Welcome back to Leading Voices — an AMSGazette series where CEO Jim O’Farrell sits down with local leaders to discuss their approaches to leadership and what drives them forward.
(Check back soon for the video of this conversation.)
April marked a huge milestone — 50 years of the United States Naval Academy admitting women. To honor that advancement, this month’s Leading Voices features not one, but five incredible women from the Academy’s class of 1989. Nearly 40 years ago, the women came to Annapolis from all over the country: a farm in Nebraska, a small town in Idaho, and the suburbs of Northern Virginia, among others. But at the Yard, they found themselves shaped by the same crucible.
Sara Joyner went on to a 36-year naval career, retiring as a Vice Admiral on the Joint Staff. Rita Buffington left the Navy after seven and a half years to build a career in defense and tech, and now coaches leaders and veterans navigating career transitions. Catherine Masar spent 25 years in naval HR before joining Amazon as an executive coach, fully retiring in 2021. Kelly Brown was a pilot for the Navy and American Airlines before retiring in 2021. And Stephanie Schollaert Uz traded her uniform for a lab coat, getting a PhD and joining the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Decades later, all five gathered to reflect on what the Academy made them, and what they’ve made of their lives since.
When Buffington first went to college, she said she felt there were two options for her: “It was the early 80s and the guidance counselor said, ‘Are you going to be a teacher or a nurse?’ So, I was like, ‘Well, I guess I’ll be a teacher,’” she said.
Her path was laid out — she went to school to become a music teacher. The problem was, she didn’t want it and decided instead to enlist in the Navy. That’s how she made it to the Naval Academy.
“I was from Nebraska — a farm kid,” Buffington said. “And for me it just changed everything. Your whole life can change direction.”
Buffington wasn’t the only one whose life was turned around by the Academy. Masar, originally from a small town in Idaho, said, “For me, the question is, what didn’t change because I went there? Because everything changed.”
The women all agreed that the Academy, with its regimented structure and rigor, ingrained valuable lessons about discipline and perseverance.
“I feel like the courage it took to go there and survive there, and the teamwork, and commitment — and then serving something larger than ourselves, our country — that really shaped me,” Schollaert Uz said.
These lessons are put to the test when the students go from midshipmen to officers. For Joyner, one of those moments came early on, when she was a maintenance offer and the only woman on her team. When she arrived at her new posting, she found that her office had been set up in a separate room from the rest of the team: “There was a palpable coldness to my reception and they were like ‘Ma’am, there’s your office.’”
After being excluded from key conversations for nearly a week, she decided to do something. One morning, Joyner arrived early and took her desk out of her office and into the other room. When the team arrived, she was already there. From then on, she made it clear she wouldn’t be shut out. As they worked through difficult problems together throughout her tour, she earned the team’s respect — and realized she had a lot to learn from them too. When she left, they gifted her a plaque that read, “The best man from O is a woman.”
When Joyner recalled the story, she said, “Sometimes you just have to figure out how to break through to people as a leader to try to get in so that you can hear and learn all those things you need to learn.”
The women agreed that every challenge, and every person they met, presented an opportunity to grow. “It’s the people in your life that make it worth living,” Masar said. “You just never know how the people you’ve been thrown into are going to impact you and what you can learn from them and how you can support them.”
For Buffington, who now coaches leaders, relationship building is central to their success. Over the years, she’s found that leadership isn’t always an inherent quality.
“I used to believe it was the charismatic leader — the person who just had it. And over time, I’ve understood it’s more about the relationship that a leader has with the person they’re leading. And it’s all about how that leader shows up authentically and builds trust with whoever is in the organization.”
In Brown’s case, leading teams on aircrafts, her go-to phrase was “Help me help you.”
“It takes a lot to say, ‘I don’t know anything about this, but I’ve built this team around me that can help me do this and we’re all in this together,’” Brown said. “You don’t have to have all the answers, and you can be vulnerable, that shows a lot.”
Joyner offered another nugget of wisdom, describing a good leader as a stabilizing force. “You become an anchor,” she said. “And your ability to work as an anchor that allows your folks to have that element of stability where they can function and stay oriented to the mission is so important.”
When reflecting on what she would tell her younger self, Schollaert Uz kept it simple: “Stay curious and keep exploring,” she said. “Life’s work is not linear.” Fifty years after the Academy opened its doors to women, the advice these five offered was all about mindset — stay open and humble and trust the people around you. It’s a fitting reminder of what becomes possible when a door that was once closed is finally opened, for these five women and the more than 7,500 others who have walked through it since.
Stay tuned for more conversations like this in upcoming issues of AMSGazette!
Written by: Shani Laskin