Ep 80 Tales of Leadership with Paul Hill

Paul Sean Hill, a distinguished author and speaker, focuses on applying deliberate leadership principles to lead high-performing teams across diverse industries. He currently serves on the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, providing critical insights into NASA's management of human spaceflight. With 25 years at NASA, he began by developing space station construction techniques and later served as a Space Shuttle and International Space Station Flight Director, including leading the return-to-flight mission on STS-114 after the Columbia accident.

In subsequent roles, Paul served as the Director of Mission Operations for human spaceflight from 2007 to 2014. During this time, he revolutionized the leadership culture, reduced costs, and increased capabilities in mission planning, training, and Mission Control. Before NASA, Paul served in the USAF in military satellite operations, holding aerospace engineering degrees from Texas A&M University. He and his wife, both Texas Aggies, raised two remarkable Aggie women, marking the fourth generation in their family.

Connect with Paul Hill:
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-LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/e8NGGVY3

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

You're listening to the Tells the Leadership podcast. This podcast is for leaders at any phase on their leadership journey to become a more purposeful and accountable leader what I like to call a pal. Join me on our journey together towards transformational leadership. All right team, welcome back to the Tells the Leadership podcast. I'm your host, josh McMillian, an active duty Army officer and the founder of McMillian Leadership Coaching. I'm on a mission to create a better leader what I like to call a purposeful, accountable leader and I plan to do that by sharing transformational stories and skills.

Speaker 1: 0:40

On today's episode, I'm going to be sharing a transformational story through a transformational leader Paul Hill. Paul is an author and a speaker focused on applying deliberate leadership principles in creating and leading high performing teams in any industry. He has also served in the Air Force and NASA in the mission control room. He is the author of mission control room to the boardroom. His passion for leading high performing teams is inspiring. Paul Hill is a purposeful, accountable leader. Let's bring him on the show. Paul, welcome to Tells the Leadership. It's been a long time coming, but I'm glad that we were actually able to make this recording happen. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: 1:26

I'm doing great, and thanks for inviting me. I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Speaker 1: 1:29

Yeah, so I think always a good place to start is just going through with the listeners and letting them know who you are. Who is Paul Hill?

Speaker 2: 1:39

You know most people. If you were to ask me, especially in the professional capacity, is the answer you would get is Paul Hill is a flight director in mission control or Paul Hill ran mission operations for mission control and space shuttle flights and international space station. I mean, that's what I'm really known for Now. I spent a number of years in the Air Force in satellite operations before I came to NASA and you know, like most military career fields, I showed up at NASA doing work that was similar to the things I did in the Air Force and just four years active duty in the Air Force I showed up and it felt like I was years ahead of some of my peers.

Speaker 2: 2:21

You know some of it is that extra push I think that you get from military service. You know more responsibility at a much junior rank, much, much junior age, as opposed to much of the rest of the world where it takes you much longer to get there. That served me extremely well. And then I went from being a senior engineer doing various engineering studies and getting ready to fly and build the International Space Station to becoming one of the first flight directors for actually operating the space station in orbit, conducting the assembly operations in orbit, if you will and then, after a number of years of that, both managing space shuttle flight operations and international space station flight operations, I moved up into the senior management ranks and, after a couple of years, became the director of mission operations, where I spent the rest of my NASA career effectively running mission planning training and flight execution or mission control itself for the operations.

Speaker 1: 3:21

Yeah, that is a rich history. And where I really want to start off with is because I've never had anyone from the NASA background on tells leadership. I've had military leaders who came on that kind of went into the entrepreneur space. I've had business owners, ceos, but I've never had anyone kind of within that background define leadership in their own terms. And that's the beauty about the definition of leadership is it's specific. What I'm learning to the individual how would you define it and then how? How has it changed, especially since being in the Air Force and then transitioning into NASA and working in that side?

Speaker 2: 4:01

You know, I'll tell you, when I showed up in mission control in 1990, so this is the same mission control, same engineering group, but you can like trace the generational handover all the way back to Apollo, gemini and Mercury. So you think about what those teams had accomplished. When I showed up, they had a very rich, very specific leadership culture. They were very focused on how do you run the team, how do you make basic decisions, to be highly reliable, error free, be right every time, because the cost being wrong is too high. And the beauty for me, then, showing up from the Air Force is, you know, my first week in the office and listening to these people talk, the way they just talked in the office, and the things they thought were important, I thought, wow, I am home, these people speak my language. And so one of the things that became clear is there was a lot of leadership related talk, value related talk, a lot of posters on the wall where we advert were advertised at by the senior management, and this is not necessarily NASA wide, but mission control, the people that actually manage the flights and responsible for the astronauts lives while they're in orbit, those areas inundated with values. This is who we are. If we make mistakes, they have the ultimate consequences. This is why we pay attention to detail. This is why we're willing to speak up in the meetings or on console flying the spacecraft when it feels scary. This is why we overcome that and speak up anyway.

Speaker 2: 5:29

So, going back to your question, how I define it for me, real leadership is all about preserving that focus, preserving that value, that what we do, the mission itself, protecting the assets, protecting our people that matters more than anything else. That matters more than my discomfort. So I'm willing to ask the hard question or I'm willing to ask the dumb question where I look around the room and everybody else appears to understand what's going on. I don't understand how we got to this answer. Having the courage to do that is one of those values Preserving a team environment where, over time, you learn that you know you don't have to have courage to do that. The boss not only will tolerate you saying I don't know, he's expecting it if you don't know. In fact, what you are more likely to get glared at, if not run off the team for, is not knowing something and acting like you do, shooting from the hip on an answer when you could have taken the time and looked up the data and been right and not projecting to the rest of the team that, oh no, this is an answer you can. You can hang your hat on I know I'm right. So for me, leadership is all about running the team in such a way that those things become easier and easier.

Speaker 2: 6:46

The way we learned to say it by the time I was in the executive ranks and actually to be really fully forthcoming by the time I'm in the management ranks, in mission control, which is 2007 timeframe. We talked a lot like this, but if you were to ask one of our most senior leaders hey, can you just give me the top three principles, really codify what is most important to us? We couldn't do it. We understand the big picture and a lot of the ways we would say it is look, we recognize it when we see it. Whether we're talking good performance by the individual or by a team or good leadership, we know when we see it. We don't have to be able to say it, and what we learned was, if we can't say it, we're not always going to do it, because over some generations you're going to forget, you're going to think you remember what we do and how we do it and why we do it, but you will have forgotten some things, which is exactly what happened to us, and so my generation. If you will have seen your leaders, I make it sound like I'm giving myself credit. I just happen to be the guy at the table with a number of the people that worked for me.

Speaker 2: 7:52

We started challenging ourselves on how do we say this, and we finally learned to say in fact, that's kind of the crux of the book that I published a few years ago, and ultimately it is making our decisions based on technical truth, having the integrity to know when we're guessing and when we actually know something versus data, versus theory, versus you know, I think this is right and knowing the difference, and then having the courage to speak up.

