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We’re looking ahead to International Women’s Day which is Tuesday, March 8 as we discuss the glass cliff, a phenomenon where women often get promoted during times of crisis. That very thing has happened to Chief Operating Officer Andrea Westcott Passman. Passman joins the VOE Podcast to discuss how she’s navigated the glass cliff, advice she has for women and we learn about her career in oil and gas. She is currently the COO of Caerus Oil and Gas.
The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.
Hello and welcome to the VOE Podcast, an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
I’m your host, Kristal Griffith from the Daniels Office of Communications and Marketing. We’ll be unpacking topics at the intersection of business and the public good with CEOs and other business leaders from the Daniels community. Let’s dive in.
Joining me today is Andrea Westcott Passman, Chief Operating Officer of Caerus Oil and Gas. Caerus is a privately held natural gas producer, the largest in the Western U.S. Andrea leads operations, engineering and environmental, health and safety for the organization. She’s been with Caerus for three years and in the oil and gas industry for more than 20 years. She received her bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and is a graduate of the Daniels College of Business, receiving her MBA in 2008. While we’ll talk to Andrea about her industry, we’ve also asked her here as a guest for International Women’s Day, which is coming up March 8. Andrea is an advocate for women in leadership and has some great insight into the glass cliff phenomenon and women needing sponsors, not mentors.
Kristal Griffith:
Andrea. Welcome to the VOE Podcast.
Andrea Westcott Passman:
Thank you for having me.
Kristal Griffith:
You are most welcome. So, before we get to our big topic of the day, I’d like to get people to know you. So, you were raised in a gold mine in Alaska, which sounds super interesting. And now you’re a COO. So, talk a little bit about your background. How on earth did you get where you are today?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
It’s because I love dirt. I’ve spent my entire life in the dirt. And I’ll say so I’m a pioneer, not just from the Daniels DU perspective, but my grandparent’s homesteaded the land that we lived on up in Alaska. So, I grew up on a gravel pit that ended up providing a lot of the gravel for the Alyeska Pipeline up there.
Kristal Griffith:
Wow.
Andrea Westcott Passman:
And then my dad was a Vietnam vet, and he got transferred into Alaska because he was an Army guy. And then he fell in love with gold mining. So, we had a family mine that was about 100 miles south of the Arctic circle. And this is really the beginning. In Alaska, people just do. There is no women don’t do this and men do that because you’re just trying to survive and not freeze to death in the dirt. And so, it was actually… I think back to like one of the beginning things that really drove me into operations and really the industrial world was my mom taught me how to drive a loader before I learned how to drive a car.
And it was my mom. My dad could have, but my mom because there was a need. And it was like, “Get your tail up on that loader, we got work to do.” And I was like, “I can’t reach the brake.” But that was really the beginning of it. And so, because my grandparents had pioneering mindset, my mother and father had a pioneering mindset. And the gravel business from my grandparents, the gold mine from my parents, really started all of that. And then I never got the message that women don’t do certain things and that women make less money. Nobody ever told me any of this, which has actually been a blessing.
And so, for a long time I wanted to be an environmental engineer. And my grandfather was a civil from Michigan, and he was like, “No, no, no, no, no. You want to go in oil and gas. Look at all this.” And I remember Dallas being on the show. J.R. got shot. And I thought, yeah, I’ll be riding around on my horse with my oil fields in the background. Being an Alaskan and not going anywhere for most of my life, that’s how I thought it was. And it’s pretty close, but a little different.
And so, math and science were my wheelhouse as a kid. And because of my grandpa and my dad, I knew I didn’t want to go to mining because it was cold and very, very dirty. And so, that’s when I decided not environmental engineering, even though the environment is huge for me, and it’s still very important to me to this day. I decided to go petroleum engineering. And at the time, School of Mines was number one for petroleum engineering, and they offered me a better scholarship than Texas A&M. So, I found myself in Colorado. And that was the beginning of a very long and really fruitful and wonderfully rewarding career in oil and gas.
Kristal Griffith:
Wow. Okay, so I looked at your bio, obviously. You lead operations, engineering, environmental health and safety for major companies. So, what exactly does that mean? What do you do?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
I get a lot of phone calls in the middle of the night, but for all the wrong reasons. So, my number one job, besides running operations for a $2 billion company, is really to make sure everyone goes home safe every single day. And yes, while I have an incredibly technical job and I have a huge P&L, it’s really about making sure that you’re taking care of the people.
