An Astronaut’s Advice on High-Stakes Collaboration

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard. We all feel pressure at work. We're all trying to execute in challenging conditions. We all need to get along with our coworkers and figure out the best way to work together as a team. But imagine doing all of that in a space station orbiting 254 miles above Earth. During her 24 years as a NASA astronaut, Cady Coleman learned a whole lot about how to perform and collaborate in high-stakes situations. She logged 2 space shuttle missions to conduct scientific experiments and launch the Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope. And her last mission involved working within a multicultural crew of 6 aboard the International Space Station for more than 5 months. She's here today to talk to us about how you prepare for that kind of job and do it well once you're up there and tell us how we can translate those lessons into more regular work back here on Earth. Her new book is called Sharing Space: An Astronaut's Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change. Cady, so great to have you here.

I'm so happy to be here.

Let's first talk about your decision to become an astronaut. You studied chemistry at MIT and then polymer science and engineering at UMass. Why did you wanna get out of a normal lab and go to space? Were you drawn to those higher stakes that I was just talking about?

I don't know if it's necessarily higher stakes, but this curiosity and a direction of just what else is out there and could I be one of the people that helped us discover it? And also, you know, I had a mom that taught me I could be literally anything that I wanted to be. It really made me think when I met Sally Ride at MIT, And it had never occurred to me. I mean, I was, I was a junior, so I was probably 20 when I saw her and heard her. I liked the fact that I could identify with her. And at the same time, I loved being in the lab, but I wanted something a little bit more that, and I knew it had to do with people and sharing and also being part of a bigger mission, even though chemistry is a plenty big mission, I promise you.

But to be an astronaut, it also takes sort of being calm and collected, right, in high-pressure situations. So have you always been able to do that, or is it something that you had to learn?

I would say a little of both, in that I've always been somebody who's good at seeing the big picture, and that takes taking a step back and a deep breath to do often. And in the world of chemistry and working in a lab where you really have to be always ready to run, you know, in terms of chemicals and flammability and all those kinds of things, I did get some practice at understanding you always have to be thinking what's next. When I do this, what could happen instead of what I expect to happen? So I did have a little of that, but I definitely had more to learn when I got to NASA. And I would say that wanting to become an astronaut had almost more to do with my optimism about the fact that discovery is something that we can all do.

So you talk a lot about all the simulations that you do at NASA to prepare for missions. But I think, you know, as any athlete knows, that there's no amount of practice that can replicate the stress of an actual game. How did you ensure that the training and preparation that you're doing is effective enough to really get you ready?

Partly by developing a mindset where you're always thinking, what isn't simulated here? What do I still need to keep in mind might happen on the big day? And that's everything from I might be nervous, things might go wrong, things might go differently, and making sure I'm ready to react. And some of those things we can recreate, like for example, in doing an emergency simulation. And when we count those as like You know, if there's a fire on the space station, if we realize there's a leak, if something happens and suddenly the atmosphere that we're breathing is suspect. And so we practice those drills and to the point where we actually put, you know, hoods on our heads that are going to, you know, help us breathe in a toxic atmosphere. We're going to find out that they get all fogged up and that we wish that we had our glasses on inside, or maybe we need to put lenses inside those things. So we managed to learn a lot of very practical lessons, but we also I think the fact that we're watched and we're graded, I think that that adds the pressure that we need to figure out at least some of the mistakes we might make on the real day. And we also have an atmosphere of talking about them. You know how like something might go badly in a meeting or at work and everybody kind of looks at their shoes and somebody says, "Oh, so, okay, you know, we'll come back to that, but onto topic two," or, you know, and it's hard to talk about, but we have a culture at NASA. That is, every single mistake you make, even if people don't know, you need to share it. For example, the T-38 is our training airplane. It's a— for a chemist in the Air Force, I mean, it was an amazing thing to do, to fly faster than the speed of sound when, when necessary. And at the same time, it's also— I mean, it really is something where things can go wrong and you have to figure out how you're going to react to them. But if I have a perfectly normal flight, and I go to unbuckle my parachute harness from the seat, and I find that one of the buckles wasn't latched. I mean, I was flying in a, in an airplane where you really might have to eject at any moment, and my parachute was only partially hooked to the seat. And that is a mistake that I made. I do two things. I think back to what caused me to make that mistake. I also report it. And chances are I also stand up at our Monday morning meeting and say, I flew in our airplane and I forgot to attach one of my clips.

Hmm.

And it's embarrassing. And at the same time, I guarantee you I am not the only one that has ever done that or realizes that they might be vulnerable to it. So it's that atmosphere of admitting your mistakes so that we can all learn. And it's hard.

Also because there must be competition among the astronauts to prove that they should be the one on the next ship. So you don't want to be the one making mistakes. How do you handle that?

