Courage to Leap & Lead with Paul Sean Hill, Episode 136 - part 2

You've got courage to leap, courage to lead. Be brave and be bold. Whoa, let it roar. Welcome to the Courage to Leap and Lead podcast, where each of our guests share the stories of courage that helped them become powerful leaders. Before we start today's show, please remember to visit courage-consulting.com. Where you can find all the episodes and other excellent resources, all at courage-consulting.com. Now, here's your host, Leadership Courage Coach CB Bowman. I sat behind the engineer at the Johnson Space Center who was the expert on that part of the shuttle that we know was damaged by that piece of foam. We were in a presentation in a big auditorium after the Columbia accident, and one of the accident investigation board members— so a bunch of senior engineers and senior leaders from different industries that were brought in to run the investigation, you know, essentially, how did NASA miss this? And they went through some very high-level engineering analysis on just what you just said. What's the relative velocity? What's the energy that's transferred at that impact? What does that look like? And as they ran through that, this guy stopped, looks down, and turns white, and got up and walked out of the auditorium. This was weeks after the accident, first time he had ever considered that simple calculation of how much energy could have been transferred with, with this rolling velocity.

Holy cow.

And I'd say that again, not to absolve NASA, but to say It's a really difficult business. In fact, this was a big part of why I wrote my book the way I did, and that is, think about the public's perception of NASA, NASA's earned reputation, not just perception, how good NASA has always been at really difficult things, solving very difficult problems, managing these enormous, almost unimaginable risks. Month after month, year after year, and being so successful. The message then is, if even the rocket scientists in NASA and these teams of people that have such a stellar reputation, if even they, or even we, are susceptible to the paradox of success getting in our way so that we stop seeing some of these things and asking those questions in ways that 10 years before we would have. But after enough time, we've got enough pressures. We got Congress whipping us to be cheaper and to keep flying, and they're losing confidence in us. You put all those things together. If it could happen to us, in what industry does, does anyone think they are immune? And then what is it they could then learn from us and how to also always be deliberate, always be methodical in their decision-making and in their risk-taking? And don't just take the risk, but manage the risk. Ask, why is it okay to do? Not how badly do we want to do it no matter what, but how much do we know about the downside? And are we sure we're managing that? Or are we just jumping off the cliff and hoping to weave a parachute while we're in free fall? Um, and part of the, part of the message in the NASA experience and in NASA's own failures is it can and will happen to every team as they build up more and more success unless their leaders have enough courage to put on the brakes and sit back and say, wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm willing to admit I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I'm willing to admit we may be making a decision that's half-baked because we really, really want to get on with it, not because we've done a good job. You know, and you know, some of that feels like personal courage because Maybe I'm not being as good as my predecessor. He never had that problem. Damn it. Now I'm the one that's gonna have to slow down and say this clearly unrisky thing is something that we can't do. That takes a different kind of courage also to be willing to be that guy.

Absolutely. You know, I just wanna break and say to the audience, look, you know, what we're not doing here is shame and blame. What we are doing is dissecting What is courage in these kinds of situations? And I want to be really clear to say, to give an analogy here. If you were a doctor and you were performing surgery to save a life, and you had a choice of saving a life or paralyzing a part of the body, which would you do? You would save the life. And that's what we're talking about here. And so it's much easier to analyze this type of thing after. What we hope is that in analyzing it after, that it's not a question of pointing fingers. It's a question, question of what do you learn from this failure that will make you successful the next time around? Back to you, Paul.

You know, the thing that we always were good at at Mission Control— in fact, we knew a long time ago, we would say we had the luxury in Mission Control of our job. The, the thing, the job that we have, the responsibility we have in Mission Control, making those calls while the, the rocket engine's burning, while the astronauts are in space, literally in harm's way— it— that kind of responsibility, like being in, in a lot of military jobs, goes a long way in keeping you honest in your thinking, making sure that you're continuing to ask and answer the right questions. You're not just cavalierly or blindly going forward because we have to, because the ramifications of mistakes are too severe and too immediate. You know, it's too unforgiving.

