Meredith Hedwall

I would say to any young woman, and this is one of my favorite things, is I love working with younger people and mentoring them. The number one thing I could say is find the person that you think does what you want to do the best, and then learn from them. I have done that. I have a couple mentors who are CEOs of major airline companies, and I just approached them and was like, you are amazing, and I love your leadership. Will you mentor me? And they usually say yes. It's crazy. Find the people that do what you do and learn, and then ask them, what do you read? Warren Buffett said one time that the reason he's smarter than everybody else is he just reads more. And I do think there is something to reading or even listening to audiobooks. I ask my mentors, what do you read? And I ask the people I meet who aren't my mentors, who I think are really smart, I'll say, what are you reading right now? And then I will go read that. One of my mentors, who was the CEO of Intel, has five mentors. The CEO of Intel has 5 mentors. That tells you that it doesn't matter how high you get, you still need mentorship. The biggest piece of advice is find a mentor, or two. Not reinvent the wheel, and glean from the people who've gone before me. And that will take you so far.

The biggest challenge is that fatigue risk management isn't mandated in every area of aviation. It's sometimes seen as a luxury when it's actually a necessity. People can decide, well, we don't need to worry about that. The problem is it's a pervasive issue. One of my biggest challenges is convincing people it's not a luxury, it's a necessity. You have to have certain safety management systems and requirements in your plane, but you don't have to have software that protects you from fatigue creeping up. On the flip side, there's so much opportunity because this spans into so many places. Not only aviation, which is where we're focused right now because there's still so much to do, but think of hospitals. You have interns who work how many hours at a time, and residents doing surgeries for 16 hours. There's so much opportunity. The medical system is another place that would be a big opportunity down the road that I would love to bring this solution to. We're managing a lot of growth, and with growth comes growing pains, but they're good growing pains. I love navigating that, taking an organization from one level to the next. I have to be really careful to not drown in opportunity and not take on more than I should.

Integrity is a big, big one. Doing what you say you're gonna do and following through. I want to be authentic. I'm not afraid to admit what I'm bad at and to just be real. I think that's actually served me very well through my life. When I got this job, my CEO said, you know, I don't even know you, I think you can do this. And I was like, look, if I don't do a good job, I can bet on myself. I believe in myself and I believe in the abilities that God has given me, and so I'm gonna use those. Loyalty is important to me, not loyalty to the point of dishonesty, but just being loyal and thankful and grateful, and then really having gratitude in life. I wake up every day, and I'm fortunate that just my personality tends to be a very positive personality. I love people by nature. I look at situations, and I can see the potential in them. Being grateful and thankful, even in hard times, and just finding the good in anything, that's important to me. Jesus is my big example. Every person I encounter, can I leave them better than when I left them? Even if that's a hard conversation with an employee, how can I serve them the best I can in this moment? Obviously, I fail at that all the time. I'm not perfect by any means, but that's the goal.