Wanda O'Brien

“Wanda is a highly compassionate leader who effectively addresses the concerns of her subordinates. She effectively led several cross-disciplinary engineering teams tasked with implementing a new technology. Despite the teams having different managers, architects, work cadences, locations, and more, Wanda was able to effectively communicate with them and address their concerns. This led to the teams collocating, having cross-disciplinary planning meetings, and reporting to cross-disciplinary managers, resulting in significant progress towards the first release. Without Wanda's ability to understand and find solutions for the team's struggles, the success would not have been achieved.”

“I first met Wanda in 2013 when she came to GE Oil & Gas as the VP of Software engineering. At the time the department had been without a leader for nearly 2 years and when Wanda arrived, the software department had no clear direction due to lack of leadership. Wanda took the helm as a seasoned commander, setting everyone in their lanes, and ensuring that there was a clear reporting structure. She took her time to understand the people, each of their individual strengths, and by proxy the organization. She then made very strategic leadership changes, with clear sets of responsibilities, and allowed people to drive to what they thought was right. This allowed many of the younger engineers to really step up and grow, building a strong community where people wanted to stay and flourish because they valued the culture that Wanda had cultivated. Over the next 6 years, while our software team was recognized across the organization as always meeting our commitments and delivering on time with perfect execution, and our software products were leading the industry and winning awards, the global business was struggling. Our parent business, Baker Hughes, was contending with dropping oil prices and a difficult economy. And while our sub-business, Bently Nevada, was consistently profitable, Baker Hughes was trying to cut costs wherever it could, and this made Bently Nevada and its people an untimely target. Wanda wasn’t having any it, there was no way she was willing to sacrifice her team. It always impressed me how many times she was willing to put herself directly between her people and the business, potentially at great personal risk. She never backed down from protecting her people. When the business wanted to cut heads, Wanda convinced them instead to not back fill old positions, when the business wanted to cancel yearly salary increases, Wanda traded hiring additional staff for giving the entire team their well-earned raises. “When a leader embraces their responsibility to care for people instead of caring for numbers, then people will follow, solve problems and see to it that that leader’s vision comes to life the right way, a stable way and not the expedient way.” – Simon Sinek This was the culture that Wanda built, and this is the type of leader that Wanda was for me and our organization. She was a great personal mentor and someone that I would always be willing to follow.”