Speaker 2: 8:20

All of that sounds really easy. They are so difficult to do and we learn them deliberately. When we bring new people into mission control, all of our training is really focused on learning how to behave in ways that demonstrate that over and over, and for me, the most important thing we can do as a leader is continue to reiterate this is who we are. This is how we do business, whether we're flying or when we're getting ready to fly or after we fly. This is how we go back and scrutinize our performance and find out where we made mistakes, where, even when we were good, where could we have been better? So we show up tomorrow and we're better.

Speaker 1: 8:57

I love that definition of leadership and I can already see a lot of similarities between how NASA does business at least within your time and how the military does it. So many things that you said that kind of just want to go back to, because I think they're all really, really important. The one is being right every time matters, because the cost of being wrong is catastrophic. And it's the same within the realm that I'm in, in the combat arms, within the infantry, because if you're wrong, well then that means one of the sons and daughters that wear the uniform may not be able to come home that night. So the decisions that we make bear such a heavy consequence that we don't make them not fully understanding what I like to call the common operating picture of like, what assets do I have and how can I leverage them to not get rid of the risk but to mitigate it down to a level where I feel comfortable with the decision that I'm making to move forward with. And another thing that you said that I love is I've learned this being in acquisitions Just because you don't know something and you ask that question does not mean that you're ignorant in the eyes of your team, and I would argue and how you would say it is that it actually brings light into a team.

Speaker 1: 10:14

When a leader doesn't know something and they ask the question, even if you think it's stupid to ask internally, it just opens up a different layer of how people see you on your team. It's like all right, this gentleman here is curious and he's coachable and he's wanting to learn, and that is one of the things that I've learned, especially transitioning from the infantry into acquisitions is having that humility, I think, is probably the best way to define it. When you don't know something, ask a question so you can gather all those facts and you can make a better informed decision.

Speaker 2: 10:48

And the last thing We'll go ahead.

Speaker 1: 10:51

I was going to say the last thing and I love it because I had General Petraeus on and every time that I hear someone talk about this, I see the same loop cycle of strategic leadership, of getting the big idea right the culture within NASA. What is that? What is that culture? How can we communicate that culture? Because we have that tacit knowledge. When I see it, I know it. And then how do we live that knowledge? And then how do we adjust it to make sure that we got the big idea right? And then it's just a revolving door. So many great points and we're only 10 minutes into the episode.

Speaker 2: 11:26

I'll tell you one of the key things that's related to all of those. So you mentioned leadership humility. Part of that, it's that willingness to ask why. I mean, of course, it's the willingness to look like you don't know, right, or in fact, to admit that you don't know.

Speaker 2: 11:43

And the best of this I mean truly eye-watering rocket scientists I work for did not know everything, and sometimes there was something they didn't know. Sometimes they made a mistake. The same thing was true of me, even when I was the executive responsible for all of it. In fact, that was what kept me awake the most was holy cow. What if people working for me either respect me too much or fear me so much that they won't question me and they won't stop me? Oh wow, I truly made a mistake, and the thing that's all related to is that leaders' willingness to also not just ask why, but demand that, on every decision we make, every risk that we accept, every choice that we make and say a system design or are we ready to execute this mission, we have to be able to answer the why's associated with why. That's okay, and the reason that we can't ever accept is well, this is the way we've always done it, so it must be okay.

Speaker 1: 12:37

Or.

Speaker 2: 12:38

I'm in charge and because I'm in charge, that's why we're going to do it this way. Well, that doesn't actually keep your people from getting killed, whether you're talking about combat arms or throwing people into the sky. Just because I'm in charge and I get to decide, isn't the why. The why is related to what do we understand about the risk? What are the physics, what is the data? What is the test? What is our previous operational experience that tells us that's a good decision? Not just because we did it this way before and got away with it. But are we sure it's the right thing to do? Are we sure we understand the risk? And in many professions yours and mine both, but there's many others like this you're never going to manage it in a way so that there's no risk.

Speaker 2: 13:20

What we want to do is actually understand the risk and take it deliberately and manage the risk to our best ability, and do that. If you're not asking those why's, you're becoming a cowboy and as you gain experience, this is the problem for individual leaders. Actually, this is a problem for us at the working level. It's a problem for leaders, it's a problem for teams. As you gain experience and do harder things, you gain enough confidence that you stop being as careful, because now you know you don't have to be, because now you're good.

Speaker 2: 13:52

And that's when you start getting sloppy. You start losing that technical truth that I mentioned. You stop asking the why's because, hey, everybody knows I'm good, I don't make mistakes. Well, I might have been good, I still might be really smart, but the way I made the decisions before might have actually leaned more on real data, real experts, real inputs rather than just my sense of my own goodness. And you can look at failure after failure across industries, including, but not only, nasa's failures where we lost astronauts, and it's almost always this. It's not engineering over sites for technical mistakes, it's things like this where, in fact, in the after actions, you go back and start doing the review and you hear people say oh, yeah, we knew we were making a mistake there, we all knew we shouldn't have been doing that and they didn't speak up and they went and took some risk that they weren't actually managing.

Speaker 1: 14:46

Wow.

Speaker 2: 14:47

And I'll tell you. The other thing is a lot of people that hear this discussion they nod their heads when it applies to space flight or when it applies to combat arms or aviation, some parts of oil and gas, those areas where things can blow up and people can actually get killed, and they can get killed right away. It's easy, obvious, to see how these things apply and where you start losing it is you start moving into other parts of even those same enterprises, like acquisitions where it's easy to say look, I'm not going to kill anybody, I'm managing a procurement over here.

Speaker 2: 15:18

Maybe we go over a budget. What's the big deal? Until your hardware hits the floor and now somebody's relying on it to save their lives?

Speaker 2: 15:26

and it doesn't function right because we skipped over something, because we knew how good we were. And what I challenge audience after audience to think about is in wherever you sit in your profession, what's the price of failure? Could you get somebody killed if you make a mistake and somebody else eventually doesn't catch that mistake? Or do you just cost the company a lot of money? Do you put the company out of business? Do we run off all of our customers? Eventually? The question is can we afford whatever the ramifications of those mistakes are? If we can't, then we sit back and think OK, then how do I preserve this willingness to ask the wise and make it OK, make it a cultural demand, in fact, that the people that work for you will insist that, as a leader, you ask and answer the wise and allow them to do the same thing.

Speaker 1: 16:16

That is probably one of the best five minutes that I've had on this podcast, so just walking through that, I'm not even joking. Then you brought me back to one of the the truest examples that I've had of the status quote. This is the way we've always done it. It was when we just got to Afghanistan. I remember vividly setting in our battalion talk and first mission of our entire nine month combat deployment. First mission EOD goes out to respond to an IED. Eod has their normal TTPs of doing their fives, 25s and 50s cordons and then being able to clear those improvised explosive devices, ieds.

