Professional Leadership from a “People Person”

Angela Billups, Ph.D., executive director, Office of Acquisition and Logistics, at the Department of Veterans Affairs, speaks about how she got started in contract management and her vision for helping young people and others in the field advance and succeed.

Angela Billups, Ph.D., is executive director, Office of Acquisition and Logistics, at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). As the head of one of the largest acquisition and logistics programs in the federal government, Billups manages and oversees the development and implementation of policies and procedures for department-wide acquisition and logistics programs supporting all VA facilities and the VA Acquisition Academy in Frederick, Maryland. She is the primary advisor to the chief acquisition office and the secretary of veterans affairs for matters related to enterprise business strategies and acquisition management. Billups also serves as the VA senior procurement executive and VA suspension and debarment official.

NCMA CEO Kraig Conrad met with Billups to discuss her career path and her views on advancing the contract management profession.

Kraig Conrad (KC): Thinking of your career journey and the leadership roles you’ve held, which opportunities did you plan, which just happened, and which were pure luck?

Angela Billups (AB): Oh, that’s an interesting question. I married straight out of college and joined my husband in Germany, never having had a job and I could not speak the German language. With my husband at work all day, I decided to get a job. Not knowing the first thing about applying for a job, I went to the post exchange to see if they had a job for me, but when they saw I had a college degree, they said I was over-qualified and sent me home. About three days later, they called and said they had a vacancy to be filled right away. My first job was working the cash register and telling people about the products for sale.

Within the next few months, I had opportunities to try other jobs at the exchange. One day, a co-worker told me there were other jobs on the base and told me how to apply. Within two weeks I was hired at the base contracting office. On day one, my boss said to me, “If you stick with me, I’m going to make you the best at this job.” Then he said, “We have to make sure you understand certain things.”

I still live by the three things he told me: First, he said, “We have this thing called the Federal Acquisition Regulation; it has 53 chapters; the Bible has 66.” Then he asked if I’d ever tried to learn the Bible. I said no and he said, “Don’t learn the FAR either. It’s guidance. It does not talk.” His final piece of advice was to “learn to be a critical thinker with every acquisition.” Of course, being new, I didn’t completely understand, but later I decided if my boss is helping me, I can do this job. So that’s how I started my career with the government 38 years ago. How much of it was planned? Probably none of it. It just seemed to happen.

KC: That is definitely a great story. I love the connection to service. You were in Germany with your husband serving in the U.S. military and that brought you into a lifetime of service through our profession. I’m delighted to hear that. Certainly, the element of pure luck is that others may define the opportunities that get presented to you, but they don’t define your career path because it’s you who need to be prepared. It sounds like you, at each step along the pathway, kept growing into the new role. So, as you grew, I’d like to know a little bit more about how your leadership style advanced with it.

AB: Over the years, my leadership style became very focused on people, meaning I try to find people where they live and help them grow from there without having any preconceived notions about what I will be able to do for them. I’ve found I have a gift for bringing people together and helping them understand acquisition, understand what they need to do as it relates to acquisition, and help them grow as acquisition professionals. Part of that growth is understanding that we serve the mission as acquisition professionals, so I help them understand not just what we do, but why we do it and why it’s so important that we do our jobs well.

A trait of a good leader is to help people move toward a common goal. Then when they get there, they feel they got there on their own, even though you’ve led them all the way. I think it’s important to pull leadership out of people no matter where they sit. As an intern, I was given that kind of opportunity in a DoD leadership course. That’s when I realized everyone doesn’t get these opportunities. That’s why my leadership style became helping people understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, giving them objectives and expected outcomes, and working with them to achieve success.

KC: That’s a great legacy. Moving into the theme of this magazine issue, can you share with us how you approach market intelligence or any of the pre-award functions that advise the broader acquisition team?

AB: I’ve always encouraged a focus on the end-to-end acquisition lifecycle, because if we’re only focused on a certain aspect of the life-cycle, we’re working in a vacuum. Then if something breaks to the left or to the right of contract execution, it affects whether we succeed or fail.