Yeah.

Um, it's the further you get away from that kind of environment, those immediate catastrophic ramifications, it starts becoming easier to rationalize your way into taking risk versus managing risk. And it's, it's that, it's that place that you need to have a different kind of courage, a willingness to say, hey, wait, wait, I think we're being cavalier here. And we learned to apply it not just in the mission control room. In fact, this is, this is the story that I recount in my book. And that is how we finally learned to take that out of the control room and apply it in our boardroom as senior managers, the, the same willingness to always say what needs to be said. But now it's not because the rocket engine's burning, it's we're about to commit $100 million on some development project that we don't actually have enough information on, but we're going to do it because we said we were going to go down this path 3 years ago and we're unwilling to second-guess ourselves. And we're going to keep pouring money into a project that, if we were all being honest, we would admit is failing. And we would take our lumps and fix this problem and go do the right thing. We learned how to apply the same logic in every situation like that. And that's the place where large or very successful teams, previously successful teams, where they get into trouble is they don't learn how to apply those things anywhere except for that one area, that area where they are the subject matter expert. But in all other things, managing people or budget or schedules, we tend to convince ourselves, well, those same rules don't apply. But that courage, that willingness to speak up and to say, here's where I think we're making a mistake and nobody is saying it. Maybe nobody else is seeing it and I'm willing to be the one person that says it. And then maybe some of you other smart people around the table will weigh in and help me understand or will help me get my message across. That, that is a behavior you can learn and, and you can make a team value, a team norm, not just in mission control while the rocket engine's burning. We learned how to do that as, as a senior leadership team sitting in the boardroom. And we pulled off corporate types of success. And I mean, like, like winning business that was worth half of our entire budget, um, in, in work that we were told we were either not allowed to pursue or would never ever be able to do in the first place. And the only reason we were able to do it is the organization was more effective than just me. And the organization was smarter than just me. The fact that everybody was now empowered to put everything on the table, to second-guess me as the boss, second-guess each other, and it wasn't adversarial. It wasn't trying to show each other up. It was, how are— how do we— How do we all focus so much on what we are trying to accomplish, what our mission is, what success looks like to our mission? that I'm always going to be willing to speak up. If that means the boss is going to have his feelings hurt because I'm about to disagree with him in front of, in front of everybody else, so be it, because the boss shares my value. The boss wants us to be successful. The boss isn't trying to look like the smartest engineer in the room. When you can get there at that level of transparency, that level of high trust, to use Stephen M. R. Covey's words, Then you really can pull off miracles. Then you can keep from doing things like accepting foam risk cavalierly, or to keep flying a solid rocket booster seal that's leaking fire. That's how you stop— that's how you prevent that kind of lax thinking from creeping into your team over time. But you have to stay on it like a drumbeat, month after month, meeting after meeting.

I see where you're going. Let me throw something at you for discussion purposes. The courage that's needed to make these kinds of decisions when it's related to a life, I think, is very different than the courage that's needed to make these kinds of decisions when it's related to a product or service.

I agree.

Right?

I agree. And I would tell you it's easier when life is involved.

Yeah, theoretically. But now, if I follow— and I haven't had a chance to read your book, um, but if I follow the, the line of thinking that we're going towards— is if we could use those same lessons learned, even though we don't have the same motivation vis-à-vis life versus product, then we would be in better shape. But I'm going to take it a step further because I think that there is at some point— this is just something I'm playing with in my head these days— you have people in the C-suite who take a sort of very nonchalant, quote unquote, position in terms of making the decision in relationship to product or service. Right. Those— since COVID we have been experimenting with those in the C-suite having more emotional connection between product and people that work for them and the customer. That kind of courage, I wonder if it is a misfit for product and service versus NASA? Because when we look then, and this is really pulling this out, at the number of suicides that's increasing for people in the C-suite, is it because they're becoming too attached to the product or service? Is it because they're starting to look at it like NASA would in terms of saving lives? I don't quite understand what's going on. I think it's an interesting question.