And when I look at my career, it was really very early on that I realized the immense responsibility associated with it all. And I remember I used to work for Union Pacific Resources a really long time ago, and they had a lot of great training. And one of my first trainings was to put out a chemical fire. It was 105 degrees that day in East Texas. I have my coveralls on. I have my FR on, my fire retardant clothing. And my fire won’t go out. And I’m crying because I’m like 21, and my career isn’t going to go well if I cannot get the fire out.
And then a good friend of mine who ran fire safety at Union Pacific came up to me, we ended up being very good friends, and he was like, “Let me show you how to put out a fire.” And that was really the beginning of understanding how incredibly dangerous but important the industry was. And that really went on for my whole entire career and still is today at the forefront. Even last year in 2020, I guess it’s 2022 now, two years ago, there was the Pine Gulch Fire, which was at the time of the biggest fire in Colorado history. And it was right on top of our oil and gas fields.
So, we had safety issues from a people perspective. We had environmental issues. We had major business continuity issues. You want to talk about VUCA on another level. And it was two months of trying to manage that. And all of that training and getting up to that point in my career really came into effect there. And it really came down to having a great team in place of people we could trust to help address that. And for those two months and that whole entire period, everyone went home safe, which was the number one achievement that we could have had out of that. So huge. And that really is the biggest focus of my job.
Kristal Griffith:
Wow. So, talk a little bit about Caerus Oil & Gas. What does the company do and what’s your role there?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
Okay, so Caerus is the largest natural gas provider in the Western United States. We’re privately held, so it’s quiet. We’re a Rockies-based operator, so business mostly in Colorado and Utah. And like I said earlier, about a $2 billion company, about 300 employees, a number of couple thousand contractors that work with us on a daily basis.
And really, I joined the company two years ago, right before the pandemic. Because at that time, there was about 250 oil and gas companies that had gone bankrupt since 2016 in the United States. So, it’s a wild ride in oil and gas. And when things are good, things are good. And when things are not so good, things are not so good.
And really, the company was looking for a total turnaround. I mean, it was near bankruptcy. And they wanted someone to come in and really modernize operations and was the new world of management style, which I’m all about making a bunch of mini CEOs to go around and run their own businesses out there and empower people and give them autonomy, which is not always oil and gas.
And so, I joined the company to help do that. The pandemic hit, which actually was a great excuse to accelerate a lot of what we were doing to digitize a lot of the business that had previously been a bit archaic, and to really move the needle forward. And here we are two years later, three acquisitions during that time. Whew.
That was a little exhausting. Negative oil, that was a lot of fun. I didn’t know what to even think of that. And then now we’re extremely profitable, doing really well. The board’s happy. Our investors are happy. That’s few and far between sometimes. And just looking to continue to acquire. That’s the mode, just get bigger.
Kristal Griffith:
That is incredible.
Andrea Westcott Passman:
It’s been fun.
Kristal Griffith:
I mean, no pressure. “Hi, we’re going to hire you. You got to come in. Hey. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to face a pandemic, all these external factors.” That’s impressive, Andrea.
This is why you’re here. Okay, so let’s discuss today’s big topic. As you know, we’ve asked you here for International Women’s Day. And I know you’ve heard of the glass ceiling where women hit a certain level and they just can’t keep moving up. But now we’re learning about this thing called the glass cliff, and it’s where women get promoted during times of crisis. Maybe you’ve heard of it since it happened to you. But anyway, when failure is more likely and then it’s more risky. So, talk about this. Have you seen this? Have you seen it happen to other women?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
Yeah, you can call me the queen of the cliff. I just haven’t fallen off the other end yet. Like I said, when I joined Caerus, it was a turnaround. The previous company before that, CNX Resources, was a turnaround that was on the verge of bankruptcy. And a lot of times you see the glass cliff because people come to women almost as a last resort.
Like let me try something so different that I haven’t seen before, because nothing else worked before this, that I’ll try out a woman. Right? Which is a great opportunity. But at the same time comes with a great amount of risk. And if you’re not sure what your brand is, what your methodology is, what your leadership style is going into one of those opportunities, and somebody hasn’t mentored and trained you along the way, that’s when we set up people for failure.
And in my case, it really comes down to making sure that I had a process, that I had a methodology, that I understood my style to be able to do turnarounds. I don’t build things from scratch. That’s not my brand. I make things better. I’m an optimizer. Truly an engineer from that perspective.