Having said that, pre-award is the foundation of the lifecycle because it begins with a budget and a concept of need. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has a mission to provide healthcare for millions of veterans who need individual care. For that there is no one-size-fits-all because a veteran may need something we don’t have and have never bought from industry. So we rely on market intelligence. We also need a framework in place to make it happen, because we are dealing with people’s lives. This means at VHA we need built-in flexibilities in our acquisition policies and procedures, and in some cases, need help from Congress.

We’re very concerned about supply chain management and visibility. We’re in the process of doing an assessment of the VA supply chain. There is also an ongoing federal effort related to strategic supply chains across the federal government. After COVID-19 hit, market intelligence and supply chain management became very, very important. Of course, at the VA, we were thinking about gloves, gowns, masks and medical equipment. Because of our COVID-19 experience, we now see how very important it is to fill our gaps and address these important challenges. And it starts in the pre-award phase.

KC: Speaking of COVID-19, what changes to your pre-award efforts were most powerful? What things do you and your team plan to carry forward?

AB: Something most people don’t know is that the VA has a mission that goes beyond our own healthcare system. We also have a responsibility to backup the industry hospital system in situations like the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit, we began having daily meetings to understand how acquisition could help with some of the areas where industry support was required during COVID-19. We also had daily meetings with VHA because we needed to understand what their challenges were. By the middle of March 2020, when the emergency was declared, the personal protective equipment (PPE) market changed, so we quickly had to understand the new market.

We’re looking at what we did to be able to provide stellar healthcare during this pandemic event. We’re also acting on all the lessons we learned in order to build a better VA for the future from the standpoint of modernizing, transforming, and aligning with all of the needs of veterans, along with making improvements throughout the acquisition lifecycle from the budget all the way through contract closeout.

KC: Tell us how the VA approaches pre-award functions with your small and veteran-owned business objectives.

AB: Small businesses are the heartbeat of the U.S. economy. The VA is required by legislation to award contracts to veteran-owned and small disadvantaged veteran-owned businesses. If there are two or more veteran-owned or disadvantaged small veteran-owned businesses, we have to award or provide a set-aside for veteran-owned businesses. But what are we doing to make sure we’re bringing along other socioeconomic groups? We’ve started discussions in partnership with the VA director for small business to determine if there is something we can do to address that.

The reality is that VA contracting professionals, as they should, focus on veteran-owned businesses, but once they learn there are not two or more veteran-owned businesses, they tend to go to full and open competition rather than consider other socioeconomic groups as a preference behind the veteran-owned companies. This administration has an executive order out that directs the use of appropriated funds to focus on small disadvantaged businesses, women-owned businesses, and minority-owned businesses. I appreciate the fact that we have this executive order out there now that supports the initiative I’m working on with the director for small business.

KC: Any advice you would like to give to someone who is up-and-coming and demonstrating good leadership potential in our profession?

AB: Everybody has some leadership qualities. That means you can lead from where you sit. Every individual has something to offer from where they sit, but in order to do that in a way that brings value to the table it needs to come from a genuine place in you. Get to know yourself so well that what you bring is not going to change, because you’re not trying to fake it till you make it. You’re doing what you know you can do, and what you enjoy doing. Young people, especially, need to know they have some value. Those of us who’ve been around a while are in a position to listen to them, to understand their needs.

Being in the federal acquisition business for 38 years, I learned early on that I really love what I do. I tell people, “I would do this and not get paid!” There are so many different things we can do, but sometimes people think the only important work in acquisition is in contract execution. When they get caught in that space that doesn’t fit who they are, they’ll say, “Well, I can’t do this,” and that’s when I tell them there are things that you can do. Tell me something about you and I’ll tell you where your skillsets can be used for the purpose of advancing this thing we call federal acquisition.

KC: We know there are young people out there seeking to have an impact who may not have government service top-of-mind. What can we do to encourage them to take government jobs?

AB: We need to work harder to put our mission areas in front of more of these young people. Hold forums at colleges about what it means to be a public servant. When students connect with public service and public missions, they’ll be able to decide whether their skillsets fit, and we’ll get the right people coming in the door to apply for our great acquisition jobs.

KC: Dr. Billups, thank you so much for being with us today. It’s clear you care a great deal about our career field and those who make it happen. CM