Lisa Atherton, President & CEO at Textron Systems tells us “it’s been a crazy career” since she graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy, and she really means it.
Her goal was to become a prosecutor once she left the Armed Forces and make sure bad guys got punished. However, life took a turn, she met her eventual husband, a single father of three children. Realizing with her new family that the education necessary for a legal career might not be affordable, Atherton instead officially transitioned to civilian life and took a job with the Air Force’s Air Combat Command (ACC). Now 25, she was back on the base because she had PowerPoint expertise, a rarity at the time. She used that expertise to create a training program on how to build a budget for the US Air Force.
As Atherton was asked questions about PowerPoint, she asked plenty of questions in return. “My curiosity just made me want to dig into what that budget process was. So, make sure that you remain intentionally and forever curious. Because that curiosity just made me want to dig into what that process was, and it eventually opened more doors.”
It was only a matter of time before Atherton was running the programming integration team for the ACC Directorate of Requirements. During this time, she earned her Master’s in Business at William and Mary, an education which would take a bit longer than a legal one, but which would allow her to balance work, family, and study.
Wanting to take that new diploma “out for a test drive,” Atherton and her husband opened a Cold Stone Creamery® ice cream franchise, which her husband – at that point, retired from the Air Force – managed the day-to-day while Atherton (who handled all the ‘backshop’ duties of the franchise) continued with her job at Air Combat Command.
Then, after a bout of not feeling well, Atherton discovered she was pregnant after a long period of trying. (Keep in mind that there are more exciting twists in this story than the usual CEO profile.)
“There’s really nothing better than being pregnant and owning your own ice cream shop,” she quips. “But that’s probably the most benefit I got out of that business, though, to be honest. When we finally sold it in 2008, we did not sell it at a profit. But 2008, as you may remember, was a bit of a challenging financial year,” she says. “I call that Cold Stone Creamery experience my capstone course. Even in the financial loss, I learned an incredible amount regarding business, leadership, and cash flow!”
Looking for her next challenge, Atherton heard about Textron from a mentor who had moved to the Northeast to begin working for the company.
“He asked me, ‘Have you ever thought about business development?’” she remembers. “So at seven months pregnant, I waddled around Textron, and interviewed for a business development role, which at that time was a very non-traditional role for women, let alone a pregnant woman who’s about to give birth to her first child.”
But Textron made an offer, and the family soon relocated. Atherton had cut her Air Force career short while her husband had continued his until his retirement, so he offered to be a stay-at-home dad while his wife continued to pursue her career goals.
At Textron, Atherton soon moved into a Program Manager role for the Area Attack Systems business.
“One of the great things about Textron is having so many different businesses, you could have multiple careers underneath one hat, right? You get to keep all those benefits accruing, but also get to go experience different things inside of a single company,” she says. “It’s a really cool model from that perspective.”
Then, Mitch Snyder – in charge of Textron subsidiary Bell’s military business – offered Atherton a Director of Operations role, allowing for another chance to learn new things within the company. She decided to take the role and move her family south again.
“And it was the best decision I made in my life, taking that leap of faith,” she says. “Sheryl Sandberg has a great quote, ‘It’s not a ladder, it’s a jungle gym.’ Sometimes you have to move around instead of climbing straight up.”
After seven months on the job, she was offered a role as the program manager for the V-22 operation – at that point, the biggest program in Textron. It was a job she figured would be the absolute high point of her career, until Snyder came to her again just 14 months later with another offer – this time for a business development role in the company’s then-new Global Military Business Development arm.
Again, she assumed that she had reached the peak of her career and that she would settle into the role for a period of a few years. And again – just over a year later – there was movement on the jungle gym again. John Garrison, who was then President of Textron’s Bell Segment, left the company. Mitch Snyder moved up as well, and Atherton soon found herself in the role of Executive VP of Bell’s Military Business.
“I don’t think there had ever been a woman in that role, besides me, for EVP for military business,” she says.
“It’s more than one time that I’ve gone into a meeting and then looked around said, ‘Am I really supposed to be here, I’ve always had that position of ‘I want to be in this job because you think I’m the best person for it you can get. I never want to be there because I check a box. I really believe in succeeding on merit. But I absolutely believe that having role models along the way help make that possible.”
Continuing with variations on a central theme, it wasn’t long before destiny came calling again, this time in the form of Textron Chairman/CEO/President Scott Donnelly. Atherton would be needed as the new President & CEO of Textron Systems, another division underneath the overall Textron umbrella.
“It wasn’t an ask from Scott,” she says. “It was a ‘Hey, you’re moving into this job,’ to Scott’s credit.”
Atherton got right on the job.
“One of the things I think Textron Systems has suffered in the past is sometimes being very siloed with their local cultures. And so we really tried to break down those silos and be a ‘one Textron Systems’ team,” she says. “One of the first things I did was hold a leadership summit, and took all 160 people, and we broke them up in groups. And we said we’re going to write a mission statement for that one team mentality.”
The mission statement Atherton and her team eventually arrived at? “We’re All In … Together.”
“Whatever that means,” she says. “For our customer, and for each other. And I think it really encapsulates what we’ve been trying to do. We’re trying to create a culture where you can say ‘I need help.’ And that’s been huge. I think that’s probably the hardest thing for people to say.”
Encouraging employees to come forward needing help – especially in the usually male-dominated defense and military culture – comes down to not slapping hands over mistakes but rather encouraging employees to bring any issues forward so they can be rectified.
“We have a matrix where we color code it, so the program team can say, ‘Hey, it’s red in this area, they’re blue in this area, they’re yellow in this area, and I need help for this section. And so we’ve almost tried to formalize asking for help a little bit,” she says.
Even before COVID, Textron Systems was looking at how to pull engineers in from different areas of the country, and the company briefly moved into a hybrid model at the inception of the crisis. But Atherton is certain the company can never become fully remote.
“You have to have time for us to come together. I just don’t believe in this business, where we manufacture highly sophisticated things that have to work the first time, that we can ever do it fully remote,” she says. “It’s going to have to be some kind of flexible approach.”
As for the future, Textron Systems focused on air, land, sea, and weapons systems. This also includes a role for the weapons division supporting Northrop Grumman on the ground-based strategic deterrent program. There are nearly 500 Textron Systems field reps working with the military in places Atherton says she’s not allowed to mention by name.
“It’s an exciting period of growth we are in,” Atherton says. “I wake up daily and I think about things having to do with going to space, or little electronic microchips that are going into new stuff, or robotic tanks”
As for the role of CEO, Atherton insists much of it involves walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes – the oldest recipe for empathy there is.
“It’s all about understanding what the other person’s needs are,” she says. “Once I know what motivates you, then I can start figuring out how to walk us to a position of agreement. And what that means is walking into a position of agreement together. It’s not going to be all your way, and it’s not going to be all my way. I really strongly believe that.”
That empathy is at the heart of Atherton’s journey, as well as the occasional leap of faith up into the great unknown.
