During his career as a Nasa flight director, Paul Sean Hill had to manage some particularly difficult situations – including overseeing the investigation into the 2003 Columbia disaster and leading the first successful mission after the accident.
But one of the biggest challenges, says Hill, was trying to change management culture at the space agency. In 2007, he was promoted to director of mission operations, and took it on himself to create a culture of greater openness and improved efficiency.
Hill says that Nasa's leadership at the time had not been conducive to honest dialogue, creating an environment that only encouraged mistakes. "The motto was 'don't ripple the pond,'" he says. This, he claims, played a role in some of the space programme's major historical accidents: "Each one of those wasn't principally a technical failure or a rocket science mistake; it was a failure in leadership."
After retiring in 2016, Nasa began to record the changes he had made. "I wanted to say, 'Hey, don't forget what we have learned. We can't screw this up again,'" he says.
Hill has now expanded his report into a book, Mission Control Management. Here, he shares with WIRED his tips for building a good team, maintaining trust and making better decisions.
WIRED: What was your biggest challenge in transforming management at Nasa?
Paul Sean Hill: The biggest challenge was getting leaders to change how they saw themselves. At Mission Control, we were like most established organisations. We had our own way of doing business. We knew how good we were. But what this meant was that, over time, you couldn't tell our most senior leaders anything. We were probably one of the most respected organisations and group of leaders anywhere in the world, and we thought we didn't have to take advice from other people.
Once you are in higher management, it becomes very easy to reflect this attitude – this arrogance that comes with success. The managers made decisions and took risks that they didn't study as well as they had in the past. This phenomenon happens to all managers.
What steps did you take to overcome this?
After several years of the top manager trying to change this attitude, he sent us out on what we call "benchmarking trips." We went out with our senior managers and we visited other government organisations and private companies and we looked behind the scenes. How do they train their technical people to do their job? For example, we went to an Air Force satellite operation facility. We saw they had ten different satellites controlled by three to five people, when historically we had used 100-150 people to operate a single space shuttle.
We saw these small teams of people managing an entire satellite constellation, then we saw how much cheaper and how much less effort they had to put into getting those people trained and to successfully do that very important job. That shocked us. That shook the management team, and we knew we had to do something to improve. Our rockets were still awfully damn good, we were just leading them badly.
How do you ensure there are no mistakes in such a high stress environment?
It really comes down to ensuring that, with every decision made, you understand why it is the right decision. As each team member makes a decision, as a manager you must ask, "What are you basing this on? What data do you have? What engineering theory do you have that supports this decision and your recommendations?" You make sure they are saying it out loud for the whole team to hear, because if they do make a mistake, somebody else on the team will likely detect it.
In fact, at the end of every training scenario, including the ones we knew we were right about, we asked, "Did we do the right thing? If we had to do this one over again, would we do it the same way? If we think about it now, is there a better way we could've done it?" We had those conversations in front of the whole team and in front of the management team. It's also true that if we make a mistake, we come back and say, "How did we make that mistake?" Eventually it becomes a habit to think that way.
How can you build a cultural value?
I think first you have to say it out loud. Until we underwent this transformation in our leadership team, you couldn't get two of the senior managers at the top of organisation to say what our goal was. So the first part is to have that conversation at the top of organisation. The CEO needs to sit with other leaders and say, "What is our most important goal?"
An insurance company may still have some risks. OK, a rocket isn't going to blow up, but they could go out of business. Everyone has their own version of "This is what blowing up the rocket looks like to us." Ask, "What is the service that we provide that is more important than anything else?" Then use that service as a litmus test to keep everybody aligned.
What are the warning signs that your team has trust issues?
Withholding information. Here’s a scenario: so you are in a team meeting and nobody is disagreeing. But then after the meeting, you may hear privately that your team are disagreeing with you. That alone is one of the top warning signs. You need to ask, "Why is it that there are concerns from people on my team that aren't being shared with me? What else may they not be sharing their opinion on, because we aren't managing the right way? What risks may they be taking that none of us are aware of?"
An example is that, at Nasa, most of the senior managers were afraid to bring these things up with the big boss. Just before I was in senior management, one of the most senior managers in the organisation told the boss that his division was struggling. He said, "We have this important space flight coming up that we have been getting ready for for several years, but we are probably going to need three extra months to be ready." The boss said, "What are you telling me this for? If you can't get this done, let me know and I will replace you with someone who can." Do you think a senior manager was ever going to be willing to bring up anything he needed help with again, after being treated like that in front of his peers? Not going to happen.
So how do you hire a team that is going to be open to dialogue?
One of the things you have to look for is if a person is capable of being fully transparent in their communication with the rest of team. That has to be first when you are making a selection for people in management. Then, your management will deliberately have this outlook too. They have to not just be willing to do it; they must understand the value in it too.
Mission Control Management, published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing is out now.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