And when I think about that, I got some great advice one time from Steve White from Comcast. It was some of the best words ever. He said, “You have to think of yourself like a business. Andrea Incorporated. And what defines Andrea incorporated? Not the company you’re going to work for, do those align, and what do you want to get out of this, and how do you want to be when you show up?”
And it was some of the best advice I had ever gotten. And I tell those people all the time, I’m like, “Well, you need to be Kristal Incorporated. Clearly you take care of yourself and do what’s best for you.”
But being able to define that and figuring out who really you are and reincorporated, Kristal Incorporated, those are the things that let us be successful so that the glass cliff doesn’t get us. Because too often you see women fail in those environments, and they don’t ever get a chance to recover. It is different. Men often get more chances than women do in that case, so we have to do a better job.
Kristal Griffith:
Wow. Okay, that’s intense. So, talk to me a little bit about how you got that experience you needed before you put yourself in that high risk situation, or did you feel like that, or did you just go for it?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
I think sometimes it happens by chance. Right? So, when I look back at my time at CNX Resources, that company was on the verge of bankruptcy when I joined. And we took a risk there to start developing a new play. You want to talk about convincing a board to go spend $30 million on something that’s never been done before is sticking your neck out on the line.
And I’ll say, I didn’t know at the time that I was sticking my neck out on the line. I was just doing me, intense me, which I’m very good at. And it paid off. We got lucky. Right? And it turned around and it ended up being a hugely successful play that made the company a lot of money, and it also turned the company around so that we were successful to go on and continue being a public company.
And so, when you look back on those opportunities, yeah, I lucked into it. But since then, I’ve taken the opportunity to be a mentor and help other women and other diverse people really make sure that they have the path in place, that they have their plan, they have their methodology if they’re going into something like that. And in hindsight, I didn’t have my personal board of advisors quite built out yet, but you bet, I use them all the time, extensive use of my personal board of advisors as I’ve gone through the Caerus journey as well.
Kristal Griffith:
Very cool. I want to talk through that, because I’ve heard you talk before. You have a board of advisors. You have very clear definitions of mentorship is versus sponsorship. So, talk us through what that means. If you’re giving advice to whether it’s fellow alumni, or Daniel students, or just the general audience, what does this mean and what do you think they should do?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
Well, so, one, I think it is the key to my success, this personal board of advisors. Thank you to DU for giving me so many more. I really appreciate that. And also to be an active player for other people in their personal board of advisors.
We talk about the difference between an ally, a mentor, and a sponsor or an advocate. An ally is educating yourself and being engaged on the issues in the workplaces so you can help other people out.
Being a mentor is about providing guidance. In my world, I think it’s a bit of coaching as well. I think one of my biggest questions is what else, it’s my favorite, and really discussing their experiences, and role playing in a safe environment. Right? It’s safe. And you really have as a mentor, you’re not expecting anything in return except for feeling altruistic.
And the then as a sponsor or an advocate, essentially you’re using your influence and credibility to help out an individual that maybe doesn’t normally get the opportunities that would… It’s sticking your social capital out there for another person. And you need them all and you need to be all of them, especially as you advance in your career.
I think back to my very first mentor. I didn’t even know he was a mentor because we didn’t quite have those words 25 years ago. And I was working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. And that was when I met my first mentor. Russell. He was a company man. He was a long time, coverall wearing, been in oil and gas his whole life from Galveston, Texas. And he pulled me aside and he said, “I like you.” And he said, “You know where the line and the sand is at.” And what he was talking about was boundaries.
And he was really the first person to come to me and say, “Let me help you be successful in this industry. Let me show you how to define your boundaries. These weren’t the words he used, but this is how I’ve interpreted it today. So that as a woman, and today as a woman, I mean, I’m in role that’s less than 1% female. Oil and gas is 22% female worldwide. But he was saying to me, “Let me help you figure this out so you can be successful.” And in a lot of ways, a mentor, too, they have to like you and you have to like them. That’s a first step in mentorship. And he was saying, “I like you,” and I said, “Well, I like you, too.” And we were good friends for many, many, many years. And he was my first mentor.
And now when I look at my personal board of advisors, some are mentors, some are people I call randomly. There’s a group of network of people that I tap into trying to find specific answers to very specific questions at any given point in time. And on the other hand, I’m also a mentor to other people. I mentor Women from Mines. I do a lot of work here at DU. It matters to me to give back because I know I’m lucky to be in the spot that I’m in, so I need to make sure I help everybody else get there, too.
