In this monthly column, Defense Daily highlights individuals from across the government, industry and academia whose efforts contribute daily to national defense, from the program managers to the human resource leaders, to the engineers and logistics officers.
Shikha Ganguly is General Manager for the Spectral Solutions Weather product line of L3Harris Technologies. The Weather product line focuses on advancing spaceborne instrument and ground system capabilities for U.S. Government and International customers to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and increase life-saving warning times. Ganguly assumed this position in 2023, where she is responsible for strategy, financial performance, and execution of the product line. Ganguly previously served as Director of the Contested Space enterprise within L3Harris’ RF Systems division, where she was responsible for infrastructure and organizational development for a rapidly scaling business.
How did you get involved in the defense industry or community?
I began my career with ITT Space Systems right out of engineering school. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, I found myself a part of L3Harris Technologies, and was fortunate to have the opportunity to serve in a series of diverse roles that came with being part of a much larger defense company.
What are some challenges you faced working through your career?
Early on, I had limited visibility into how all of the pieces of our programs and business fit together and didn’t have the confidence to go above and beyond my daily tasking and seek this understanding without anyone inviting me to do so. I also didn’t initially participate very actively in finding assignments that aligned to my strengths. As I’ve grown throughout my career, I’ve gained the perspective that opportunity to stretch and grow different professional muscles abounds. One eager person willing to learn and take on new challenges can bring great value to a business leader with more needs than ready help, so there’s no reason not to knock on doors and express willingness to be that help.
Did you feel like you always had sufficient mentors and leaders to help guide you? Why/why not?
Very early on, I believe I lacked in mentors who helped me broaden my perspective, largely because I was still learning about my own strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and how to be open enough about them to enable me to seek out the exposure and experience I needed. However, for most of my career, I have benefited greatly from leaders and mentors with very strategic approaches to talent development, who have been insightful and generous with feedback, and have pushed me to exceed my own expectations.
How do you work to be a mentor yourself to younger counterparts?
I love this question. The most crucial element to our future as a business and industry is a strong, sustainable backbone of skilled talent, so being a part of growing that talent is very exciting to me. I’ve been lucky to form rewarding mentoring relationships over the years, some by carving out time to work more closely with newer team members, and some through formal mentoring programs.
My style with mentees usually involves nudging them toward taking on new challenges that can help them maximize their potential as force multipliers, and being an open sounding board to them as they work through obstacles. We do important work that I believe is a natural draw for brilliant, dynamic people. So, in my favorite cases, it works just like a classic story, and I’m just helping mentees tap into the power that’s been within them all along.
What are some of the under-appreciated positions in the defense field, the unsung heroes or essential cogs in the machine that help the job get done with less recognition?
The defense industry is indeed a complex machine, and it takes a vast array of contributors to keep it humming. I saw that most recently during the successful GOES-19 satellite launch June 25. The satellite’s primary instrument, the Advanced Baseline Imager, was built by L3Harris. I believe some of the unsung heroes are similar to the essential ones in any business, including talent recruiters, supply chain buyers, facilities managers, to name a few, however this is amplified in our industry because our requirements for people, materials, and equipment are extremely challenging.
How can the industry improve in promoting these individuals and building them up?
We can all do a better job of sharing the stories of what it takes to create and deliver our products across all types of contributors. I believe greater awareness of the importance of these roles to our missions, both internal to our company and externally, will help build recognition of their criticality and motivate our teams to prioritize their development.
How has the culture changed around diversity within your career?
I am really encouraged by the way that diversity has gone from a fringe topic that most people are not comfortable discussing openly in a business environment to a centrally featured business imperative. When I first started working full time, our industry and others had almost no training related to diversity or inclusion. Now, we offer training and guides that help our workforce understand what our goals are with respect to diversity, why they’re important, and what we can do to support them. We still have a lot of work to do to ensure we’re drawing in diverse talent of all kinds and maximizing the potential of that talent by fully of weaving them into the fabric of our organization and industry. However, the first step is defining and sharing our goals with our team members who will help us achieve them.
What is your advice for new entrants to the defense/military community?
Know that there’s an infinite amount to learn in our industry, and unabashedly seek to learn as much as you can every day! Since the defense community is a complex machine, seek to understand how as many jobs within this machine work as possible – you will achieve better results if you know what constrains progress and how to optimize accordingly.
What do you see as the future of your sector in national defense?
In the space sector, our customers’ needs are driving us toward more flexible capabilities that are able to adapt to evolving mission needs on much shorter time scales than historical space programs. The ability to bring capability to bear quickly is becoming more critical than ever before. At L3Harris, we are responding to this need using modular product designs and scaling up space vehicle production capacity in several of our locations.
Who are the Force Multipliers in your community? Let us know at [email protected].