Everybody's got their own way. My way is probably to be a little bit oblivious to the competition and really just being myself. And we have several different sort of categories of astronauts, and so we are by definition kind different. You know, I came as a scientist from the military, actually I think one of the first scientists from the military. And so that's different than a pilot from the military or somebody who was a navigator or some other kind of flight crew. So we're all in different categories. I think that makes it easy not to be comparing ourselves and realizing that we each bring different skills. And in a way it was actually, I think, lucky for me because what I am nervous about being observed, it's harder for me to do my best sometimes. Hmm. I'll also just add that once you're selected, they have every intention of having you fly in space. And the big competition is really over because you are there. They have spent money on you before you even walk in the door, and they intend to use your skills. So there is that spirit of community Everyone from the spouses to the other astronauts are helpful, share lessons, share ways of coping with just the enormity of the amount that we have to learn and the time that we spend training.

Yeah. And with so much of the work of NASA being done on the ground, I think in your book you said it was something like you had spent more than 8,000 days at NASA and 180 days in space. So while you're waiting to be tapped for a mission, how do you stay motivated and ready?

It's really the word that you used, Allison. It's the word mission where there's individual shuttle missions, there's going to the space station, those missions, and there's future missions, but they're all part of one really big and very clear mission, which is about space exploration. And so we all have different jobs in between flights. And it's very clear, I think, to all of us that what you do in that job, whether— I've had jobs where it was my job to review procedures that were new. And make sure that they really did what they're supposed to do. And some of that is just attention to detail and it's not exactly exciting and yet it's imperative because the crew that's really going to space doesn't have time. They can't be iterating all those procedures. They need to see something that's a baseline that's good. You know, and so there's all sorts of jobs that we have in between that all really count. And I think it's that mission that is so much larger than us that makes the difference.

A term you use in the book is operational mindset. So explain what that means and how those of us who aren't astronauts might apply it to our work.

Operational mindset is the way to carry out a mission, and it's not the vision of the mission, it's the what are we doing today and how are we going to carry it out. And it's everything that you see in the movies when there's like, you know, SWAT teams or SEALs or, you know, all these, you know, spy missions. And, and I think they gloss over the attention to detail that it takes to really make sure that they have a plan that they've really thought out. An example that I'll use is that I was used to as a chemist, and I was somebody who was new at flying when I first learned to fly airplanes. And I would go out there to the airfield. This is little planes. This is before NASA. And if I, you know, realized that I had 4 more things before I could go out and fly, I just got those things done. If the day was longer, you know, I just made the day longer. But I found that If my last thing in the day was to go out and fly an airplane by myself, there's times that I took that checklist, walked around the plane, made sure everything was ready, got inside— and this is a plane that I rented— and realized, you know, my head's been so many different places today, I'm not physically present enough to really be able to fly this airplane with the safety of myself and people on the ground. And you take that book, of the airplane, you bring it back inside and say, I'm taking myself off the manifest. Hmm. So it's a, it's a different way of thinking. And the other example I'll give, it's specific to me perhaps, is that I'm somebody that sees a lot of possibilities. And if it were me, we would change the plan until the very last minute. Like, oh, what if we could do that part and that part too? Or if we started just 3 minutes earlier, we could do this. And when you change the plan at the last minute, you make it vulnerable. And there's a certain amount of that that is good to do when you suddenly realize the plan could be better and needs to be better. But a lot of it, like starting 3 minutes earlier, maybe suddenly we're not in the right range of our satellite times. And I learned that I had to learn to contain my suggestions because having a plan, having it set, and everyone being ready to implement it together is the way to have a successful plan. And last-minute changes are not usually the right way to go, but sometimes invaluable.

That's definitely a lesson I need to learn. I'm always someone who's like, we can push it to the end and make it perfect.

Exactly. Me too.

So then ultimately the mission teams are put together by NASA and in the case of the International Space Station, other countries' space agencies. You know, you don't really have a say in who you're going to be working with. So what's the first step that you take to start figuring out how you're going to collaborate?

The first step is getting to know each other. It's actually when you go and have coffee or eat dinner or take a walk and realize, oh, that's the guy that I just met this week and he's in the park with his kids. It is, I think, tugging on those other ways to be connected that ultimately connects the team. Appreciating where each other comes from, I think goes a long way. And I think communication has a lot to do with it. English is the language of the space station, but all of us are required to speak English to a State Department intermediate-high level. And we're all required to speak Russian to the same level. My first survival training, I was with two young engineers and we're going to spend three days in the woods surviving in the winter. A few hours outside of Moscow, but still pretty cold.

I can imagine.