Kristal Griffith:
What was that experience like being just so male dominated? Right? I mean, I think a lot of women face that, but it seems maybe pretty extreme in your situation, in your experience.
Andrea Westcott Passman:
I think it’s definitely out there. I think what’s great now, and especially when you just think about anything when it comes to DEI, we’re all looking for belonging. And when you say belonging is in do I fit in, are there other people here like me? And I was thinking that, yeah, there’s not a lot of women to look up to or to even look around for. But who are the people that I can find something in common with, that I do share the same values with? Right? And it’s all about sharing similar values, similar experiences, and differences as well so you can get a different point of view.
I think about my values, and it’s about doubling down on those. I’m passionate. I believe in integrity. I believe in human connection. And making sure that I’m looking for people that share those same values, whether it’s a man, a woman, a diverse individual, and being able to provide that for others as well is where we’re looking for commonality so we can all move forward together.
And I hope the people that are out there that don’t feel like they belong look for people where they have those overlapping values and commonalities. And it doesn’t have to be somebody high up in the organization. It can be a peer as well. Peer mentoring and peer coaching is an amazing attribute that we should all be tapping into.
Kristal Griffith:
I love it. The other question I have is how do you pick this board? So, I’m guessing you’re looking for things, certain people for certain things, right? You don’t want your board to be universal. You want diversity on your board just like you do in other things, right? So how are you picking these people out?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
I think it’s twofold. One, sometimes it happens by chance. I think of my favorite, and I do play favorites, personal board of advisor. It’s one of the partners at a big consulting firm. He runs the oil and gas division there. He actually found me. And he was like, “Listen, I think you have potential. Here’s all the things that I think you’re missing out on, though.”
He told me time. He said, “When you walk into a board room, I’m sure you can bowl over the entire room. Why don’t you try listening?” And I was like, great advice. Yeah, but you need to hear that from your personal board of advisors. So, sometimes they come to you by circumstance. Sometimes you go looking for them. I know I recently interviewed for a public board, and I haven’t done that a lot in my lifetime. And I wanted some very specific advice how to do that. So, what did I do? I called up DU. Thank you, Kerry and Scott. Shout out to you guys out there, and Barb, for giving me some great names to connect with.
And do you have chemistry with everybody? No. And I think chemistry matters. It’s a little bit like dating. You got to make sure that you have something, a connection with the other person across the table so that you can find the commonality again. And they were able to really provide me a lot of great resources at the same time, as well as meet a lot of just great new people.
Kristal Griffith:
Oh, that’s awesome. I want to talk a little bit about your time here at Daniels. So, you pursued an MBA. What interested you in that? You obviously had a fantastic education at the School of Mines. So, why get an MBA? What were you looking for?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
So, the MBA really started back with my family. And as we mentioned, we had the family gold mine. The gold mine was growing quite a bit when I was younger and they took in a partner. And to their naivete, they lost the business, a business I had grown up in since I was eight years old. And when I left for college is when it happened. And I was like, I don’t want that to ever happen again. And so, justice is extremely important to me. But I really came to DU so that I could make sure that if I ever had to protect my family again, I would. And not only that, but protect my own career as well.
Kristal Griffith:
As you know, we teach ethical leadership here, dedication to the public good. How do your of values factor into how you lead?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
So, I talked a little bit about my values in terms of being passionate, having integrity, really focusing on human connection, and that’s really what drives me. And so, when I think of integrity, I do think of ethics. And the reason why I showed up at DU, watching my family lose their business, was so hard to watch, the injustice associated with that. And even in my own career when I bump into that. And I think about the ethical piece and how important that is, and tying that to my personal value of integrity and human connection.
And I think about one of the worst times in my entire career. It was a few years ago and we had a blowout. And in oil and gas, a blowout is the worst thing on the face of the planet. This blowout happened to be a thousand feet away from a public water reservoir. I was the nighttime incident commander. So, starting at 6:00 PM till 6:00 AM. And it took us two weeks to get this under control. Talk about not a fun phone call to make when this started, as well as doing a public earnings call and telling the whole world. No pressure there.
And I’ll tell you this. This is really when I had to double down on my values. Because a lot of times in extraordinary circumstances like that, the business is at risk. But even more importantly, people and the environment are at risk as well. And you have to decide where you’re at, and not everybody’s on the same page. And I’ll tell you one thing I do not believe that sometime business leaders do. Human life is not just worth $2.5 million. I am sorry. That is a huge difference between me and some others out there, not everybody.
