NASA's Culture Problem: What Challenger and Columbia Teach About Trust
When you think of NASA, you think of inspiration, visionaries and making the impossible possible. From the start, NASA always had a lofty vision and goals, creating a deep sense of purpose and pride for employees. From putting humans on the moon, to building and launching the Hubble telescope that allowed deep space exploration, NASA dominated breakthroughs in space discovery for decades. What you don’t likely think about NASA, is a culture of blame, fear of retaliation, communication breakdown or poor management.
January 1967, tragedy first struck NASA when Apollo 1 caught fire during a test, killing three astronauts. January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into flight, killing seven astronauts. February 2003, the Columbia shuttle disintegrated upon reentry due to heat tile damage during lift-off. Accident investigations for all three shared themes. Employees were aware of issues before the accidents but didn’t raise concerns. Individuals withheld information for fear of blame. Communications broke down across teams. Assumptions were made about accountability and people didn’t always feel empowered.
NASA could no longer deny their culture challenges. Technical issues contributed to the tragedies, but cultural issues prevented concerns from being escalated and addressed. In April 2004, an “Assessment and Plan for Organizational Culture Change for NASA” stated:
“The NASA culture reflects a long legacy of a can-do approach to task achievement, but doesn’t yet fully reflect the agency’s values of Safety, People, Excellence and Integrity. The culture reflects an organization in transition, with many ongoing initiatives and lack of a clear sense at working levels of ‘how it all fits together.”
Why Culture?
We often think of culture as the “soft,” optional parts of work that don’t require priority or focus. However, it is culture that creates the daily environment impacting how work gets done. It influences whether employees share concerns, discuss and reflect upon mistakes, build trust, or are empowered. If you are facing quality issues, missing revenue targets or receiving customer complaints, take a hard look at your culture. There are likely challenges with employees not raising issues due to fear of retaliation or blame, poor communication channels, or a lack of empowered employees.
Culture enables the right behaviors to eliminate issues and drive performance. It can also be one of the most difficult things to change. Culture is shaped by what is rewarded. Each interaction requires you to be intentional about the culture you want to cultivate.
What is a healthy organizational culture?
Healthy cultures have a strong foundation of trust, which begins with vulnerability. Vulnerability allows people to build empathy and relate to each other. People feel safe to ask for help, without fear of blame or retaliation. Healthy cultures regularly spend time openly reflecting on success, mistakes and failures, to learn what to take forward. These cultures invite candor, constructive debate and dialogue. Employees do what they say they will do. Communications are carried throughout the organization. Issues are addressed openly and not behind one another’s backs. A trusting organization is built on respect and helps employees bring their best forward daily.
Maintain trust by empowering your leaders and holding them accountable. Trust people closest to the work to make informed decisions. Empowerment and accountability create trust, eliminates confusion and produces stronger morale and performance. The intent is not to pass off responsibility, delegate work or place blame. Discuss the expected outcomes and let the employee determine how to achieve them. Check in on progress by asking questions, while being careful not to tell or take over.
Leverage People leaders for the single greatest cultural impact. Culture is shaped one conversation at a time with employees internalizing what it means. The day-to-day people leader is in the best position to help drive performance of the employee and shape the culture through regular touchpoints.
Embrace transparency. Transparency promotes visibility and allows for faster response when there are challenges. It promotes trust and builds integrity and prevent surprises. Transparency also allows for stronger collaboration and performance.
Regularly schedule listening time. Healthy cultures include regular time for listening, promoting trust and candor. Employees are doing the work daily and are in the best position to see challenges, bottlenecks and communication breakdowns. By regularly building in time to listen, employees feel heard, leaders can uncover obstacles and quickly remove them. Listening should involve a combination of 1:1s, team meetings, and roundtables. Leaders will need to resist the urge to “tell” in these meetings and instead focus on asking thoughtful questions.
Connect employee’s work to the vision to create a sense of purpose and focus. People want to do meaningful work, know their work is valued and answer “How do I contribute to this?” People leaders should engage employees in discussions of how their work contributes to the vision of the business. Without this, people lose their resilience, trust, hope and engagement.
Intentionally communicate stories, heroes, rituals and shared values. We are wired to learn through stories and they help understand the behaviors we value. Learning about successes, mistakes and heroes reinforce that. Rituals allow us to create patterns of behavior without having to spend energy remembering to do them. Operating Rhythms, touch points, career conversations, and insights can all become a ritual in our regular work and reinforce culture. Shared values demonstrate what we encourage or discourage. The combination of these items helps shape the culture, holding up what we value, what to reinforce and where to adjust for impact.
Be mindful of “control.” In challenging environments, leaders often try to implement more control with processes, restrictions and narrowing responsibility. Intentions are good: more control will lead to better outcomes. However, it ends up starving an organization of much needed oxygen to thrive. They slow down work. They disengage employees. They remove empowerment and make accountability challenging. This creates an environment that lacks trust, a critical element of organizational health. Yet we still embrace these behaviors for fear of losing control if taken away.
Culture will determine your success or failure as an organization. It requires intentional and vigilant focus to cultivate the desired behaviors of trust, candor, empowerment & accountability, and transparency.
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