Speaker 1: 17:00

The Taliban realized what our TTPs were because we got complacent and we got cocky with how we were doing those things. Essentially, what they did is they adapted. I won't go into how they adapted. They adapted it so well that we weren't able to be caught up with it and ended up losing a soldier within the first 15 minutes of us being on ground. That is one of the, in my mind, always sticks to my six with me is the realist example of status quo. This is the way we've always done it and we're always going to be able to do it this way. Well, the enemy is going to get a boat, and it doesn't matter if it's an actual enemy shooting at you or if it's just the operational environment that you're in, or the world economics. It's consistently and constantly changing and that's such a powerful, powerful example. What I'd love to do, paul, is a start off on your leadership journey. Where did that start for you? Was that right around the time that you were joining the Air Force?

Speaker 2: 17:59

It was. I mean I guess I would be not giving credit where credit is due by the four years I spent in the Corps of Condets at Texas A&M. Now, a fair amount of that I'm proud to say this right now I'll get the Corps in trouble or get them mad at me, but a fair amount of that was amazing that most of it I learned how tough I was and what I could put up with without punching somebody or with. But you definitely came out of that environment toughened up and able to overcome a lot of pressures. My first real spark in the professional environment was a major and then Lieutenant Colonel that I worked for only for two years in my four years of active duty and in fact this guy. I was a deploying officer. He brought me into a staff position. I never saw him in our operational environment, but everything this guy did exuded professional excellence. I mean we wore camis and I looked like a guy who wore camis and crawled around in the desert.

Speaker 2: 19:04

In my staff position in the office I looked like one of us to carry guns through the desert. This guy looked like he just bought the uniform and had it pressed and was wearing spit shine combat boots and every now and then he would joke with me about how I looked and I was considered one of the up and coming. By then I was a captain and I was considered like to have my hair on fire and respected against the ops community. So how I looked didn't matter at all. I was a badass, right Little bitty badass, but nevertheless. And I asked him one day and I knew this major and then Lieutenant Colonel, like I said, thought highly of me, I knew like I was kind of his guy and I asked him what time you're in, so why do you put so much effort into what your uniform looks like when we are going to go back out in the field? He said, paul, every time you walk down this hallway the airmen are looking at you.

Speaker 2: 19:56

You are setting an example and you are sending the message to them on whether or not you take this seriously. And this is important. And while maybe the pressed uniform and the spit shine shoes aren't the important aspect of what we do as far as operational excellence goes, but every little facet of that that you are, that you are broadcasting out to the people who work for you, who you are trying to lead and inspire, every bit of that matters. So there is that one moment where you need this one airman to take some order and you are in a difficult situation and the operation is going to fail. Somebody might get killed if we don't do this now.

Speaker 2: 20:37

That guy needs to trust you in all things and needs to know your judgment is impactful. I can't tell you how many talks I had with him about things that I thought were inane, that didn't end like that, and it woke me up to the difference, even as a lieutenant and a captain, that I could make, just by little, subtle changes in what I focused on and what I thought were important, and that has stayed with me to this day. I mean, that was gosh very 35, almost 40 years ago and to this day I, in fact, I can still see John Pretz walking along with me somewhere or sitting in front of his desk at school, because I asked him some really simple question, only to find out that, oh no, there's a real heavy component of this.

Speaker 2: 21:23

So that was huge for me and you know, that's that part of being a young leader. I think that is a difficult message to learn and I was so fortunate to have such a powerful leader who was so comfortable talking about things like that when even then it was becoming not cool to talk that way. And part of what I got from that is wow, I thought those things, but I didn't know we could talk like that. I didn't know anybody did talk like that. In fact, what I'm hearing or seeing from a lot of other leaders is that isn't the way we talk anymore and this guy who is so singularly impressive almost always talks about that, about all things. I mean talks like that about all things. That stuck with me and it definitely helped me when I got to NASA not just be picked up, picked out to run a lot of senior engineering projects at a very early time in my career.

Speaker 2: 22:18

But I got selected to be one of the first space station flight directors after six years at NASA, having never worked in mission control on console, which is practically well practically they'd only happened twice and both of the guys that happened to were deep in training astronauts and training people in mission control. And why did I get it. A large part of it was the leadership that I brought, that I learned at the knee of John Pretz, my experience in the Air Force and all that In fact, I was told after I was selected. You know your resume doesn't have a couple of things on it. We usually demand before we select somebody to be flight director and put them in charge of mission control. But we called several of your Air Force references and the things they told us we thought would be crazy not to select you, and none of that had anything to do with rocket science. It was all about leading the team and setting the example, all things that I didn't realize how important they were while I was doing them.

Speaker 1: 23:17

Wow. So I just created a video not too long ago talking about setting the standard within your organization and I had one of those aha moments kind of with a battalion commander that was in a Premier soft unit that kind of came down and graded our company. Live fire Horrible live fire was really cold at the end of the night, everyone was really tired. It was like 12 o'clock at night, it was kind of raining and I was being very soft on the guys and I remember that battalion commander walking up to me like Josh deeds not words and just walked away and ever since then that's just stuck with me deeds not words. And then I realized is that the standard in the organization is the bare minimum to be average. That's what success looks like.

Speaker 1: 24:04

To show up you, you're meeting the standard, but as the leader Especially when you have the rule of mirrors everyone's watching you people who love you, people who hate you, people who are indifferent to you and looking for a chink in your armor. Everyone is watching you. And that lesson that you learned is such a Truly a blessing at such a young age and you're able to carry on. Is that? Hey, I don't. I wear this uniform with pride because when I need to make a tough decision, I know that soldier knows the standards that I hold myself to, and then they will hesitate to act when, when, that needs to come. Well, that's such a powerful lesson.

Speaker 2: 24:42

You know it's funny, by the time I got once I was selected to be a flight director. I didn't take long and I developed a reputation of being a Nice way of saying it would be a fire breather. It's possible. I thought I was a table-pound and hard ass.

Speaker 1: 24:55

Everything was a nail and you were the hammer, or worse right.

