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Situationally Appropriate Leadership
Situationally appropriate leadership is kind of the mainstay of the success that I’ve seen on all of my space shuttle missions. It’s not always the person that has the title that has the knowledge or the situational awareness to make the critical decision. Many times, in a normal flow of activities, you can work by consensus. But there are times when a leader has to lead, and it may not be the person who’s designated the commander. It may be the person that has the deepest systems knowledge. It may be the rookie astronaut that has the knowledge, or the insight, or even just an orthogonal view that everybody else – because they have tunnel vision from their years of experience – could not see.
I’ve seen this in other aspects of my life as well. I actually worked as a chief technology officer at a major medical research institute, and I created these innovation teams that were comprised of not just physicians and traditional engineers, but nurses and respiratory technologists and physical therapists, and even lawyers and business people – people that don’t necessarily think alike. It was fascinating to see the people that came up with these really wonderful ideas. Oftentimes it was the nurses that came up with the best ideas. They’re on the frontlines of medicine and they see the things that are going well in healthcare and the things that aren’t, and they’d come up with these jerry-rigged innovations that turned out to be really, really useful in patient care.
I always place great value in creating multi-disciplinary teams and really try to focus on empowering situationally appropriate leadership.
Build multi-disciplinary teams
The best advice that I could give for creating really successful teams is to constitute them with people that don’t think like you, don’t look like you, don’t come from the same place as you, have different educational backgrounds, different cultures. The more diversity we can create in a team, the better because you don’t really know where your blind spots are. So that’s one of the most successful strategies that I’ve used and that I would recommend to you.
The other aspect that I would suggest is also to ask for feedback. We don’t know what we don’t know. I’ve often asked after working with a team for a while: how’s it going? Am I saying too much? Too little? Is the creative spirit of the team working? And I’ve actually gotten really good feedback in the past. Early on in my career, I was told, “You really need to talk less”. And I paraphrase it and discuss it in my book as “You need to shut up more.” And that’s a hard thing to hear, but as someone who wants to get the best out of his or her team, you really need to listen to everybody around the table. And even if you have the right answer immediately, sometimes it’s good to sit back and let the junior people speak, and really take turns.