Does It Matter How I Manage?
Flying people in space is a very dangerous business. In Mission Control therefore, we have always focused on deliberate decision-making – understanding why we take some action, change a plan, or stay the course. Further, we have always demanded just as deliberate leadership in the Mission Control Room in order to ensure the team retains that focus and never fails to protect the astronauts and the spacecraft and accomplishes the mission.
In such dangerous work, the ramifications of some mistakes are so severe and immediate that this deliberate focus and leadership are not difficult to instill and reinforce in generation after generation of the workforce. It is obvious that they are essential to assure success, especially when the safety margins are the slimmest.
However, even for those of us who grew up in this line of work, as we are promoted into management away from the Mission Control Room and those obvious risks, many fail to see a direct connection between flying rockets and managing the business. A CEO of a large, global energy company made that very point to me. This wasn’t just any CEO. He is an icon in his industry and widely credited with leading his company’s growth from $50 million in revenue to $25 billion. This accomplished and genuinely impressive executive got right to the point:
"I’ve heard you talk several times now about culture. I can see how that is important in Mission Control. I just don’t see how it matters in running my business.
Here’s how it works for the executives in my company: I give you your annual targets. At the end of the year, if you hit your numbers, you did good. If you didn’t hit your numbers, you didn’t do good. Do that more than a couple of years, and I’ll have to replace you with someone who can.
How you do it, the culture in your area of responsibility… I don’t know how that matters, as long as you hit your numbers and help the company reach our strategic goals."
Absent the pressures many of us feel managing the immediate risks in work like spaceflight, the challenge as managers is to retain the sense of morality that comes so naturally in the Mission Control Room. Because, even as managers, it is a morality — there are real consequences for every action we take, and mistakes can range from financially costly to catastrophic and life threatening. Perhaps today’s mistake or oversight “only” costs the customer or the company money. It could snowball on its own or in combination with similar missteps to cost the company a customer. Further, in businesses that will never end in physical injury, there is always the risk of bankrupting the company and destroying the enterprise.
Previous successes alone to do not lead an organization to continued success. Each of the three accidents in which NASA lost astronauts came after years of stunning successes. These weren’t working-level engineering or real-time rocket science errors, and veteran, respected leaders were not enough to prevent the mistakes. Despite their leaders’ professed shared values and good intentions, top-down management practices masked known concerns and warning signs, and the teams worked hard to meet their leaders’ expectations.
And there is the moral connection. As managers whose decisions do not lead to obvious and potentially catastrophic results, we must be continuously and deliberately aware of our management practices – why we take some action, change a plan, or stay the course. Without the “luxury” of Mission Control’s ubiquitous risks to reinforce deliberate decision-making, just “hitting our numbers” and all of the other nuances of management can lead us down the path to costly mistakes and avoidable failure. How we manage matters for long term success – it is a morality.
Fortunately, we can learn to be just as deliberate in our management decision-making as Mission Control must be in spaceflight. As this becomes an organizational value, the resulting cultural norms not only affect the management team but also influence critical decision-making at all levels.
Find out more about how Mission Control learned this connection and brought the same rigor to management practices that we had demanded while flying in space, and how this brought similar strong performance to the management team. Look for the book Leadership from the Mission Control Room to the Boardroom in the US and Canada in May, and in other international markets by December.
