Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Talk to me. Information, news and entertainment on demand. WUS radio.com. 0:10 [on-hold music] Welcome to The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT in our connected world, with your host, Peggy Smedley. [on-hold music] Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. 0:26 After an extensive career working for NASA, my last guest today has found a way to apply leadership strategies used during his aerospace missions to enhance team dynamics across a wide variety of businesses and industries. 0:42 Please join me in welcoming Paul Sean Hill, author of Leadership: From the Mission Control Room to the Boardroom, A Guide to Unleashing Team Performance. Paul, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much. 0:56 Thanks for having me. So Paul, I have to tell you, I'm, I'm trying to understand if we've got a mission operative, uh, is it a dictatoret? Do I have that right? A mod? Are we, are we creating mods in our, in our offices? 1:10 What are we doing here? Well, you know, the, the, the real lesson from, from our experience in mission control, um, is, is kind of twofold. 1:20 It's one, what does it take to be really good, high-performing individuals, high-performing teams? 1:24 And what is it that happens to us as we get promoted once we get noticed as these high-performing people, these high-performing teams? 1:32 How is it so many of us change and become awful leaders, which was certainly our experience. 1:38 Against our, our better intentions, what is it that changes for us in the environment that keeps us from being as near perfect in our decision-making in the mission control room, but when we come out of that and we're managing the business and managing people, we make decisions that we wouldn't have understood before we had been promoted. 1:56 And that really is the focus is how do you learn those lessons from mission control and apply them in managing a business. So that's interesting. 2:04 So are there really similarities then between what you've lear-- what, what you've kind of led at NASA and how CEOs are different in these industries? 2:14 Because that's interesting, because you've learned all this great stuff. You've learned... I mean, those are some serious things. You make a mistake in, in mission control, right? 2:22 In a mission control room, somebody dies, right? I mean, that's what we're talking. An astronaut is, is... It's a terrible thing, right? There's some serious consequences. 2:30 So as a CEO of a company, you could say, "Well, they've made a mistake. It's, it's a, it's an expensive one," but why do they become such bad bosses? You know? Or why are they not leading properly? 2:42 I mean, there's a different mindset or what, what are the similarities or what are the differences? What have you learned? I guess that's a really interesting point you make. 2:51 [chuckles] Well, you, you, you hit right on it when, um... The difference in the decision-making, the fact that we are s- we become separated as we get promoted away from those immediate ramifications. 3:02 So if, again, if you think about it in mission control terms, then a mistake that an individual makes at the working level could cause the rocket to explode, literally blow up the rocket right now, kill the astronauts that are relying on us. 3:16 Whereas, you know, as a CEO or a manager a-at, at any level, sitting at the head of a conference table, well, if we make a decision, maybe it costs us a little bit of money, but what's the big deal? 3:27 However, you know, apply that f-from a, from a different perspective and don't think so much about the rocket science, but the purpose of the mission. You know, the company. 3:36 Do I, did I cost the company e-enough money with this mistake that maybe I run, run the risk of bankrupting the company? 3:42 You know, are we gonna run off so many of our customers because the quality of our products or the qual-quality of our service has gone down, we lose customers, and again, we bankrupt the company. 3:52 And while bankrupting the company doesn't sound as sexy, you know, on TV or on the radio as blowing up the rocket, to those stakeholders, to the shareholders, to the employees who lose-- who are at risk of losing their jobs, not doing the right thing, not leading the company well and making the right decisions does have serious ramifications. 4:13 And that's the thing we have to, we have to make sure we've-- don't forget as managers, as we get promoted higher and higher. Everything that I do is setting a tone. 4:22 It's, it's, it's telling the people who work around me and work for me, this is right and this is wrong. These are the allowable behaviors, these are not. 4:31 And so, you know, in the mission control room, it is normal for everybody in the room to know that they can raise their hand and tell the boss, the flight director who's in charge, "Hey, this is the wrong decision. 4:41 You're doing the wrong, the wrong thing," or, "We're doing the wrong thing." And it's allowed in that room because what's most important in that room is be successful. 4:50 Don't blow up the rocket, not pretend that I'm still the smartest person in the room. And that's- So that- -that so many senior managers have to learn. But that's the thing, that awkwardness of being able to criticize. 