Speaker 2: 25:00

And and that was my reputation from a lot of people on the outside If you were to talk to the people who worked the teams with me, that would not be what you would hear from 90 95% of them. You know you can't please everybody. There's always gonna be some people that that that are just gonna be unhappy with with being led, but the vast majority of them would not have said that fact. I have the dubious distinction I don't not say this in public. I've never said this except like one-on-one with people, but I I had the second highest Evaluations of flight director and this is from the flight controllers, right? Not my boss has thought that I was great, but second highest evaluated flight director According to the flight directors in in history. Not that it was a popularity contest, but I most of their most of the grading wasn't on popularity. It was on how you ran the team, how you made decisions, that kind of thing. What was true, though, is that technical truth, integrity, courage thing. I was extraordinarily unforgiving on that, because our mission was so important to me. I definitely had the, the mission control, that human spaceflight mission in my heart, that Responsibility that we had to protect astronauts man. I took that as a sacred responsibility and anything that our team is doing that isn't Based on making the right decision for the right reason. I felt like we're letting down our sacred responsibility can't happen. Which meant if we had, if I had, a flight controller on my teams that was guessing on something, that guy and I would have a, would have a conversation about it, sometimes right then, if we had time, we would do it later. You know, if, if I had somebody that that that knew knew the action we should, we should take and they didn't speak up until afterwards when we're we're doing, say, an after-action discussion or something like that, that usually would end in a, in a relatively tough conversation. And then when I say that I don't mean I don't mean chest pointing and cussing, but I mean, hey, this is the expectation and in and there is no, there is no B performance here and we have to show up with our a game every single time and again. If you were to talk to the people on my teams, you know I had nothing but but great support from them and the outside looking in, I think there were some people that actually a big criticism I would frequently get would be wow, you sure do talk direct and I would always ask when you say that, what do you mean? Did you hear me say something that was personally Insulting or personally challenging or anything like that? Well, no, but you know, it was clear.

Speaker 2: 27:31

You thought that that that you know the presenter say in a conference room Didn't actually have the day to back up what they were saying and they hadn't done a good job making their case. I said, well, did they have the data? Had they made a? Had they done a good job at making their case? Well, no, but it just seemed like maybe you should let that go. I said, no, isn't who we are. It's not what we do. I don't. I wouldn't amastulate a presenter. Hey, it's just. Hey, this, this isn't ready. We're not able to make this decision.

Speaker 2: 27:59

Let's move on to the next topic. Here are the parts of your story that are weak. Go work on them and bring them back to us. When you can answer this, this and this and if it happened more than once, you can guarantee I'm going to talk to that guy supervisor say hey, what's happening near your shop? You keep sending me work. You keep sending me fly the engineers that that are doing work like this. We need better than that and I guess that's direct. But you know what? I got 18 performance and I got 18 performance out of a lot of people that that, like you said at one time, thought b team performance was good enough. I'm meeting the standard, but it's not good enough. It's not good enough for for any profession. In fact, you always want to show up with your a game, even if the worst thing can happen is we just lose a customer, we just lose some money.

Speaker 1: 28:46

No, how is that good enough.

Speaker 2: 28:48

You know you on musk did not create spacex and tesla and make them successful against all the odds by just trying to satisfy the minimum.

Speaker 1: 28:58

All right, team, let's take a quick break from this podcast and I want to personally invite you to our private facebook community that I call purposeful accountable leaders, or pals and pals is a community dedicated to inspiring and developing Servent leaders by sharing transformational stories and skills exactly what tells the leadership is all about. My goal is to build a community of like-minded leaders that can share lessons, learn, ask questions and celebrate wins when it happens. And my mission in life is clear I will end toxic leadership by sharing transformational stories and skills, and you will find countless Transformational leaders in this group. Many of them I have had the honor to serve with in the military. If you want to find a community that can help you grow both personally and professionally, we would love to have you. You can simply search purposeful accountable leaders on facebook or click the leadership resources tab in the show notes To join. I am looking forward to seeing you guys and continuing to grow together on our leadership journey.

Speaker 1: 30:01

Back to the podcast. Exactly you, just you basically just boiled down to the rawest elements of how to be successful as a leader within any type of organization, and it's one holding the standard. But it doesn't matter what your background is For for you, like coming in from the Air Force and going in being a Flight director and charge of mission control. It doesn't matter. You didn't have that pedigree that they were looking for, but you had the ability to lead that they were craving and needing because you were able to lean on your team. You're able to leave them on those people that I always call that as a leader.

Speaker 1: 30:38

You're, you're like you're. You're a foot Deep and a mile wide. You maybe not, you're not the subject matter expert, but you understand all the tools at your disposal and your team are those wells. They're a mile deep and a foot wide and that's where you tap and you direct and always talk about like the symphony of destruction. If you're a make-a-death fan, I like to talk of like as a leader. That that's really what you're doing is you're Orchestrating the team to perform based on their strengths, but you're also holding them accountable. You're humble when you need to be and you have a servant heart. That that is the, that is the secret if there is any of being a Purposeful, accountable leader or a transformational leader, and you just summed it up, I think, absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 2: 31:20

I'll tell you the thing I didn't realize during my time as a flight director. You know, as a flight director I was kind of growing into that leadership role and I was, you know, kind of Kind of storming my way through one mission after another or solving one problem after another with my team. You know my focus was getting it done and I mean I was definitely focused on the leadership and leading the team the right way. It wasn't until later, looking back, one of the things I realized that served me well as a leader Was the fact that I did not let the discomfort of having to have the hard conversation Keep us from having it right, because again it goes back to those ramifications I mentioned a few minutes ago. I knew the ramifications of the team being wrong, of me allowing the wrong action to be taken in orbit, was too high. I I don't understand discomfort in that environment and.

Speaker 2: 32:10

I definitely learned that, um, in the operations environment in the air force, you know, I have men and women around me bearing arms and we are we are doing satellite operations on top level national security systems. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this this seems uncomfortable. It sounds like I'm telling you that we aren't doing a good enough job or that you've made a mistake. And that's what I'm saying, because what we're doing, this whole thing, can't tolerate that and that Not having that discomfort always came easy to me, and maybe it's something that I just learned over my time in the court a and m and then my time in the air force. But by the time I became a flight director, I never let that discomfort get in the way. It did not ever become comfortable. I still felt that discomfort, you know, even in my toughest moments, sitting down with somebody, whether it's a flight controller or An executive who worked for me when I was in the executive ranks, and telling them hey, I'm seeing these problems, I need you to step up, I, I, I don't want to see these things. That felt uncomfortable to me too. I mean, for one thing, I loved my team at every level. Man, these people are family and and I don't, I don't feel good telling family, hey, you're letting us down. But I also know and this was the beauty about the organization I lived in admission control. They share my values. This isn't just me, it's the organizational values. The fact that that I, they resonate so strongly with me, didn't make them just mine.

Speaker 2: 33:38

And so they knew, by the time we get through this hard conversation, this isn't a personal attack. This is us trying to help us be better. In this case, maybe it's my job, is the boss, to help you be better. So I'm willing to put up with that discomfort, but I don't feel good with it either. And here's the thing, that person that I'm having that uncomfortable conversation with, here's how they can help me be the most comfortable. Hear me, get past me, hurting your feelings.

Speaker 2: 34:03

Think about, okay, I see that here's where I can be better the next time I'm in that situation, and I will not, not for for crummy old Paul Hill, but for the cause, for what the team exists to do in the first place, and to set an example for their own teammates, for the people that are coming up behind them, who they are already starting to be in a leadership role.

