Do Your Job as If You Are the Queen of England

And I’m sure you have had more than that one mentor. Through your career, what’s been the best piece of mentorship or feedback advice, whatever you’ve received and what was so great about it to you?

Yes, I was fortunate to have, and it’s funny because I wasn’t often in formal mentoring programs. But I had people I would go to. And it’s funny because I have people in our organization today who will say, “Oh, I wish I could be assigned a mentor,” and I keep asking them, “Do you not have people you go to on your hardest days, where you just need a safe place to blow off a little steam and maybe get some advice? That’s mentorship.”
And you have mentors, you maybe just aren’t labeling them that way. And actually, one of my favorite, favorite mentors was actually a boss, the woman I worked for on the Global Positioning System, Peggy Burns, a fantastic engineer and an inspiring leader who had a way of boiling things down into very memorable phrases.
You might even think of bumper stickers, right? You could put this on a bumper sticker and people would immediately get it. One of my favorites that she shared with me that actually really probably has been, in the back of my mind, one of those little guiding principles is, “Do your job as if you’re the Queen of England.” You go, what? You mean that it’s my realm and I’m in control? No, no, no, no. What she meant was, in the conversation we had, was the Queen of England never rotates to a new role. She never quits. She doesn’t get to retire.

Right.

When she makes decisions, she has to live with them. And working in fields where the decisions we make today actually last for decades as part of our infrastructure, the global position system must fly forever.

Right.

We were making decisions that had to last. And so being told to think like the Queen of England was actually a mindset framework that helped me to get comfortable with decisions that I needed to make.