Intergalactic Teamwork
What NASAs space teams can teach us in the modern world of work
Astronauts were the first remote workers.
For the last several decades, these highly-trained, highly-skilled professionals have launched thousands of miles into space with only a telephone or video screen to connect them back to planet Earth. Under some of the most intense and extreme circumstances, including managing crises, complications, and conundrums, astronauts have figured out how to consistently perform as a team at an elite level with lives on the line.
All while rarely being in the same “office space.”
Space teamwork flips our ideas about traditional teamwork on their head. While the typical sports franchise or office manager is worried about creating serendipitous run-ins at the water cooler, astronauts concern themselves with only the strategies that contribute to the bottom line and a successful mission.
This heightened focus on the mission, and not the abstract possibilities of “innovation” and “more creativity”, drives everything astronauts do to establish successful teams.
Any team can benefit from some space-like structure.
So what goes into running an elite interstellar team?
NASA lays out a few key considerations:
- Composition
- Technology and Distance
- Data
Let’s look at them one at a time.
Dynamic Composition
The foundation of all good teamwork is putting the right people on the team.
They have a deep and intentional evaluation and selection procedures. They have high standards and are unwilling to compromise, even if the talent looks really good on paper.
But they do something else that’s special. They leave nothing up to chance when it comes to integrating the new team members.
NASA goes to extreme lengths to make sure that these elite team members are brought in the right way. They know that good onboarding is one of the best ways to ensure team retention and engagement over the career of a team member, so they take this part as or more seriously than the selection process (which is also consistent with the data on talent selection: development trumps selection in regards to long-term performance outcomes).
They’ve done away with the idea of letting the culture speak for itself. They’ve taken away the responsibility of indoctrinating new team members from the existing team (there’s no space hazing) and redistributed that responsibility to NASA’s larger leadership across the globe.
NASA has 3 different teams with 5 different agencies representing 23 countries across the world keeping the international space station going 24/7. The core principle of their onboarding and team integration philosophy is to allow people to paint outside the lines, as long as they stay on the canvas.
They send this message by embracing individuality and individual goals, as well as the customs of each culture, so long as the team members buy-in to the overarching shared goal of keeping the space station up and running. That overarching goal is the canvas. NASA prides itself on a culture that puts the interest of space first, and that subsumes the other identities that the individual team members have.
They don’t erase individuality. Quite the contrary, actually. They work hard to accommodate it. But they only accommodate it insofar as the individual is willing to commit to the team.
To make sure that the teams work well together toward that shared goal, the agency has developed and implemented extensive psychosocial training.
The key here is psychosocial, versus technical or tactical.
They don’t just go out and practice or go through the motions physically.
They take the time to educate and understand the cultural differences of team members. Psychosocial competencies - things like good communication, empathy, and effective emotional responding - are THE core feature of what NASA considers its “technical” training for everyone involved.
Having good players on the team isn’t enough to be successful. You have to make sure they can work together.
NASA encourages teams of all domains to be more proactive in providing training like this, and they’ve got some pragmatic suggestions for making it happen.
The way NASA does it is by having the teams actually work together on something related to the ISS as part of the training. They’ll manufacture a crisis and have the teams respond. They’ll encourage some cross-cultural conflict, and then talk about it.
Their training isn’t some passive onboarding experience or a one-directional instruction-centered experience. It’s a dynamic, immersive, team-first approach to the dynamic composition of a global group of elite performers.
Technology and Distance
Since NASA has been doing remote work for decades, they’ve been forced to lean in to the benefits of technology for maximizing performance. Originally, astronauts on the ISS would have to go hours between receiving instructions and sometimes days without talking to family.
From a teamwork perspective, there was plenty of time for communication to get screwed up and for things to go wrong. It could’ve been a time-delayed disastrous version of telephone.
Instead, NASA has leveraged technology to facilitate better teamwork across the space-time continuum.