Yeah, you know, I'm not sure how to, how to, how to answer that other than—

I threw a lot out.

I, I would tell you, I would tell you, um, my experience as we learn to apply these ideas in our management team, not just in the control room, where, as I said, it's easier to do it there, right? Because everybody knows what's at stake. So in some cases, you literally choke down that fear you have of speaking in public. Because I have to. I'm the expert on this. And if I don't say this, it's too late and we're going to lose them anyway. I have to do this. So that's why I said it's easier in that situation because you have that pressure. When we learn how to translate that out of that situation into our management function, which is more service and product related, not saving lives, because that's all done by the mission control team, not by a bunch of managers. When we learned to do that, it became easier. I didn't feel more pressure. I felt less pressure as a senior leader when I realized the high-trust environment that we had finally developed in our management function, because I knew all of this wasn't hinging on me being smarter than everybody else, and that if we succeeded or failed, it was only on as good as I was today. Just like when I was a flight director in the mission control room leading the team, it was this enormous relief to me that I've got all these experienced managers, all experts in various things, also very good, really good judgment in each one of them, right? So put them together. Now they're very transparent, all very engaged in every decision, including decisions that are not part of their area of responsibility. And I had complete confidence in decision after decision after decision. In fact, before, you know, by the time I retired as a NASA executive, most of our most difficult decisions, I spoke very few words in our board discussions on them. I sat at the end of the table while they all went back and forth around the table, and one of them typically looked down the table at me and synthesized, well, here's what I think we're saying, Paul, right? And my contribution in many of those occasions was, yep, I don't think I could have said it that well. That's exactly right. That is a huge relief. I mean, what else do you want as a leader? I mean, as a flight director in mission control, I was relieved by that. Imagine if I had to make all the decisions based on all the data all by myself. It would have been terrifying. But I had all these experts who were there reviewing the data, giving me really good advice, giving me the benefit of their analysis. And sometimes I had to ask them good questions. Sometimes they got myopia and I had to ask questions to get them to look up and see some perspective. But it was not to tell them, well, you're going to take my answer anyway. No, it was to make sure that I was getting the most benefit of their expertise and their judgment. The same thing applies in any management role, any management forum, whether you're managing dollars or managing fire shooting out of the back of the rocket.

Hmm.

In fact, you know, the more difficult fear to overcome is sitting in that conference room and you're surrounded by peers that, you know, some of them have been there before you were. Some of them are the graybeards of your business. And, you know, everybody knows when that person speaks, everybody else just shuts up. You never argue with that guy. You never argue with that woman. They're always right about these things. What's the one courage we, we, we had to be sure our people would overcome? That one. No, don't be so respectful you let us make a mistake. Don't be so loyal to me personally that you allow me to kill the astronauts, or you allow me to put our money into the wrong development project when we could have used that money to make our people's job experience better, or our job performance better for the customers, for the astronauts, to make it— make us more able to protect them. Don't let us spend it in the wrong place. That's not loyalty. And I don't want you to be loyal to me anyway. I want you to be loyal to what we are trying to accomplish— our product, our service, whether it's protecting the astronauts' lives or successfully accomplishing this mission. We owe our first loyalty to that, to what the team is here to do. If we can all do that, we can survive any disagreement. What we can't survive is anybody not speaking up when they have something that could have made us better.

But Paul, I really think With all due respect, you're the exception to the rule. And that's—

I know, I agree. I will agree that I, uh, I'm in the minority. I'm in the 25%, like that coach told me, right? But, and here's what— here's why I consider myself a leadership evangelist. Here's why, why in fact most of my speeches kind of go down this theme. It's why the book really is written along the same line, is all it really takes to join me there is wrap your mind around some very simple ideas. And if I can make it safe for anybody who works for me to just tell me what they think, that what they think truth is, and why they think that's truth, why they think our decision is wrong, and have the courage to speak up, that behavior can be learned and can become easier and easier, such that it requires less courage. And you have to demonstrate that at the top. If you can do that at the top, it can trickle down. And I saw it happen in a big way in my organization. But I agree, it takes a leader to start that ball rolling.

