Three ‘hidden’ leadership lessons

If you didn’t see last year’s wonderful Hidden Figures, see it. The movie is based on the true story of three African-American women who played crucial roles at NASA and broke racial and gender barriers as they helped the United States succeed in landing men on the moon.

Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan began working at NASA when some bathrooms were for whites only. When a black woman had to petition to be allowed to join a segregated engineering program, as Mary Jackson did. When there were few women of any color in manager positions. But they did their work brilliantly, never allowed racial or gender obstacles to stop them, and left a lasting legacy of success. Here are their three leadership lessons:

Don’t take “no” for an answer

Mary Jackson began her professional life as math teacher, who eventually ended up working for NACA, NASA’s predecessor. After a couple of years in “computing,” she began working for engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki, who suggested she enter a training program that would enable her to be promoted to engineer. But the training program was at an all-white high school. Jackson applied for special permission from the City of Hampton, Virginia, was granted permission and did the training course. In 1958, she became NASA’s first African-American female engineer. She went on to author and co-author dozens of research reports, most focused on the behavior of the boundary layer of air around airplanes, which you can probably see is crucial when you are launching rockets through the atmosphere.

Work hard, no matter what

Katherine Johnson joined NACA in 1953 after years as a math teacher and then being one of the first African-American grad students at West Virginia University. Despite being widowed in 1956, Johnson went on to become one of the first women credited as an author of a major research report, did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepherd’s flight – America’s first manned space mission – and was personally selected by John Glenn to double-check the orbital calculations for his entire mission – the first American space mission to orbit the earth. Johnson went on to author or co-author a total of 26 research reports and worked on calculations for the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle program. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

When you see opportunity, seize it

Dorothy Vaughan, also a math teacher, came to the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1943, believing she was taking a temporary position that would last for the duration of World War II. By 1943, still at Langley but now working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), Vaughan became the first African-American supervisor at NACA and one of the first female supervisors. When mainframe computers arrived at NASA, Vaughan became an expert in FORTRAN programming. She led the way for both Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson, providing opportunity not only for herself but others.

The moral of their leadership lessons is simple: you can surrender to obstacles or you can overcome them. For Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, surrendering was not an option.