The first thing they did was establish a central contact (called CAPCOM), who would be the main person receiving and communicating information for the space crew. This centralized communication meant that everyone was receiving the same message, and coordinating across teams in different countries became much easier. They used technology to centralize the message and make it more consistent. They cut out the game of telephone.
NASA also worked hard to set social norms that encouraged support. Living in space is lonely. Rather than suggesting that those “in the [space] arena” were somehow special, better, or different from the rest of the team, they focused on making sure those people felt like a part of the team. This is a notable difference from most sports organizations, where we tend to think of athletes and coaches as separate from the rest of the group. Though the demands of the role are different, the artificial separation increases feelings of isolation and not being supported.
The second thing NASA did was use technology to reduce the sense of distance between those in space and those on the ground. Much like in sports teams, there’s a tendency to create an “us vs. them” mentality between those who do things like travel or lug equipment, and those who stay home regularly. NASA did away with this illusion of separateness by using technology to reduce the distance between team members.
They created an “off-the-air” channel for people to communicate informally and candidly, without fear of reprisal. They leveraged video and used it to bring people into meetings, rather than seeing it as a burden to get the video set up or a privilege for someone to simply dial in.
They focused solely on reducing the virtual distance by any means necessary and creating a culture that supported people performing their jobs how they needed to in order to be their best.
They befriended technology and used it to make the team better, instead of looking at it as a barrier or blocker to great teamwork.
The last thing NASA did was set limits.
Recognizing that advances in technology led to an increased sense of “always being on”, the organization was proactive in defining and limiting work schedules. They recognize that more is not always better.
In fact, NASA considers limiting schedules a way to protect team performance and the health of the team members. The health of the team members and these boundaries are considered assets, and NASA works hard to p
rotect them by limiting extra hours and off-hours communication.
Data
When you’ve got people floating around in zero gravity, it’s important to keep an eye on things like health and performance.
NASA uses monitoring technologies, the same way sports teams do, to keep track of important markers of performance - things like sleep, behavioral health, and team dynamics. But what NASA does is different than the traditional sports organization or business team deploying some level of tracking and quantifying.
They turn the data right over to the team.
Rather than using these technologies purely to keep track of things or as a way to inform decisions from on high or evaluate the talent, they give the information back to the team.
In their words:
“We have learned that these monitoring technologies are only useful when they place the feedback mechanism directly into the hands of the team itself so that the team can track its progress and monitor its risk and then access various countermeasures as desired.”
In other words, they turn the team into a self-regulated machine. They don’t concern themselves much with the data showing something they might not like. They focus purely on optimizing performance and do that by empowering the team to correct itself.
This perspective also aligns with some of the interesting data on elite athletes’ vs. coaches’ perceptions of sports performance. Athletes on the ground are often better suited to read what’s happening in the heat of the moment than the folks on the sideline. The vantage point is different. But rather than favoring one completely over the other, the best teams integrate these perspectives to promote peak performance.
There’s something uniquely empowering about giving the information to the team and then asking them to figure it out. We’ve seen this even at the highest levels of sport, with people like Steve Kerr allowing his team members to draw up plays on the sideline. Rather than using data as a means to have power over someone, the best teams use data to elevate the power of everyone.
Summing it up
If you want to improve your teamwork, NASA offers some pretty practical steps you can take right now to make things better.
You can start by ensuring the consistency of the message. That means more open and transparent communication and a willingness to have honest, difficult conversations. Don’t leave the important information to telephone.
You can also reinvest in the way you establish the culture on your teams. If you’re the leader of your team, part of your responsibility is to ensure that the cultural values, standards, and norms you want to play out are a part of the initial onboarding to the team, rather than leaving it up to team members to teach it.
NASA’s approach also suggests that you turn the data back over to the team itself. Rather than using the data as the leader to make decisions about the team’s next move, consider sharing what you’ve learned with the team, and asking them how they’d like to adjust.
Any team would benefit from leveraging NASA’s teamwork principles. What they’ve done better than most is find ways to turn challenges into competitive advantages.