Yeah.

Because you have power, right? The people below you, if you don't enable them to do this, if I, as the senior executive at the head of the table, if I'm going to kick you off the team for not agreeing with me, you can bet nobody on the team is going to argue with me. They're going to believe anything that I say. I have to be willing to give up that kind of authority, that kind of loyalty. And, you know, from my group, my, my, my growing up years in mission control, I'll happily give that up. I don't want that kind of authority. I don't want that kind of loyalty. I want the kind of loyalty that means everybody that works for me will look me in the eye and tell me I'm wrong and be unafraid to do it because they know they're going to survive it because it's not a risk. The risk is sitting there and knowing I'm wrong and not speaking up. You can learn that behavior if you get a leader that first demonstrates it and demonstrates it repeatedly. The, the next level can learn that and apply the same thing as a team, and they can then take those same ideas and push them down. And we learned how to do exactly that level by level in a large organization, and we learned how to develop those ideas in, in the performance of our mid-level managers. Outside of their role sitting in mission control, in their management functions, that's when you can really make a difference.

I agree with you. However, the reality is, is that I think there's even less than 25% of our leaders who can or are willing to do that. Because then now we're talking about tying in ego, right? And then you add on that Circle of ego, money. And so while we say, let's hear what you're thinking, immediate reaction is, you're crazy. Come on. You don't— I mean, I don't even know if you should be working here.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, I was running my own organization, got called out, got called out on this behavior myself. So I understand it. I had a meeting with my executive committee, and we had been meeting for years, and finally somebody said to me, what's our role? And I said, well, it's no different than what I explained before. And I went through the list of what I thought was correct. And they had the guts to say to me, Why aren't you letting us do our role? And I said, what are you talking about? And this is in my book. And they said, well, each time we meet, you come here with a list of things that you've done, the association has done, and we listen and we say, great job, and then we go away, and then the next month we meet and the same thing happens. And I said, You're giving me your thoughts. And they said, how about this, CB? You present us with the problem and let us solve the problem. Let us give you some ideas. I said, in other words, you want me to shut up? They were brave enough to say, yeah, we want you to shut up. We want you to hear us because that's the job that you said we have. And then we want to hear your thoughts. I thought, how dare them? It's my company. What are they talking about? And then I heard our friend Marshall. He was interviewing Alan Mulally, and Alan He asked Alan, what was the greatest, greatest thing that you learned as CEO of Ford? And Alan said, I learned to shut up in meetings because when I talk, everybody agrees and I don't learn anything. And I thought to myself, well, I'm in good company here.

So we had a group or a set of cultural norms, if you will, that we settled into in our management functions. And I'm talking senior managers now for this 3,500-person organization that, that is the home of Mission Control. But we didn't come up with all of that ourselves. I mean, you know, we were largely a bunch of triple Type A engineers, with me probably being poster child of triple Type A. Everything's very black and white, very little gray.

Yeah.

Um, and there was some personal growth that I had to go through, which I talk about in my book. But some of it was learning the things that don't come naturally to triple Type A engineers. Things like differences in communication style and personal personality types can cause you to argue, and you're not actually arguing over the actual content at all.

Yeah.

You're just arguing over style.

Yes.

And neither of you was hearing any— either of you. And it took a while for me to understand that. In fact, I wouldn't have become a senior leader at NASA had I not finally learned that after some, some professional upset of my own. But after that, as a senior leader, when I said, you know, our leadership team learned to develop these things and take them out of the control room and make them part of how we managed, we didn't just sit back one day and say, you know what, fellas? Let's talk to each other like this from now. In fact, it was a much more difficult slog than that, and it started with— actually, it was a series of books that we turned into a process. 5 books, one of which is Marshall's book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There. Also Stephen M.R. Covey's— shucks. Oh, darn it. Yes, I got it right here. Speed of Trust. I knew that.