And snowy. And I invited them over for lunch with one of our translators. And one of my favorite memories is being out there and having one of them say, you know, "Katya, again, your idea again." My other example is on the crew that I was on, we had an Italian, a Russian and myself that were going to fly in the Russian Soyuz capsule. And we were very different people, all of us. And luckily, actually, we all spoke very good English and very good Russian by that time. But we did have a pretty big, I'd say, cultural divide in that unlike my survival experience where my two crewmates in survival were really eager to hear my ideas and understand what I wanted to say, My crewmate, my new crewmate that I was definitely going to space with, he'd grown up in an isolated part of Russia. He was a single-seat airplane pilot and he hadn't had to work with a lot of people. He just never really worked with women. And so that was really new for him and probably hard for both of us.

And so how did you deal with it?

I asked a lot of advice. We spent usually at least a year or two, and in our case, 3, learning to get along together. And so I asked advice of other cosmonauts. You know, he's not somebody that speaks a lot to everybody else in the crew. And I had to figure out how to be heard even more so than my Italian crewmate who was his co-pilot. You know, you have to think about who the people are on your team. I certainly bring my baggage to a mission and it's hard to undo a lifetime of listening or not listening. Now, if you were the vice president of some company and other people are not like actually hearing you and answering your questions, I don't think I would deal with the situation the same way. But for the purposes of our mission of communicating in a way that worked for all of us, where it was important to me to feel heard, I think Paolo liked accomplishing the sort of knitting things together. And for Dimitri, it was important that he hear our suggestions, but he's also a new commander. Learning how to sort of like charge ahead and at the same time bring your team with you. When we get up there, we're actually with 3 more people. And so now we're a crew of 6.

I know that's the craziest thing because you, you're a team of 3. There are 3 people there and you must develop a way of working with that group of 6. And then the 3 other people leave and you get a new group of 3 people. So you have to shake everything up again.

Exactly.

That must have been really challenging.

When we came up there, Scott Kelly and 2 Russians, one that I knew quite well, and one not as much. I mean, Scott is a person of— this is Scott Kelly. He's a person of few words. I am a person of many words. I found out later people would ask Scott, is that going to be okay being up there with Katie? You know, she talks a lot. And I'm like, well, nobody ever asked me did I want to be up there with Mr. Few Words. I expected to be excellent colleagues. I didn't expect to really have a very special relationship and love working together. And actually for, you know, for lots of different reasons, you know, I prefer being a person of few words. Scott had a real gift for non-judgmental feedback. An example I'll give that's one of my favorites is he just said, "Coleman, I've been watching." This is up on the space station. And he says, "You're slow at the beginning, you're fast in the middle, and you're slow again at the end. And I think it has to do with unpacking and packing when everything is weightless." Where if you don't tuck it just right in the right place, something might float away. But what if you just said, okay, today everything's going on the left, and if I have to, I'm just gonna duct tape it in place, even if it's just so geographically I have one place to look. He said, but whatever works for you, I urge you to look for something that helps you do that better. And if he had said to me, Coleman, you know, why are you so slow? And candidly, all of us are slow when we first get up there. But if he'd said that to me, I mean, I knew I was slower than I wanted to be. I can see the timeline and it would've just made me feel worse without actually a way to go, okay, let me try that. So we've all got our different ways to sort of tease those things out.

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That's correct. And this was a decision that was made basically starting in the '90s and implemented, you know, with the space station where we'd had a range of spacesuits, small, medium, large, extra large. And for money and logistics, they said we are not going to have those small or those extra large spacesuits on the space station. And it eliminated more than a third of the women. And if we have to be in a bigger spacesuit and we actually practice in a swimming pool with that big space suit, it's like you and a giant exercise ball full of air dragging you up to the surface at different angles when you're trying to lean over and work. It's really a big physical disadvantage to have. And the phrase that I remember from that was, "We've looked ahead at the manifest and we have all of the spacewalkers that we need." And to me, that indicates that There's really a lack of understanding of what having a diverse team in every arena means. And that means having women included in the spacewalking. And as a person who was definitely in that group that was not supposed to be big enough, I wanted to do that. And I also had— I recruited and had a lot of great help trying to succeed in that spacesuit. After my initial spacesuit training, one of the guys came up to me and he said, "Katie, I've seen you and you have a good head for spacewalking and you're doing great. And you need to know that the small spacesuit that you're doing so well in is going to go away and a medium is going to be a lot harder for you. So you just need to be aware that when somebody looks at you and says you're too small for that spacesuit, you just say, 'I take a medium,' because I think you can be in that group that can succeed." So I had that kind of help. I had determination. And also, and I think people might not have understood what this meant at the time to eliminate those spacesuits. You could not live and work on the space station unless you were spacesuit qualified. You could be on a shuttle mission. You could go up there, accomplish a mission, come home. But I wanted to live on that space station and work up there. It's a decision that had really a lot of implications. And your question was, how do you make change? And in that way, when something is basically just not, I think, not right and not in the best interest of the mission, there's two ways to change it. You can stand up and say loudly, this needs to be changed. My way is more to find a way to speak in terms that people can understand. That includes making sure that you are basically achieving that when people look, they see the facts they need to see. And so that they understand why they need you. And I think the good news is that right now with the office being 40% women, it's harder to make decisions that leave out more than a third of the people.

