Wheeler right at home at Plant Hammond
Cassandra Wheeler is the only black woman to be a plant manager in the Southern Co. system.
Cassandra Wheeler is not your grandmother’s power plant manager.
She is not the first woman to run Georgia Power’s Plant Hammond — despite the position historically being dominated by men — but she is the first and only black woman to manage a power plant in the Southern Co. system.
Wheeler is the third woman to take the reins at Plant Hammond, following Susan Mayfield and Tracy Hawkins.
“I think our culture is accepting of it now,” Wheeler said. “On the plant manager team here in Georgia, I’ve worked with most of these guys before. So being at Hammond has not been an issue ... because we’re all familiar with one another.”
Wheeler said people often times assume that because she’s a woman and a minority that there are some difficult obstacles and challenges to overcome.
“Just by the nature of me being a plant manager it means that I’ve overcome things in some people’s minds, but I don’t know that I’ve had a whole lot of obstacles,” she said.
Wheeler, who has been the manager of the plant in Coosa since April 2014, originally envisioned a career as a pharmacist. But instead, she enlisted in the Air Force, where her scores on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test led her to become an avionics technician with the B-1 bomber program — stationed at the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota.
“After I had been there a couple of years, and was taking classes (still thinking of being a pharmacist) those guys said to me, ‘Why are you pursuing a degree in pharmacy? It doesn’t make sense, what you’re doing is engineering,’” Wheeler said.
After doing a little more research in the engineering field, she realized they were right.
After being honorably discharged after six years of service, Wheeler got a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, which is a mandatory co-op school — switching each quarter between classes and work in her field.
“When I graduated I worked for one of the companies with whom I co-op’d, just a great company, the Mead Corp.,” Wheeler said.
A friend who worked at Plant Miller in Quinton, Alabama, suggested in 2001 that the power industry might be a good fit for her. Acting on her friend’s advice, she sent her resume, got a job and has been with the Southern Co. ever since.
After five or six moves, she was back at Plant Miller as maintenance manager when her supervisor approached her in 2012 asking about her plans for future.
“I said, ‘Well, this is my dream job,’” Wheeler said. “He said, ‘What about plant manager?’”
Plant Gadsden had a position opening as their plant manager was retiring. It was a little over a month later that she got a call from the vice president over all the plant managers, asking if she would be interested in the job.
“That’s how I became a plant manager,” Wheeler said. “I stayed there for two years and then got a call from the vice president here in Georgia asking if I had an interest in being plant manager at Hammond and I thought that might be pretty cool.”
“We are very fortunate to have someone with Cassandra’s abilities at Plant Hammond,” said Ted McCullough, senior production officer and vice president for Georgia Power. “She lives our motto to be ‘a citizen wherever we serve’ through her work in the community in Rome and Floyd County.”
Wheeler encourages one-on-one contact between employees, and allows many visit in her office to get to know each other, both personally and professionally.
“As long as you open up and are transparent with the team here, and I mean the entire team, you really find that you don’t have any problems,” Wheeler said.
She credits a lot of her predecessors, including retired Plant Hammond manager Perry Boren, with mentoring her through the years.
“He was at Plant Miller for 11 years, and there was a lot that I learned from him,” Wheeler said. “He was just a tremendous champion for me and my career.”
Wheeler said that she could see herself climbing the corporate ladder in the Southern Co. system before her career is over.
“If you’re willing to make some tough decisions about your career and if your family can allow you to have that kind of flexibility, then you can make some career progressions that are unusual as well.”