Rocio Bauer’s profile over at WashingtonExec is worth your time if you’re thinking about what leadership looks like when you’re serving a mission customer through technology. She’s spent her career at the intersection of Army requirements and enterprise IT, and that dual fluency—understanding both the operator’s problem set and the platform that has to solve it—is exactly what makes someone effective in these roles.
I see this gap all the time when we map the market for technology executives in defense. Plenty of people can run an IT organization, and plenty understand the mission. Far fewer can translate between the two under pressure, with stakeholders who don’t speak the same language. That’s the skill that doesn’t show up on a résumé but surfaces fast in a search debrief.
If you’re building or leading a team that delivers capability to a federal customer, the question isn’t whether your people have a clearance and a track record. It’s whether they’ve done the translation work—and whether they can do it again for you.