Talking about the risks and the stakes, you know, you were at NASA when the Columbia space shuttle blew up on reentry, which killed 7 of your colleagues. How did that change how you thought about the stakes of your work? Or about how the organization operated in terms of protecting its astronauts and avoiding disasters like that?

I would say that even before that, all of us understand, and our families do too, that flying in space is never going to be safe. I mean, it's going to be as safe as we can make it. And the way that I get up and go training or climb into the shuttle or the Soyuz and live on a space station is that I count on the people on the ground to have done their best. And we try to put them in the best position to do that, try to create safety systems where they feel free to report safety issues or things that just don't feel right or could be done better. I will say that I thought I was prepared. To understand that, having trained and lived with astronauts who had been through other accidents through the Challenger, through Apollo. And until it actually happens in your very own community to your very own friends and their families, I don't think you can know how you're gonna feel. And I never wanna discount what it means to be somebody, whether it's NASA or one of the contractors, everybody is part of that mission. They're all thinking through, the parts that they played when one of these accidents happen. I think that the space program represents such hope, hope of a future, hope of finding different places, hope of exploring who we are and who we can be. Then when something happens like one of these accidents, it kind of says, well, is there really gonna be that hope? Does that hope really exist? And I think that's why everybody remembers where they were when Challenger happened. When Columbia happened, because they just, they represent that sort of like struggle to realize that hope still exists, you know, for all of us.

So it didn't change how you thought about your willingness to go up in space or your trust in NASA. You sort of, you know, still believed, you know, particularly in the aftermath where you helped figure out what went wrong and why to avoid it in the future, that the organization was doing the right thing.

It did not change that. It really didn't. I mean, I was involved in detail in one of the projects, which was the goo, so to speak, that we would use. It's almost like putty that we would put on the bottom of the space shuttle. It wasn't actually to address the actual thing that happened to Columbia in that Columbia's wings, the edges of the wings, that very brittle reinforced carbon-carbon, that was what developed a hole from the foam. On the launch pad. But understanding what happened and what the vulnerabilities were made it clear that that foam could have hit anywhere on the space shuttle. So I was involved in a repair method, and I am a polymer chemist by background. And together, I think that we really succeeded in bringing the best repair to space, but it took some really candid talking, thinking, and leadership.

Yeah, I'd love to hear your view on the future of space travel, you know, particularly with the involvement of the private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc.

I love having all these companies involved. I know people worry as sort of an initial front that if something is commercial, if money's at stake, then human life will be valued less. And I don't think that that's true. But what these companies can do for the space program and for the mission is that they can do what the government can't. They can take bigger risks with hardware, not with people on board, but with hardware. So they can say, well, let's try this rocket without as much of a heat shield. Or let's, you know, look at Elon Musk and the Starship. You know, he's built a very efficient, you know, way to make a lot of different physical rockets so that he and his team can test different aspects of them without people on board so that we get more quickly to the version where we are gonna put people on board. And they have different resources, different visions, but it is about that larger goal. And I respect that. And I love the fact that they've found a way to bring people who are not billionaires to space. And, you know, what does it mean when you see someone who is like you, maybe someone with a disability, maybe someone who is your gender, maybe someone who is your religious beliefs? There's so many more people going more than 50 miles above the Earth and looking back and seeing all of us, that more people feel seen. And that's invaluable.

Yeah. And that change in perspective is something that you talk about a lot in the book. That's the wonder of space, right? Knowing that we're all floating through it too.

I'm not the first person to come up with that idea of talking about Earth as a spaceship. But, you know, I think as astronauts we have an extraordinary opportunity to be up there as 6 or 7 people and you look around and there is nobody else that is present. Either you have to get the work done, your teammates have to get the work done, or you have to enable each other to do it or else the mission doesn't succeed. And it's just so clear that nobody else is there. Whereas on Earth, when I walk out of some meeting where, oh, the same person talked a lot and didn't listen, or, I brought something up or some other woman brought something up and didn't get heard, or, you know, these things. You put it away and you go on to other things. You go home, but we don't get to go home. And it's a privilege. But then if you take that and you look at our Earth and you think of our Earth as a spaceship, you realize that everyone is on the crew and everyone has a point of view that is valuable or experience or something that they really bring to the team. And looking back, you know, at the Earth, I just feel like, oh, if everyone knew how connected we really all could be.

Well, Cady, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks a lot.

That's Cady Coleman, former NASA astronaut and author of Sharing Space: An Astronaut's Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change. And we have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team— Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Alison Beard.