Speaker 2: 34:24

For that's what it's all about and, and you know, 95%, if not more of the time, anytime I ever had to have it, I see a personal, this uncomfortable conversation like that. That's how they responded, and you know what better feeling can you have to sit back and look at somebody that you you had problems with and you Weren't sure you could get that guy there, and to see him take it to heart and, over the course of time Whatever that's whether that's months or years Turn into a hero that you sit and you look back and you go, wow, I remember that time. I thought that guy might not make it. Now, holy cow, I hope we end up all working for him.

Speaker 1: 34:58

That's one of the hardest things, I think, nowadays that leaders avoid. They. They avoid conflict, they avoid that 60 seconds of discomfort, and then that 60 seconds of discomfort grows into 60 hours of work that you have to do on the back end because you could have solved it right there. You could have potentially changed the course of that employee's life. And I have countless, countless stories of me having having to have those tough conversations with individuals that I've even had to fire, some in Afghanistan and some as a company commander. Were they hard? Yeah, were they hard every single time. Did they ever get easy? No, it didn't. But at the core of it, I did it because I'm trying to make my organization better and I have to make tough decisions to ensure that the men and women that I lead have the best leadership possible. So when you do get, involved.

Speaker 2: 35:48

I would rather have that uncomfortable conversation than to look some family member in the eye and tell them yeah, that was going to make me feel kind of icky inside to say that to those guys, Exactly. So let them make the mistake. That cost you your mother or father or son or daughter. That's an easy to call to make.

Speaker 1: 36:07

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 36:07

And the hard part is to now translate that into other parts of the business, because the same idea applies.

Speaker 1: 36:14

When.

Speaker 2: 36:14

I got into mission control management, one of the first things I was told was hey, check all that leadership talk at the door.

Speaker 1: 36:21

We don't really talk that way, but then I was known to talk like that as a flight director.

Speaker 2: 36:27

In fact, in some cases the senior management kind of put up with me because I was successful as a flight director, even though I kind of talked the old way and I got up there, and my predecessor as the director, so he actually brought me up there and I was on staff and then I was his deputy for for a little over a year and he saw this before I did, because he was. He was the first director they ever brought in that hadn't grown up in mission control. All the other guys incrementally over time had just the experience you just said. You know that manager didn't have that 60 second conversation. That manager didn't have that 60 conversation, that 60 second conversation, and over time he eroded the culture. He wrote the culture so much that not only were these couple or three senior managers not having those conversations, it became wrong to do it in our senior management ranks.

Speaker 2: 37:19

For the senior management team that leads mission control by 2004 timeframe when my predecessor took took the job. It was not cool to talk that way. When I got up there three years later to work with him, I was shocked when I saw that and one of my proudest moments was a leader. I mean as a leader was just two years after that. Less than two years after that, I replaced my boss as a director and he moved on to other jobs and in that timeframe we took his concerns with that and then exploded them in the leadership team to peak, pull apart. What are we not doing? Well, why aren't we saying these things and stop saying it's not cool to talk that way? We're now going to teach ourselves how to actually say it right and then push it down to the next level of the leadership team. And they're going to push it down to the next and they're going to push it down to the next. And while they're doing that, I'm going to be giving talks to the entire organization at all levels over and over, reinforcing what we have been preaching at them for years, even though we stopped demonstrating it in the most senior ranks. And the biggest, my biggest fear for that always is.

Speaker 2: 38:32

It isn't just how you talk. It affects the culture. It affects how the people decide what is important and what they do. And God help us. In any profession, what people decide is going back to what you said a little while ago adequate is good enough? Just hit, just doing the minimum is good enough? Oh no, it's not. That's how we go out of business or that's how we kill somebody. And how do you protect against that? Make it part of the culture, and not only that. Make the culture aware that we have to talk about these things. We have to actually do these things deliberately. This is what it means to us. That's how you keep it alive. That's how you keep a management team from abrogating the responsibility and letting the organization fail when it didn't have to.

Speaker 1: 39:19

You talked about right there something that's really near to my heart and it's something of the past story you just talked about with that major.

Speaker 1: 39:25

But when you let something slip like that, you just now created a new standard within your organization that people will replicate. So not having those If you ever read the book by Kim Scott, radical Candor perfect example of how to have those tough conversations been in a very powerful way. But when you avoid those tough conversations as a culture, then your organization avoids them and then you're just sweeping rug, sweeping problems under the rug, or you're just kicking them down. The exactly what our politicians do right now. They just kick problems down the road for someone else to deal with and then you start thinking short term. Well, now I'm thinking, while I'm going to be in this leadership role, I'm going to make decisions based on that, versus thinking long term and seeing through you. I need to make decisions that don't just necessarily impact my time here, but impact many, many years of the organization and the team that I'm going to be leading. But I would love to kind of take it now to what inspired you to write the book Mission Control Room to the boardroom.

Speaker 2: 40:28

You know, it would be the profound shock that I had when I got to the senior leadership ranks and heard people say it's not cool to talk this way. And not only that, to see that our management practices reflected that it's not cool to talk this way and that, just as one of many examples in fact I go through. I go into these in the book, but I'll just give you one of them the organizations. So you know, the Mission Control Organization had a number of different divisions, all different engineering disciplines and things like that.

Speaker 2: 40:59

Lots of people, I mean you know, when I started there, we had about 3,500 people, so pretty large organization, a lot of divisions. Each of the executives that managed each one of those divisions was expected, when they came to the senior management meetings, to not bring up any problems. They were having getting their part of the work done, including their part of the organization that actually comprised the Mission Control Team getting ready for upcoming missions. Because there was so much focus on being ready and flying on time that if we talked about issues in our management forums and we're talking mission control only management forums that if we make, if we let it get out, that we've got some technical issue that we don't know what to do with or that's getting away from us, it's going to go over cost or we don't know how to fix it or we're not going to be ready for this next flight on time. Somebody's going to leak that until the upper management and then the bosses are going to get in trouble. And I'm not just saying it felt like this, they were told this. So, and I quote, keep all of that shit to yourselves and go work out your problem for yourself. In fact, in that time frame this is before my predecessor was up there. In that time frame, one of those division chiefs went to see the boss in the corner office. He says okay, I know you don't want to, you don't like to hear the bad news, but here's the problem. My engineers are not going to be go to fly on time. There's a big part of this was a major piece of the International Space Station with new command and control computers. This was a big deal. This would be like replacing two engines of a four-engine airplane in flight. While you're, while you're in the air, my guys are telling me we're not ready to do it. We know what the problem is. We just have not had the time to get all the procedures ready and get the astronauts trained. We're going to need another three months. And the answer he got back is why are you telling me this? If you can't solve your problems, what the hell do I need you for? Well, I'll get somebody else to replace you and you can go do something else after I fire you.

