How Lisa Watts Follows the Energy at Astra

In our quarterly Shooting Star series, we profile a team member who has exemplified a core Orion value. For our fifth spotlight, Orion recognizes Lisa Watts, Astra Chief Programs Officer, for her commitment to empowering her team.

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Practicality and People

I figured out pretty early on that my strength was in understanding and leading people. I did cross country growing up, and I was never the fastest, but I was the captain of the team.

My dad always tells this story of when he came to one of my cross country meets, and he remembers seeing this big group of 50 kids in red tracksuits, and in front of them all, there was this little teenager looking like a drill sergeant, directing people to the bathrooms and letting them know where to be by when. It took him a second to realize, oh, that’s my daughter. I love working with people, so I think some parts of leadership tend to come naturally to me.

There’s also this little bug in my personality that always makes me look for something practical. I went to grad school for environmental management, but I quickly started to pull away from the nonprofit world. I was more interested in the very real impact businesses could have on the environment, so I started looking into the idea of running a business “the right way.”

Once I graduated, I was hired by a consulting firm and became fascinated with this concept of organizational leadership, of who is making what decisions and why. From there I continued down the path of business and started helping people develop strategic programs.

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Finding a Fit with Leadership

I stayed in a consulting role for roughly 15 years, understanding the ins and outs of people’s management styles and helping them become more effective leaders. After doing that for long enough, I started to want to become a leader in a business myself. I eventually made the decision to move out of the consulting field.

I shifted to a new role where I was the chief of staff to the CEO, and I spent a lot of time observing leaders in basically every executive position on a daily basis. I realized that for me, in terms of my place of work, I really need to make sure I have vision and values alignment with the other executives. I’ve seen so many teams crumble because it’s just not there.

I want to feel really good about the CEO I work for. Your team reflects you, and you reflect them, so I want to do something with other people where we face a lot of challenges and have a lot of fun together.

When I was recruited to join Astra, to be honest, I was a bit apprehensive about the whole thing. Edens St. Fleur (Orion Senior Talent Acquisition Partner) reached out to me, and I remember thinking, what is this business? Why are they calling me?

But once I actually spoke with him, he was really down-to-earth and gave me a lot of insight into the structure of the organization. Then when I met Scott Ingold (Astra COO) and Alberto Gomez (Astra CEO), I felt even more connected to them. I felt like I could have talked to them for hours about big questions that mattered a lot to me, like how to help people learn and how to make real change. That’s when I thought, this is exciting. This feels different.

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Leaders Who Do the Plumbing

One of the first times we met, Alberto told me a story about someone who had started as an AP clerk at one of Astra’s companies. Within a couple years, she had stepped into a leadership role at the business.

Coming from a consulting background, I’ve seen so many situations where investors miss the real beauty of a business. They just remove everyone and treat the business like a short-term game, and if they run the numbers through a spreadsheet, the results look great. But there are people who have been working at these companies for the past 30 years who have incredible expertise. And when you cut those people out, you break that business.

When I first heard that story from Alberto, I felt skeptical about how real it was. It was just so different from what I’d seen in the industry. But once I joined the team, I could truly see how Astra empowers people within our businesses to step into leadership.

We had a summit at the end of last year, and the toilet in the women’s bathroom broke. I was chatting with Evan Forosisky (Astra Group President), the son of the founder of GE Mechanical (an Astra partner company), and I remember mentioning it to him over coffee. He immediately went to repair it. He’s one of the most senior people in the company at this big executive meeting, and he was like, “Get out of my way. I have to fix this toilet.”

This is the culture at Astra. No one’s too good to fix a toilet – and they know how to do it. I guarantee you that that wouldn’t have happened at almost any other company having a major executive meeting.

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From Consulting to Creating

When I joined Astra, I knew I had to learn really fast. I stepped in as the Head of Strategic Growth Programs at a time when didn’t have anyone else on the training team.

A major thing that has stuck with me from consulting, though, is working with speed. We were accountable for every hour we worked, so I knew that I could walk into the office each day, and the next 8 hours were going to be killer. I think I’ve continued that into my work beyond consulting, and it’s definitely been helpful for me here.

I’ve always been a builder. I love creating something new from a blank canvas. I already expected that I wasn’t going to have all the answers – and that it would probably get more confusing before it got clearer – but that’s because no one has ever done exactly what we’re doing.

For the first few months, I was really just trying to get my arms around our goals, to understand where we were going, and to put shorter-term goals on the board. More recently, I’ve been able to create a team and to establish trust with the people I work with so that we can really build out the rest of our programming.

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Empowering Excellence

In terms of our approach to training, we’re actually finding that we have centers of excellence within our network itself, and we can support them so that they’re the ones sharing their best practices with the rest of the organization. I’m so excited to see that flywheel gain momentum. Learning and development is definitely more impactful when we’re all building these trainings together.

Our companies are the ones that know best what they need. We just need to empower them. That’s the magic at Astra: when we find the sweet spot between giving people enough runway and providing them with the right amount of support, our programs can really take off.

I think a lot of other companies miss that, because they think the power comes from the top. The truth at Astra is that the power of this company is really from all of our partner companies throughout the network. Like my team member Jason Bisping (Astra Senior Leader of Learning and Development) says, we just need to follow that energy. We actually poll people consistently to figure out how we can best connect people to the right resources. How do we get their career journeys going? How do we give them a place to go?

You can invest significant energy and funding into learning and development, and it will drive growth – but we’re not a company that’s doing this so that we can show an ROI in 12 months. We do it because it’s the right thing to do. It’s like one of our leaders, Rob Stuckey (TCS Dallas Branch General Manager), always says: “you take care of the people, and the people will take care of the problems.”