In his job as director of weapons stockpile management at Sandia National Laboratories, Chris O’Gorman manages and leads a diverse team of 400-plus scientists, engineers, and technologists. It’s an important and complex job: O’Gorman is tasked with ensuring the reliability and safety of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
As an effective leader, O’Gorman looks for what drives people as individuals. When he engages with colleagues, particularly new employees, he doesn’t begin by probing work-related topics and issues. Instead, he wants to understand them as people. “First and foremost, I don’t assume I know someone,” says O’Gorman, this year’s winner of the Executive Excellence Award. “I was just out at a remote site visiting folks who work for a manager of mine, and it was the first time I met this team. What was important to me was learning where they’re from and how they picked engineering. All those things are important because I like to relate to people, and more often than not, I find commonalities that are helpful as a leader.”
One reason O’Gorman puts such a big emphasis on understanding people is that throughout his life he has often felt as though others assume they know who he is based on his background. Indeed, as a kid growing up on the reservation of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, O’Gorman would play competitive basketball in the surrounding farming communities. “I remember the mocking and racial slurs,” O’Gorman says. “I remember feeling the inferiority they wanted me to feel, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Why can’t we just play basketball?’”
While O’Gorman faced challenges as a kid — especially after his family lost their farm to bankruptcy — he had advantages and a determination to succeed. “Growing up I had a good home life and my mom and dad taught me a lot about responsibility and work ethic,” O’Gorman says. After his family lost their farm and they began to diverge, O’Gorman had enough self-awareness to see that the trauma and anger around the event were not healthy, and he was beginning to head down the wrong road. So he approached his high school guidance counselor and asked how he could pursue other school options.
The answer was to attend St. Martin’s Academy hundreds of miles away in Rapid City, S.D. There O’Gorman realized how far behind he was academically and vowed to close that gap through hard work. “I learned how to study and I learned to like science and math,” he recalls. While O’Gorman faced plenty of challenges trying to catch up to the other students, grasping the importance of hard work and study skills laid a foundation that propelled him through his higher education and career journey.
After graduating from high school O’Gorman moved with his mother to Albuquerque, N.M. He eventually enrolled in the University of New Mexico, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering — and made the basketball team as a walk-on. While in school, he was offered a cooperative education assignment from NASA and had to choose between the offer and playing basketball. “I had to decide to focus on engineering or sports, and I decided to focus on education,” O’Gorman says. “I knew that I didn’t want to be living paycheck to paycheck and that it was time to focus.”
At Sandia, O’Gorman has found both stability and an abundance of opportunity. Sandia offered a program to pay for his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. In the years since, O’Gorman has steadily risen within Sandia, becoming the first Native executive at the lab. As the director of weapons stockpile, he plays a critical leadership role for Sandia and the nation.
O’Gorman also devotes a significant amount of time to mentoring and educating Native students. He has been active in both Sandia’s American Indian Outreach Committee and AISES throughout his career, and he has helped establish internship, scholarship, and cooperative education opportunities. O’Gorman also taught physics at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, N.M. Besides teaching, O’Gorman knew part of his job was convincing kids they are fully capable of succeeding. “I went in recognizing and believing that all kids are smart and can do this, even if they didn’t think that,” he says. “When I taught physics, I had all the confidence in the world that these kids could pass the class and pass with flying colors.”
