The Cranky Middle Manager Show #240 How NASA Builds Teams Charles Pellerin

Posted on 04. Jun, 2010 by Wayne in Podcast

 Standard Podcast [36:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today, Wayne Turmel geeks out on space and leadership with Charles Pellerin, author of “How NASA Builds Teams- Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers and Project Teams”. He was the guy in charge of the Hubble Telescope project which was the lowest of lows and highest of highs so he feels your pain. Also we look at another project that was just crazy but got funded, the Trojan Horse, and a quote from Stravinsky (although I’m pretty sure he said it in Russian).

Charlie Pellerin is the brains behind 4-D Systems and proof that sometimes, leadership really is Rocket Science.

June 28th’s workshop will be also be How to Create and Manage Remote Project Teams. Find out more here

As always, use the discount code cranky to save 10%!S

Also, check out our new BNET blog on Managing Remote and Virtual Teams.

Now you can get 3 of the best Cranky interviews on project management on one CD for $15 plus postage

• Green PM
• Lazy Project Management
• Managing Projects Across Distance

Click here to learn more and to purchase this CD. Contains a discount coupon for all Greatwebmeetings.com webinar workshops.

Show Notes

0:00 Welcome everyone. Today we are talking leadership on the biggest of projects so it seems right to dedicate this show to Odysseus, who understood how hard it was to get a project adopted (really, a big wooden horse?) and that it’s not over til it’s over.

4:20 Today’s quote of the week is from Igor Stravinsky. Do you learn from founts of wisdom and knowledge or from your mistakes…and can’t it be both?

5:00 Okay, Charlie Hellerin was the head of Astrophysics at NASA when the Hubble Telescope launched. Here he tells us how things went wrong, and how this led to his research on leadership and teams. It gets a bit geeky but it’s worth the ride.

11:20 Give thanks to whatever gods you believe in that this was him and not you. The real issue was the culture at NASA. Who knew that beating the snot out of contractors wasn’t going to get good results?

13:41 No big surprise, but the biggest challenge in organizations like NASA was “context”. That’s the working environment. How do you do things where you work and how does that impact leadership? Charlie tells us how he developed his “4-D” system by using Cartesian physics, Carl Jung and a Dilbert cartoon. Yeah, it makes my head hurt but it’s really cool. It’s all based on how we make decisions (emotions and logic) and where we get information from (intuition and observation).

15:58 The 4 dimensions of leadership are:

1. Cultivation- do you care about growing people
2. Inclusion- do you include people and give them a sense of belonging
3. Visioning- innovation and big picture
4. Direction- processes and getting things done

17:45 Why don’t business books work? Change comes from behavior change, not recognizing the problem. Charlie walks us through how this works in the real world.

22:09 I ask him to speak slowly with small words. When you’re doing an assessment it’s amazing how just the act of being assessed can improve performance. As long as the assessment is followed up on and taken seriously it actually works. People will spend time on what gets measured. It’s pretty simple.

27:14 As managers, we spend a lot of time influencing and trying to persuade other people to do stuff. The term Charlie uses is “story lines”. Is your story line arguable or is it factual? He explains it better than I do but can you identify your story line and tell whether it’s arbitrary or factual.

30:00 The story line at NASA was about beating vendors til they scream, well why would they come forward with problems?

31:29 NASA is an engineering culture. Soft skills are often looked at skeptically, but the problems were largely with that culture.

Charlie’s Resources

Chris Martenson’s Crash Course Blog (not for the paranoid)

Jeff Rubin’s blog

All kinds of good stuff including free downloads and assessments from Charlie’s site