Speaker 2: 42:55

That was the leadership environment of the of the NASA mission control organization. So why did I write my book when we changed all of that? So, like point by point, our management practices were exactly opposite of that where I could sit at the head of the table as the no kidding boss and we could be in a in a really tough engineering discussion where I'm part of it and it's now clear what I think is the right answer. And one of the executives that worked for me in front of probably 30 people, all the way down to our working level engineers and one of one of my direct reports, would say pause, the dumbest thing I ever heard. You say look, we just got through seeing this data, here's what the right answer is. And my response was oh yeah, you're right, you're right. I completely missed that. All right, go on, go on, I've caught up with you now. There was no value whatsoever. And then pretending the boss was right and everybody in the room just chuckled, whereas if that had happened a few years before, people in the room would have been terrified. Oh my God, that guy just lost his job.

Speaker 2: 43:55

For saying that to Paul Hill I mean not to me, because I wouldn't have fired somebody for that I'd give him a medal for telling me I was wrong, keeping me from being wrong, but that kind of thing, the fact that we did not make major decisions in the organization without every single one of the senior leaders being in the room. And, more importantly, if we knew we had some senior, some senior on the senior, but a major decision coming up, we would make sure we sent out everything we knew about it to all the divisions. Have them evaluate it so that they could show up with. Here is we pulled the division engineers at all levels. Here's what we think about it. Here's what we, here's how we think we need to change the decision and why. And we would then discuss it as a team, including with many of their working level engineers in the room, sometimes stopping us and saying no, no, no, you guys got that part wrong. Here's what we think over here. Here's what we need to do and why. And, in the end, the decision we made we made as a team and we didn't vote.

Speaker 2: 44:52

He wasn't a democracy. I can't remember a single decision, however, when there wasn't, if not unanimous, near unanimous agreement. This is the rationale and we understand the data, and it was never a case where we made a decision where this is flight safety related, like we're going to accept this risk and it's either absolutely wrong to do or it's absolutely right to do. There was never one of those that we weren't all complete agreement and the data supported what we had and there was no fear there was no discussion of. We can't air this out in front of in front of anybody. In fact I was. I was known to have no goat being ready to launch a shuttle flight because we were not satisfied with our readiness on some some technical problem that we had been chasing on on the spacecraft, and my people knew, if nothing else, we can trust the boss to stand in front of the train and make sure that we don't do the wrong thing.

Speaker 1: 45:47

And you know as a leader.

Speaker 2: 45:48

What's my responsibility? That? And still that kind of trust, that kind of willingness, that that kind of culture that the more senior you are, the more that should be your full responsibility, because the people closer to the technical work, the people closer to the combat arms can manage all of that stuff extraordinarily well If you give them that environment where they can now say and do right things and not be afraid of saying them or do.

Speaker 1: 46:15

Yeah, that's the whole theme that I've gotten through and I love every individual episode.

Speaker 1: 46:21

I begin to realize the theme and the theme that I've noticed repeated throughout your journey is really evolving, revolving around candor, embracing that type of mindset and then surrounding yourself with individuals that will tell you when you're wrong, and then you being able to have the thick skin, like how we went back to that in the military. Everyone says the thick skin or the humility to be a yep, you're right, but embracing that type of culture with any type of organization that you've ever led. That's that's what I'm seeing and and that's something that I share within my leadership practices that if we don't have thick skin, we can't move forward and if we don't tell truths and facts, we can't solve problems. And then we have to bring everyone to the table, because exactly what you just said having that small group of engineers trying to work through this complex problem well, that's just a small pool of your resources.

Speaker 1: 47:18

Why aren't you bringing everyone together to try to solve this as a team? Because there's individuals lives on the line. Yeah, if we don't make the mission, that's okay, but if we need more time or we need more resources, well, that's the failure of the leader. Instead of that individual being fired, the leader should be fired because they're not doing their jobs. What is one, one resource or one practice from your book that you wrote that you could share with our listeners?

Speaker 2: 47:46

And you think I'd had one all keyed up, all keyed up on my heads as I wrote the darn book. When you know, for me it was the insistence that well, a couple things, that the assistance, that every decision we made had to include the wise. Like, when you bring it to us, you know we need to make this engineering change. We need this budget increase to fix this problem. Bring me, bring us the wise. Why is it in our best interest? How does this connect back to the mission? How does this make us better? How does it make it better for the team that's doing it? Don't just tell us this is a good idea or this is what you want, but tell us, tell us why. Let us have that conversation and then, as we, as we make those decisions, take the decisions and the rationale, not just the decision, back down the chain so that everybody right down to the working level, understands this isn't just the direction.

Speaker 2: 48:39

This is why we decided it, and if we got it wrong, then come back and tell us. And for me it's keep everything about the mission. So you know. You mentioned thick skin. I look at it a little bit differently. I think you have to. You have to cultivate the idea that this isn't about personal insult.

Speaker 2: 48:59

This is about our shared core purpose In our case we exist to protect the astronauts, to get them to space and back alive. Protect the, protect the spacecraft and then accomplish the mission in that order. And we will do everything possible to protect the astronauts lives and bring them back, including bend and break and destroy the spacecraft. If that's what it takes, if we can rally around that, then discussions that in other organizations might feel hurtful. Like you're picking on me now. I have to have thick skin. Don't really feel like that, because now we all still have in mind hey, this isn't about, this isn't about attacking you. You know your division, that your work isn't going to show up on time, oof, let's talk about that. Let's find out why.

Speaker 2: 49:43

Some other division, by the way, might have some resources, might be smart guys, might be software, but we might have something that can help your guys. But let's talk about it and find out. Is there something we can do to help? And why are we just finding out? What is it? What is it in our management dialogue in the last several months that we missed? Have you been telling us? We haven't been hearing it. Have you not been telling us? If not, why not? Don't let that one happen again. But again, it's about that core purpose. It's not about finding out why you didn't lead well. Are we sure that we were doing everything possible to deliver on the core purpose or on the mission? That is the only thing that matters Now. You can't use that as a shield to talk to the people that work for you any way you want, because hey the mission is all that matters, so I should be able to talk in the most offensive way.

Speaker 2: 50:38

That's not the message at all. In fact, I'll say it even more concisely. We learned to air. I mean, we learned as a management team to err on the side of clarity instead of diplomacy. And if I could sum up the biggest change we made in the mission control management range, besides making it cool to talk this way, we changed from diplomacy over clarity, because that way there weren't any ripples in the pond. In fact, that's what the old guys used to say Don't make any ripples in the pond because we don't want anybody to find out about it.

Speaker 2: 51:10

And what we learned to say is I don't know, we prefer clarity over diplomacy. And if somebody gets their feelings hurt, we'll deal with that and what we'll make amends we'll fix that. I mean, try not to do that, but if that happens we will deal with it. But we have to have clarity first, clarity over diplomacy. Because you know what the ripples are in the pond. We're just pretending they're not there.

