Brandy Utley

I attribute my success to all the leadership that guided me along my way. If I didn't have the right mentorship, and I didn't have the right people in place to help guide me, to teach me how to guide others, I wouldn't be successful myself. I've had so many mentors throughout my career, numerous people that believed in me, believed in my abilities, and pushed me in the right direction to get where I am today. My very first LPO, her and I still talk to this day. It's been a learning process over 24 years in the profession, transferring from one command to the next. You learn by doing the job, the school of hard knocks. You learn from other leaders, who you want to be, who you don't want to be, and you take bits and pieces from everybody. Building relationships with others, whether they are civilians working for the DOD or other sailors, shapes who you are as a leader, and you learn the different personalities and how to work together to accomplish each mission at each different command.

Grow where you're planted.

Be true to yourself, but understand that you are entering into a war-fighting organization, so you're going to have to grow a thick skin. You can be a girly girl, you can be a woman, you can have emotions, you can have all the things that make a woman and still perform well in an organization that is mostly men. A lot of young people don't understand that they're coming in because the money's good, or the education benefits are good, or some benefit is what triggered them, but they're not understanding that at the end of the day, you may have to go somewhere you don't want to. You may have to pick up a weapon that you didn't plan to, and you may have to make defense of our border, or deal with everything that's going on in Iran right now, or everything that's gone on before in Afghanistan and Iraq. You may have to go into situations that you didn't plan for because you thought that you were just going to be behind a desk the whole time, but that's not true. You're signing up for a war-fighting organization, so you have to be willing to go to war.

The biggest challenge is understanding where we're at in the world right now. A lot of people, especially junior sailors but even senior sailors and personnel in the military, don't understand that we are a country that is going to defend our country. The challenge is getting everybody to understand that without complaining that you have to work an extra little bit of time, or you have to do this job over here that you didn't necessarily want to do. Everybody has to participate and pull their own weight in the military to complete the mission at hand. It doesn't matter what command you're at, whether it's a training command, or an expeditionary command, or on a ship, or at an air squadron, everybody has a job to do, and you have to do that to the best of your ability. The challenge is getting people to understand that you're in the military. There are certain things that we are required to do, and going home every day because you're on shore duty is not it.

Honesty, integrity, kindness, and empathy are most important to me. Everybody has a personal life outside of the Navy, and those personal lives don't necessarily coincide with what our task is. But if you don't have empathy for those that work for you in regards to what's going on in their personal life, then you're not going to be able to help them be the best that they can be.