Yeah, I came up—

I didn't think of that book. And what we did with these 5 books, starting with these 2, is we did like an elementary school book club experience. We gave a copy of that to everybody that was on my staff, the senior engineers, the executives who worked for me. So it was about 18 or 20 of us.

Mm-hmm.

And then we all went away for a couple of weeks, read the book. And then we got back together and sat around a table and said, okay, what did you guys get out of it? Literally just, okay, you, what did you think was the best takeaways from this? And what we learned, what I learned early on was I couldn't go first, you know, because then I colored the entire discussion.

Absolutely.

I would have somebody else talk. And then after the first time or two that we did this, they would start, I wouldn't say debating, but comparing notes across the table. You know, I didn't quite get that. Here's what I saw. I can't believe you didn't mention this. And we started coming up with these things that were really important to us. In fact, we made a table from Covey's book, The Speed of Trust, of the key behaviors from low-trust organizations, key behaviors from high-trust organizations, which he spells out beautifully in the book.

Mm-hmm.

We just put it— put them together on a table.

Mm-hmm.

And we were patting ourselves on the back. Early on in this process, as we were trying to wrap our minds around quote touchy-feely stuff that doesn't matter, which is the stuff that brought us to our knees, right? Until we figured this out.

Yes.

And what we, as we were looking at the table, we were all bragging about—that's us. Those high trust behaviors, every one of those that defines us. And the more we talked about it, the more it became clear. No, no, no, no. That's not us. senior leaders in mission control. That was us working troops sitting in mission control, managing the rocket, managing the risks. In our actual management forums, we demonstrate almost all of the low-trust behaviors and only one of the high-trust behaviors. And to the team's credit, every single one of those senior leaders around the table who was not happy about reaching this realization, right? Because this is now feeling like we're disloyal to, to our legacy. Oh my God, how can we be saying that the guys that we, we grew up under led us to being like this and that we are like this? We're not as good as we thought we were. But that alone was enough of a, of a motivation for us, right? Being, being a bunch of mission control triple type A's, faced with the fact that we really are this low trust leadership team and the high trust side is what we thought we were and what we intend to be. We now need to take some action, and we're going to change the ledger, and we're going to look at individual ways we do business and engage with each other that cause us to be this low-trust side. And we're going to identify ways we can engage differently and move to the high-trust side. And some of it was, was some of our management processes we changed, but all of it was very deliberately tied to eliminating low-trust behaviors. Maximizing High Trust Behaviors. Well, we went from Speed of Trust to Good to Great. I mean, to What Got You Here Won't Get You There, to Good to Great, Built to Last. And then finally, John Kotter's Leading Change, where—

Wow.

We take all of that, all of that touchy-feely stuff that we're now wrapping our minds around. And now how do we deliberately go through and identify what are the things that are most important for us to change? down and in the organization that will do the most for the organization? How do we make that change? How do we communicate it down through all levels of management? How do we keep listening to how that's being experienced, you know, with the, the communication coming back up? And then how do we let what we're hearing from the workforce adjust our thinking and adjust where we're going? And we, we made a science out of doing just that. And then we made a science out of developing the next generation of leaders on those ideas intentionally, rather than waiting for them to discover those books on their own 25 years later.

So what I love is how you created your book club, and then, and then were very intentional about using what you learned. My experience has been with corporate America, and I've been with the Fortune 100 companies, is that The leader at the top reads the book, it becomes the flavor of the day because, yeah, it is not incorporated, it's not implemented in how they walk the talk.

Right.

And so, you know, everybody scrambles to get up to this flavor of the day, and the next month it's a new flavor of the day, right? And so I wondered, as I was listening to you, maybe our requirements for those that reach the C-suite is that they have to read a series of books. But it's more than that. It's how are they going to implement it on an ongoing basis?

