll go figure out how to fix it, right? Maybe it’s advocating for someone who you feel might not be heard, who’s valuable to the conversation. Those are sometimes hard things to do. They’re different. And as a student, maybe that looks like taking an internship that’s far away from home, studying abroad, new country, new environment, right? New learning. You’re gonna learn a lot about yourself.

placing yourself in a new environment, leadership roles in a club on campus, or trying out a new organization that interests you, those are all opportunities for you to choose being courageous over being comfortable. Those were the strongest moments in my life happened to be when I found that courage to act on something that was new or different. And I maybe describe this one the best as leadership.

often shows up when silence would be easier.

And then number three is learn something new every day. So it’s, it’s again, that self-awareness, deliberate growth. You’ve got to be, it doesn’t mean you have to dig out technical equations every day. Lord. Like that’s not, that is not what I would want or upon anybody really dig into that all the time. Right. Because it’s about building that life. Right. So every new role that you have, every new challenge that’s presented, it’s, it’s going to,

ADAMS (45:08)

to sit there.

GULDEN (45:17)

Yes, it’s gonna sometimes require new technical knowledge, but it’s also gonna require you to be a new and different version of yourself as a leader. You might not know exactly how to approach it, so learn something, go read a book, go think about it, and I’ll give you a series of books in the end that you can put on the podcast of kind of my recommendations. And it’s also not…

The scenarios where what made you effective in one organization is automatically gonna make you effective in the next scenario. And maybe I see that’s where leaders might struggle the most, is not realizing that they have to learn something new. They have to challenge what they thought the successful thing was that they had done in the past, and they have to transition to something else. So I have an acronym that…

So the military, have acronyms for everything. So somehow along the line, I created this acronym. And I might’ve heard it from somebody. I don’t even remember, but I put it on my computer. I put it on my little notebook that I had with me all the time. And it was W-A-I-T, wait. And it actually stands for why am I talking? And it was to remind me that I need to observe before I act. I need to…

pause and listen and seek feedback and input first before I just barrel in with my thoughts and direction and plans. Right? So it, it really became important early on. And honestly, the further I got in my career, it became more important because I feel like the more senior you are in organizations, no matter what, be engineering, business, doesn’t even matter.

If you walk into a room and you start talking.

Either everybody else stops. So there’s not a whole lot of collaborative conversation or people say, well, the leaders already made up their mind. So I don’t have anything else to contribute. I don’t want to, you know, it just kind of stifles the whole purpose of gathering people together for a conversation. So wait, why am I talking became a very big reminder for me every day about how do I present myself and

And I’ve learned and I’m learning something along the way with every one of those. But along that idea of learning new things, I hit on the fact that you have, you know, coaches and mentors out there. Cause you like, you don’t grow in isolation. Your experiences aren’t what makes you stronger. It’s that reflection. We talked about an adjusting and intentional shifts and changes, but you also kind of need a support team.

to help you figure some of that out sometimes. just so the listeners understand, because everyone maybe has some different definitions. So I believe there’s coaches, mentors, and champions. So you have a coach. I look at a coach as people who give you frequent direct, maybe it’s the uncomfortable feedback, but they tend to be the ones that are close to work in real time. Maybe some people call them the halftime adjustment.

right in the middle of the game they’re gonna see your blind spots quickly they might even keep your ego in check whatever it is but they help you make those small immediate course corrections before those small issues become big ones

I look at mentors where they’re the people that they probably engage with you less frequently. They tend to come with a distance and a broader perspective. I found the best mentors are the ones that ask you questions versus tell you things. They challenge your assumptions. They get you to think they’re often outside your organization completely. They may not even be in the same discipline. And they would help me zoom out.

and see the larger picture. Cause I also feel like sometimes as engineers, you want to dig in and dig deeper. And sometimes the thing you need to do as the leader is to back away and to look broader. And so the mentors helped me not by giving me the answers, but by helping me kind of reframe the questions and reframe the understanding of what was happening so that then I could learn more about what I needed to do next. Champions.

Maybe I didn’t use as much in this, you they’re the ones that advocate for you when you’re not in the room. They might help your career timing and alignment and placement and the trust with them compounds over time. while they don’t necessarily manage your career, they can kind of change its trajectory. I would say probably most of this conversation we’ve had has been focused around that coach and mentor who…

while you’re learning new things every day, remember that was point three, you’re gonna have a bunch of different mix of learning, but you also need a mix of that support. The people around you that are helping you do that learning. And I certainly don’t use all three of those types of people all the time, but I would probably say at any moment I had at least one of them. Somehow in my mind, having just had a conversation ready there or…

an email I was ready to send, right? So they’re the ones that help you intentionally learn new things every day. I’d say in recap, those three best pieces of advice I would give is build and maintain a strong foundation, one that can carry the load and has room for that expansion that you will come across in your life. Be fierce, choose courage over comfort. Leadership shows up when silence.

would be a lot easier. And then learn something new every day, right? That growth is not passive, it’s deliberate, it’s intentional, and it’s building those right relationships with people that will help you adapt, reflect, and kind of lead authentically in whatever new environment you’re put in.

ADAMS (50:37)

Erin, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

GULDEN (50:40)

No, I really appreciate it. been great talking with you, sharing a bit of it. again, remember, you’re not, don’t focus on building a resume. Cause then you’re just chasing titles, right? Build your life. And while you’re building your life, you’re developing that character and strengthening your leadership every step of that journey. So thanks a lot so much