Speaker 2: 51:29

But if there's some big issue that we're not working, the tidalway is coming boys. So let's get them all out on the table. You want to take the ripples out of the pond, tell us where they all are and we'll go fix them. We'll call them the waters. But I'd much rather do that Error on the side of clarity instead of diplomacy. Don't be offensive, right? So you know there's an art to that. But clarity instead of diplomacy, because if you let diplomacy get in the way, then you're right back to oh, I'm not going to have that difficult conversation and the culture pays the price. And then eventually your mission, your core purpose, pays the price, and that's what we can't afford.

Speaker 1: 52:07

Diplomacy over clarity versus clarity over diplomacy. I love that, I realize I didn't.

Speaker 2: 52:13

I got off the track, which, as you can probably tell now, I tend to do because this is a this is my favorite topic. Why did I write the book? Because, as we learned to say these things and learned how badly we were doing it, but how simple it is to actually do it the right way, that had such a profound effect on me. I actually told all the guys on my team we're going to have to write this down. We're going to have to write. I got to write this book Because I can't. You know. I mean, at this point we were 40 something, almost 50 years into mission controls history and we're just now learning how to articulate these fundamental things and why they're important. I'm not going to be the director that led the team that figured that out, only to have us forget again. I've got to write it all down so that we don't lose it again.

Speaker 2: 53:02

And, by the way, the message is powerful. It's repeatable in any industry. So that's why I wrote the book, cause I, I couldn't not. You know, it was like this bug in my head, you know, like the earworm of the song. You can't ever stop. It was that I couldn't get it out of my head. I had to write it.

Speaker 1: 53:16

Yeah, I, I, I have a hundred percent understand where you're coming from. That's one reason that I started this whole podcast is to try and communicate leaders who are starting out in their journey, regardless of what their profession is. There is a better path out there to be successful as a leader, and a lot of the mentors that you're going to have in your career and your life aren't going to show you those skills. They're going to show you the toxic leadership traits that are going to get you success early in your career. But it's not about success early in your career. It's about chasing significance. It's about improving the organizations, about improving in people's lives that you're serving and, at the end of the day, it's about serving, serving others. And I would love to ask you cause? I think you're a man of faith too, but how? How has faith helped you on your leadership journey?

Speaker 2: 54:04

Um, I would say that the strongest part of this. Um, it's funny. If you were to ask Gene Kranz, I see would give you a different answer than me. Gene Kranz is a famous Apollo astronaut. Um, I have astronaut, a famous Apollo flight director, um, and among, and a lot of other things, including the guy that that kind of wrote the book on the original culture of mission control and the things that we used to say that became not cool to say anymore. He was the guy that first set him and wrote him down.

Speaker 2: 54:31

But my answer for this would be you know those moments when I thought I don't know if I can carry this load anymore. I think it's going to, I think it's going to break me. I think you know the knees are bending. This is too hard. I'm afraid maybe I'm not going to be good enough. And it's that faith that, no, no, I know I can. There is, there is something, there is something else that is that is. I'm not sure what the right way of saying this is.

Speaker 2: 55:01

Now we're getting into an area that I'm definitely less comfortable talking about, which I'm not refusing to do. It's just. It's just. I have to. I have to think through my words.

Speaker 2: 55:10

There is something else that that has given me the strength to do this in the first place.

Speaker 2: 55:18

And if, if I can, just if I can just keep reaching into that, I can take that next step, I can take the next step after that.

Speaker 2: 55:27

In fact, it will help me then sit back and say, hey, you know the friction we had in our last meeting, what's that mean? And if it was, I can rely on that same sense that there is something else that is giving me the energy to do this in the first place. That does actually push me back to then have that conversation. And, and you know, if the problem we had on the team was me, I'm going to be the first one to tell the team. In fact, I'll get the team together, I'll tell all of them in front, in front of everybody, and tell them how I'm not going to do that. For me, it all ties back to those same things and that this isn't, this isn't just about me. There is, there is something else that we are all connected to that, if we don't lose, that will help us on those in those darkest moments where we think we can't take that next step.

Speaker 1: 56:12

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Speaker 1: 57:23

Back to the episode. That is one of the most, I think, impactful things is that there's always light, even in the darkest moments, and I can tell you it's like some of the most darkest moments that I have in my life. The individuals that were around me helped me get through that, because they helped show that there's light there. Regardless of the environment that we find ourselves in, regardless of the problem that we find ourselves in, there's always light. But you have to have that mindset to look for or hunt the good stuff, because there's always enough bad stuff around us. And then if you start getting into that mindset and thinking, well, I did that wrong, well, I should have said that, or I should have said this, or I should have done that, well, then you're just creating that type of negative, reinforcing behaviors. You have to start thinking about okay, what could I have done better. Next time I'm going to go do that and I'm going to have the strength to go do it.

Speaker 2: 58:16

Now I will tell you I was obsessive about that as possible. I'm kind of obsessive about looking back at how we could have been better, how I could have been better, to the extent that when I was training to be a flight director, or actually when I was working as a flight director, and I would get these evaluations from the flight controllers, kind of like report cards this is report cards from the team up to the leader and they were anonymous from the flight controllers and I'd read through the comments, I'd read through them and even when the scores were like flaming high, I would take the lowest ones and I wrote them on the whiteboard in my office and I would write the comments that I thought they were the ones that kind of hurt the most right and they hurt the most.

Speaker 2: 58:57

Because I read it and I go, yeah, I own that one, that's me, and I would write those comments and I would write those lowest scores in the areas that I was lowest in and they stayed on my whiteboard until my next flight and then I looked and I'd see it again.

Speaker 2: 59:09

And I would look at them every day with doing just what you said. How do I show up better and not keep doing that if that is getting in the way of the team, which you can make yourself crazy if you do that the wrong way. As you said, it's got to be about how do I show up better, not cheat, and I'm terrible. I mean, one thing could be if you get really, really lousy scores, yeah, okay, I'm terrible, but I know I can be better and I'm gone and that's what tomorrow is all about.

Speaker 1: 59:37

Yep, it's always about moving forward. The past is the past. It's a fact. You can't change it. You can change tomorrow, but you have to have the mindset to move out. To do that, I would love to kind of walk through really quick, because I know we're getting towards the end of the show and I always try to end it at about an hour, just to respect of your time. But where are you at currently, when you're leadership ridged? And then what pushes you every single day?

Speaker 2: 1:00:03

Well, you know, I retired from NASA at the end of 2015, wrote my book. Interestingly, the NASA lawyers originally told me I was allowed to write the book while I was a NASA employee and then I got a visit from one of the most senior lawyers, hat in hand, almost literally. He says yeah, okay, we screwed up, we shouldn't have told you that. And then the other statute says that if you write this book, you're going to have to retire or you can't be a NASA or a federal employee and write this book. That leans so heavily on my federal employee experience. I mean, it wasn't that NASA was going to be mad at me, but that apparently it's against federal statute.