Absolutely. And the poster on the wall of our team values, that's not it. It has to be how you actually engage with each other. And there has to be a willingness and a tolerance of the people on the team who are expected to do that, to be able to say, you know, we're not doing that. We said we were going to do these things. We said that you weren't going to make any of these decisions without the whole team knowing about it first. And in fact, this is a real learning for me. After we had made some of this progress, one of my divisions was having budget problems, and I had margin in my budget going towards the end of the year that I could fix their problem. I could make them whole. And I don't remember how much it was. Let's say it was a few hundred thousand dollars, even $1 million. Whatever it was, I had the ability with a pen to fix their problem, and the whole organization would just keep right on going. And I did. They came and made their case to me behind closed doors because it's kind of embarrassing.

Yeah, but what was the learning? What was the learning when you just sort of signed it off?

Oh, boy. Now, to our credit, I will say, even though that one was on me, I screwed that up as a senior leader. by doing— and in fact, by then I had even written down, we do not do these things without the entire team weighing in first. After I did it, one of my division chiefs says, you know, Paul, you're the boss, and all of us know that you already fixed that division's problem. And it's okay. I'm not saying you can't, but maybe you should stop saying we're all going to be very transparent if in reality you're going to use your authority as boss to do what you have the authority to do. And he actually meant it to make me feel better. And I still feel that dagger sticking out of my back, and I put it there. And I never made that mistake again. Not, not in— not even in the smallest decision. There was never another decision that mattered to the whole team that I made without first putting it on the table and letting everybody who worked for me, and I mean the direct reports, not the entire organization, but gave all of them the opportunity to weigh in from their part of the organization's perspective and just from their own personal judgment. Are we sure this is the right thing to do? But it goes back to what you said. It can't be flavor of the day. It has to apply to the boss, and it has to apply to the team. And if you can keep doing that consistently and If you can articulate with the team regularly, here's why this matters to us, people. We're not just doing it because this feels nicer today. Here's how this makes us a better leadership team. Here's how this drives us more towards success and away from unintentional failure. That's why all of this matters. Then that can start becoming a cultural driver, which, which absolutely happened with us in our management ranks, which I would tell you, when we started, I would not have predicted it would have been as nearly as effective as it was, that it would take hold as a culture in the management team like that. I was just hoping everybody would do it. I wasn't expecting they would all adopt it and it would start becoming who we were.

Well, I think part of the problem is, and in fact, I coach other coaches. And so one of the coaches reached out to me and said, that they were working with somebody who had this particular opportunity to do what you said. And what happened ironically is that that leader started looking weak to the rest of the organization because that person spent their time getting input, right? So there is that fine line of input versus non-input. which makes the greater leader, and how is it that that can be perceived as a weaker leader, right? So that's the fear right there.

Right. Now, I will tell you one, you know, you said a little while ago that we're a very— NASA tends to look militaristic, and we are a very hierarchical organization. And the mission control part, because of how close we are to you know, the, the real catastrophic risk tends to be more hierarchical, hierarchical, more military-like than all of the rest. So while on the one hand, as say the, the director, the senior leader of the whole organization, while I would not make any of those decisions without hearing from the senior leaders who work for me, it wasn't a matter of spending months and going around talking to them. They knew, here are the 5 major issues that we're working right now, and these have been teed up for this board meeting on on this date, and these several divisions have project teams working on some things that are going to contribute to those decisions. As they do, they're going to be presenting them to the management team. As they do, you're expected to be paying attention and to be learning so that when it comes time for us to, to make a decision, you're, you're kind of schooled up. And we're expecting for you to be taking the parts of that that affect your part of the organization back to your organization and run it down the management chain over there to make sure there's not something in your corner of the world that we're missing, the teams that are working it. So when you show up to our meeting and we're going to make the decision, we're expecting you to show up with a load of brains, not just yours personally, but from all those geniuses that work for you.

Yeah.

And, and if you need to bring some of those young guys who aren't afraid of anybody to the meeting and let them rant at us if they think that we're, we're not hearing them. But—

Hold on one second, Paul. Anthony, the monitor just is arriving. Wanted to let my husband know we— I ordered an Apple monitor and it just arrived, which was supposed to arrive several days ago. But, you know, UPS in its glory. Hold on one second. Well, actually, this is a good time to take a break.