How an astronaut thinks about trust and teamwork

How an astronaut thinks about teamwork

What you probably already know: Plenty of books have been written about building a high-functioning team, and the importance of trust within that. But no where is that more vital than at NASA, where people’s lives literally hang in the balance. For former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman, whose new book, Sharing Space, just came out, trusting her team with her life started by having honest conversations.

Why? “People ask me, ‘how can you feel OK being on a launch pad?’ And I assume that everyone has done their best,” Coleman said. That’s because she’s talked to everyone on the team. She asks they how they are. And they know they can tell her if things aren’t going well. “It is so much more important to admit you made a mistake,” she said. And at NASA, admitting mistakes can become a very public thing. That makes it all the more important that the work environment is such that people aren’t punished when they admit something’s gone wrong.

What it means: Coleman used to fly small jets when she was in the Air Force, and before they take off, there’s a safety check-list. She recalls a time when they asked her if each of the buckles on her parachute harness were buckled, and she realized that she had checked one but not the other because she’d been interrupted during the checklist process. So she admitted that she hadn’t checked the second buckle. Turns out, lots of people got interrupted at that same point in the checklist process, so the Air Force changed the process.

What happens now? That same culture of honesty and communication is replicated at NASA. “We’ve created a culture where people really do speak up about what they’ve done that they realize could have been done better,” she said. While it will never be safe to go to space, Coleman said, the culture at NASA around transparency and humility was a big part of why she was willing to step into the shuttle. “That’s why I feel fine getting on top of that rocket,” she said. “Because I know that people have done their best.”

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