Polymers and punctuation: Finding her own path through
Here’s Arletta Scott Williams at U.S. Steel in the early 1980s: an engineering undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University wearing a hard hat and a welder’s coat over her uniform on the hot, hazy floor, working a turn as a shift foreman and trying to decide whether the metal that the workmen are sending through the line has been subject to the proper heat conditions to keep it from going to scrap.
“That’s money to the company,” she said.
But ask her about the hardest calls she had to make during the years she spent in the cooperative education program — rotating every four months between CMU classes and work at three U.S. Steel plants throughout the Monongahela Valley — and she doesn’t name a crucial technical or financial decision.
“It would have been one of the people she said .“Trying to listen to somebody talk through a personal problem that didn’ t have anything to do with the physical work .”
Being a shift foreman — a required duty on the way to becoming a metallurgist responsible for a steel product line — meant noticing when workers were distracted in a way that could interfere with the job.
“Sometimes people just need to knowthat you respect them enough to stop and listen to what it is they have to say,” she said. “It has formed a lot of my management style.”
Ms. Williams, now executive director of the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, was drawn to study materials science and engineering, and to work at U.S. Steel because of her interest in the technical details of math and science — not the intricacies of human relations. She says, with honest wonder, “I was just captured by the use of polymers.”
Yet in the crucible of the steel mills, she learned how listening can convey fairness and neutralize skepticism. As “the scrawny kid, the new chick” on the management track in a male-dominated, blue-collar work world, she faced plenty of skepticism.
“Right out the chute, being a woman, you are not supposed to be there. Then it’s, ‘You are too young. You’re still in school. What do you know?’”
Her response? “‘I’m listening to you. That’s what I know.’ That has paid dividends over the years.”
Ms. Williams, 57, is the first woman and the first African-American to lead Alcosan, a job she took in 1998.
In her first jobs during her undergraduate education, she picked up tricks that would help her navigate posts throughout her career.
At U.S. Steel, she learned to truncate her name to A. Scott Williams on reports, turning her middle name — her maternal grandmother’s maiden name — into a subtle tool for dodging gender bias. “You write memos, nobody knows exactly who or what it is. By the time they figure it out, you’ve been promoted,” she said, with a triumphant laugh.
She also watched the way leadership hierarchies were observed or eased in the mills.
For example, overhead cranes tooted different cadences as a warning when “the white hats” — the supervisors in white hard hats — came through. But managers who drove Cadillacs at home drove beat-up “mill cars” to work like everybody else who parked in the treacherous terrain of the onsite lots, where steel byproducts would occasionally coat the vehicles, she said.
She became accustomed to river rats the size of large cats drawn to the heat of the steel plants. She gradually earned credibility by demonstrating to the men around her that she wasn’t afraid of getting dirty.
Her first years at the Allegheny County wastewater plant were punctuated by moments when it became clear she was “the only one small enough to wade down into that spot and stick a scrawny arm into a particular pipe to get something out.”
Those early jobs taught her the value of being willing to wade into the muck, alone or elbow-to-elbow with her team. “I still have a uniform hanging in my office,” she said, “should I need to put it on and jump out there.”