See what colleagues have to say about Jim’s leadership and expert knowledge.
“Jim Free benefits/attributes that make him a great leader and person to work with:
His strengths and accomplishments are both numerous, a defining characteristic that is wholly winning and makes one want to secure his help and to work with him are:
Servant leadership – always wanting an endeavor to be successful, and willing to do his part no matter the personal cost while being incredibly supportive of all who share the challenge with him. He has successfully led teams from propulsion system level development for spacecraft, to project management of those spacecraft, up to and including the highest levels of human spaceflight, to management of a NASA center, all to great success. People want to work with and for him. People remember most how leaders make them feel rather than what they said. He helps them feel loved, valued, and successful, even under the most difficult circumstances and challenges, a not unusual circumstance in spaceflight hardware development. He is not about himself he is about others and the success of the team. Personal example that illustrates this innate approach is him invariably offering his better seats on planes to any member of the armed forces traveling on the same flight with him, and helping any parent struggling to board a plane with strollers and extra baggage. He is never too busy to make the personal support of people a priority. However, he is no pushover, he sets high standards, and will say the hard things that need to be said, yet people strive to meet and hear them as they know it comes from a caring place and makes everyone love what they are doing, and successful! People love work on his team.”
“Jim’s natural leadership helped mentor me through several stages of my career. He guided me to go outside of my comfort zone, which challenged me and set me up for long-term success. He is genuine, honest, and passionate about helping others develop, grow and succeed.”
“Jim’s breadth of experience allowed him as a coach to understand the challenges of the environment that I was working within and provide real guidance on how best to utilize my skill set within that environment. Through Jim’s coaching I gained a better understanding of how to employ my strengths, allowing me to pursue more challenging roles, with substantial growth opportunities.Jim as a coach pushed me to be self-aware, to acknowledge behaviors or responses that may hold me back in my career, and to be willing to explore how to adapt those behaviors and responses, so that I could be the best leader I could be.”
“Jim provided me mentorship through a formative time in my career as I was exploring options in career paths and developing my leadership skills. He approached every conversation with empathy, active listening and pragmatic advice. As a mentor he used his breadth of knowledge and experience to help guide me through increasingly difficult challenges ranging in topics from complex trade studies, relationship building and leading teams. In addition to one on one mentoring sessions, I learned from Jim by witnessing his example as a leader. He exemplifies all the leadership qualities and approaches to problem solving we discussed in our mentoring sessions, showing me by example what it looks like to put principles into practice. Thanks to Jim’s mentorship, I built the skill set to transition from a discipline engineer to project management and gained the confidence to take on leadership roles with increasing responsibility.”