5:02 I mean, and I, and I know you talk about that there were three tragic crashes involving faculty, you know, the, the, the facul- the, the faculty or, or the facility, I should say, engineering there. 5:15 But w-- before your time, but then now you look at this and, and, and, and... But the f- was it the failure of leadership? Was it the failure... Was it pointing blame? I guess the question is: How do you change mindset? 5:29 I mean, because if somebody doesn't know how to lead by saying, "Hey, tell me I'm wrong," versus people who know to feel comfortable to raise their hand, it's a different environment to know how to do that. Right. 5:42 It's a different culture. And it's a top-down problem because, you know, the person at the head of the table, the boss, at whatever level you're at, the boss is the person who decides what's acceptable behavior. 5:52 Is it okay for me to say, "Hey, I think we're wrong. I think we're overlooking something"? You can't really fix that from the bottom up. 5:59 So when you think about the NASA accidents, in all three cases-There were, there were conditions in the community that were set by the senior executives that prevented the organization from coming forward and stopping things. 6:12 Even when they were-- when they saw the indications that we were making bad mistakes or that we were, we were taking risks, making decisions without enough data, without really doing due diligence. 6:23 But the community went ahead and did it because the boss says, "Hey, this is what we want to do, and we've decided it's okay." 6:31 And so the trick is, as we get promoted, remembering that the management environment itself kind of lures us down that path. 6:39 That the path of believing that, "Well, because I'm the boss, I'm the great decider, so I don't really need information from anybody else." 6:45 When the higher you go in an organization, the more important it is that you're able to hear the voices from the people below you on your org chart because they are closer to the problem. 6:56 They have more, they have more data, more information. 6:59 The trick is figuring out how do we get that information to flow, not have everybody below me either respect me so much or fear me so much that they won't tell me, "Hey, I think you're doing the wrong thing," or, "I don't think we've studied this enough. 7:11 We're not ready to make this decision." And you can't bring that alive. I don't wanna pick on Uber, but, I mean, they just had a hack, and they kept it a secret. And we all talk about what happened to Target. 7:22 When you keep things a secret, bad things happen. So we still haven't learned of a culture that if you come clean and you tell things when there's a hack, we all know we can't connect things to the internet. 7:31 We haven't mastered the security yet. There's all kinds of bad actors out there, but we're still doing it. So we still have a culture of not wanting to be forthright and, and forthcoming on things. 7:42 So we still have people at the helm who still haven't figured this out yet. Right. And we learned this the hard way inside NASA. When you... Again, you think about those three accidents. 7:53 And, and just in my organization, just the Mission Control organization, uh, about the time I was getting into senior management, kind of the, the rule of thumb on the management team was no ripples in the pond, which meant you were expected at the most senior levels of an organization that's responsible for mission control for human spaceflight, you were expected in meetings in front of even your peers or the boss, never bring up an issue, never bring up something that sounds like we might have a problem. 8:22 Even if we really do have a problem, and we need help with it, don't bring it up because it makes us look weak, and we might get in trouble. So, so don't talk about the things that we need to be talk... 8:32 that we need to be talking about. 8:33 So we had individual managers in the Mission Control organization who genuinely had tr-- problems that their part of the organization couldn't solve, that they were expected to just do the best you can and don't go seek help from your peers or from anybody else because the word will get out, which is not the right way to fly in space, just like it's not the right way to run a railroad or any other business. 8:55 What you really want is everybody in your team to be willing to come forward and say, "I don't understand this, and I need help. Who else on the team has had experience with this? 9:04 Let's get our two teams together to solve this problem." 9:07 And that is a normal way of doing business in the Mission Control room flying the rocket, but we f- we have difficulty applying it sometimes in the management ranks. 9:16 But we can learn to apply those same ideas in the management ranks, but it has to be a value head, I mean, held by the boss. Well, Paul Sean Hill, we're out of time. 9:27 Author of Leadership from the Mission Control Room to the Boardroom: A Guide to Unleashing Team Performance. Thank you for being with us today. We wish you continued success. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. 9:39 All right, listeners, we're broadcast live every Tuesday, twelve PM Central. You can check us out at thepeggySmedleyShow.com, and you can get his book online. As always, this is The Peggy Smedley Show, the voice of IoT. 9:51 And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have a great week. 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