And so, I think back to this blowout. It was the night that we were finally going to finish the job and plug this thing. And it was really high stress because this was tons of gas flowing. And the water reservoir was nearby. We had all the engineers on staff, and there was an immense amount of stress in the room. And I went to our CEO, and he was pretty stressed out. And I said, “Hey, why don’t you go home? Because I got this. I’ll text you a play by play. The team needs to have their head in the game. We got this. Give us a little bit of space.” And all he had to do was leave.
And that was the writing on the wall for me that we do not look at this the same way. Here I am trying to care and feed these people so that they can keep everyone safe, and you’re telling us to hurry up so we can get the business back online. That’s two different worlds. That’s when you need to go find something else.
Kristal Griffith:
Gosh, that is very revealing. I know. Obviously, I looked at the Caerus website, and it’s very clear that you believe in sustainability there. So, talk a little bit about the company’s values, and it sounds like they align with yours.
Andrea Westcott Passman:
Yeah, they do. Growing up in Alaska, one of the biggest things was always take care of your backyard. I mean, I heard that all the time from my grandfather, from my dad, from my mom. It was like we live in this beautiful place. We’re incredibly lucky to have homesteaded here. I mean, how many people even get to grow up that way? It’s wonderful. Colorado is so much like that, too. And really everywhere I’ve lived I find to be absolutely beautiful.
And I wanted a company that did believe that. Right? And Caerus being a Denver-based company, we have operations all over the Rockies, I wanted a company that aligned with that, because that’s a part of who I am. It’s how I grew up. And when I came to Caerus being COO, I had an opportunity to really cultivate that as well.
And in conjunction with our great GC Allison Woolston and the support of our CEO Dave Keyte, we were able to do our first sustainability report two years ago. And what was great about that, and you see a lot of this in sustainability reporting, sometimes you hire third parties and they come in and they make up all your data. We did it internally. And it was our data and it was from our people.
And I think one of the big differences at Caerus, and we do see this at a lot of companies, is because people live and work and breathe exactly in the same spot, our teams out there care just as much. And they don’t want to ruin it, either. They’re all huge outdoors men out there. I mean, they love snowmobile, and fishing, and doing all the things outside that are a part of the Rockies lifestyle. And we really do care.
And I think it’s a misnomer out there that oil and gas is the bad guys. No, it’s full of a bunch of people that really don’t want to mess anything up. I mean, we don’t want to spill. We want to keep the environment clean. We want clean air just like everybody else. The practices that are in place are extremely easy to do.
I mean, that has been one of the thing that our board, being that we’re predominantly backed by a California company Oaktree, they’re very big on making sure that we’re sustainable, which that aligns for me, too. So, making sure that we’re taking care of our people, we’re taking care of our land, that we own it.
And it’s all the way of the operator level. The guy that turns the wrench out there, he cares just as much and he’s just as responsible as I am, or the head of environmental, or the head of air quality, or the CEO or the board. We’re all in it together.
Kristal Griffith:
As you know, you are a voice of experience if you didn’t know that already. So, what do you wish you had known as a student or do you have a motto or lesson, something you’d like to pass on as a voice of experience?
Andrea Westcott Passman:
So, I think it goes back again to my personal board of advisors. And I think of my partner, Steve Kenney. He’s a CFO. I tap into that brain all the time, he’s so smart. And really, I think of my best friend as well, Christy Uffelman. She runs a company called Edge Leadership. I met her years ago when I was working out east.
And Christy said to me, “What are you doing?” She was ticked at me, and this is when we first met. I was like, “What do you mean, ‘what am I’m doing?'” She’s like, “You have figured this out, and you’re not helping anyone else figure this out.” I was like, “What do you mean? I’m good. There’s not a problem out there.” She’s like, “Oh, there’s a problem out there. You just don’t know.” And so, really what she was saying to me was a call to action. And this was 10 years ago where she was saying, “Get your tail out there and do something.”
Kristal Griffith:
Thank you for coming in – really appreciate it.
Andrea Westcott Passman:
Thank you!
This has been the VOE Podcast, produced by the Daniels College of Business and sponsored by U.S. Bank. Music by Joshua Metzel, music composition graduate student at the Lamont School of Music. Join us next time for more business insights from our community. In the meantime, visit Daniels.du.edu/voe-podcast, and please remember to like, follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.