Speaker 2: 1:00:44

So, that kind of accelerated my thinking. I was at that point I was ready for a change, just other things that were going on in NASA. I had led him to a place where I felt really good about where we were, and so it was not hard for me to move on to do other things. So I wrote the book and then I went on the speaker circuit to give you an idea where I am now and what I learned when I started giving speeches about these topics, some of them based on my book, others just ideas that are tangentially related. As I did, I found that those ideas resonated in leadership team after leadership team and in conferences across any industries, and the more I did it, the better I became at it. And when I say better, I don't mean a better speaker although I'm sure that happened too but it was sort of like the mission control team as we evolved how to articulate some of our most important cultural attributes.

Speaker 2: 1:01:41

As I talked about those and other things, I would have those aha moments oh, this is a better way to saying it, this is a clearer way of saying it that more leaders will see how this applies and how to do this where they sit. So I've spent the last seven years, I guess, between writing the book and giving speeches like this. And if you were to ask me my most important leadership contribution, most people at NASA would assume that I would say it was my flight director time, especially because I was the lead flight director for the return to flight. So after the Columbia accident I led the ops teams that developed a lot of the new things we had to put in place to be able to fly again, and then I led the mission planning and mission control for that first shuttle flight after the accident. Most people would say wow. Paul Hill would surely say that was his greatest leadership accomplishment.

Speaker 1: 1:02:36

And it wasn't.

Speaker 2: 1:02:37

It was leading the senior leaders and mission control to realize what we were doing wrong, figure out how to do it right and how to articulate it and why it mattered, and then push it down more than two levels, three levels deep into the organization. So I had I had mid level managers now that were starting to become steeped in the same these things and connecting to why it mattered and how they and how they manage most most probably my proudest moment as a senior leader the seven years I've spent talking to management teams, though I feel like I am making a similar contribution, you know putting ideas out there for managers in other industries to pick up and apply.

Speaker 2: 1:03:19

You know my whole goal when I wrote the book was you know we learned a lot of our things the hard way. You know the lesson of hard knocks, much like the military over the over the last couple of centuries. Not everybody needs to learn them the hard way. In fact. Here are the areas that we stumbled in and had to correct ourselves, that we once did well. Here's how that happened and here's how we got better again. Read our story and learn from it. Don't make the mistake, and you guys can be better than we were. And that's saying something, because mission control is pretty damn good and always has been.

Speaker 1: 1:03:51

That's. I love that. So learn from someone else, a mentor, so you can avoid those mistakes. But I guarantee you there's going to be people listening to this podcast that do not take that advice, and then they're going to do what private McMillian did, and having a drill sergeant yell at me is like all right, mcmillian, you're going to learn today paying a repetition, which ones are going to be, and that's just the story of life. That's hilarious, and I've learned that, and now I've humbled myself enough to go out, find people that are successful in areas that I want to be successful in and pick their brain, take them out to launch, add value to them and learn from them, because they've lived that experience, and experience breeds wisdom, and that's one thing that you can't have, unless you go through a situation or if you have someone in your corner who has that type of experience.

Speaker 2: 1:04:40

You have to be careful, though I agree with you. You have to be careful because experience often also breeds arrogance, and it's a well-founded arrogance. It comes with the confidence of knowing that I'm an expert and I'm good, but it's easy to lose some of the edge that actually made you good, because, while you just know that you're good, love that, and in fact, it's the rare leader who stays self-aware long enough, because the hazard of being a leader is especially a leader that's really well respected is everybody's telling you how good you are.

Speaker 1: 1:05:15

In fact, some people may be telling you that you're always right and boy you got to be on your guard.

Speaker 2: 1:05:20

You got to put your shields up to not let that stuff penetrate too much, where you start believing it and now you're not listening to your team anymore because you don't need them.

Speaker 2: 1:05:27

I actually had one of the most respected engineers and leaders that was at NASA my entire career, actually told me once when he was really in his heyday. You know the guys that worked for me. I really don't. My biggest fear is that they make decisions. I don't want them to make any decisions. I want them to bring all the data up to me and then we make all the decisions so I can make sure the right thing happens, which I mean, you know for me as a leader would be terrifying.

Speaker 2: 1:05:53

Now, what I agree with and this was only part of his meeting, by the way, he actually meant that the way you would take that at first Part of the meeting I agree with is hey, if we're making engineering decisions down and in the ranks that really have life and death ramifications and these are changes to the way we've evaluated those risks before that needs to bubble up and we need to hear that at higher levels. It doesn't have to come to me because I'm going to second guess your engineering, but I'm going to want to know. We are now recommending this change in engineering that is different than we've always done before and it has this life and death effect where it could cause this major system on the vehicle to fail.

Speaker 1: 1:06:33

I need that.

Speaker 2: 1:06:34

I need it to come all the way up and, by the way, it's not just for me, it's for all of those senior executives that work for me. I want the senior leadership team to hear that so that we can all make sure hey, we are all in agreement. Are we missing something? Is there something else we ought to ask before we do that? And are there engineers or working troops down and in any other part of the organization that when they hear that, they raise their hand and say wait, wait, wait, wait. That sounds wrong. So from that regard, I agree, I still want them to make the decision. Some of those things we have to know at all levels. These decisions need to go up and be reviewed at a higher level to make sure that there's not something we're missing.

Speaker 1: 1:07:10

But that's not you making the decision, no, it did and I think it kind of goes back to the whole idea is that big decisions require big teams and you don't make them in solos, especially if it's going to affect someone's life. You don't want a silo of an engineer just making a decision that has a consequence of potentially impacting the success of the mission or success of a life by themselves. You want it to be flushed out and you want all the facts to be laid out at the table. It's time for our final show segment that I like to call the killer bees. These are the same four questions that I asked every guest on the Tales of Leadership podcast Be brief, be brilliant, be brilliant, be present and be gone. Question one what do you believe separates a good leader from an extraordinary leader?

Speaker 2: 1:08:06

The willingness to be humble enough to know they don't know everything and the willingness to keep asking their people, to ask and answer those why's and to push that thinking down and to be open to the fact that any of us, at any level, might be making a mistake and that people below us can keep that from happening.

Speaker 1: 1:08:26

Question two what is one resource that you can recommend to our listeners?

Speaker 2: 1:08:31

I would start with what got you here. One gets you there a book by Marshall Goldsmith. It's a real simple idea, but part of it addresses just what I'm talking about, that arrogance of success. This is what always got me here, but it may not help me at the next level. You know that idea that you dance with the one that brung you. Sometimes that works, sometimes that means I'm really good at this level and it doesn't translate to the next level, because the next level is where I need to have more of that cultural focus and I can't stop being the chief engineer and second guessing everybody's math. What got you here won't get you there. Powerful book.

Speaker 1: 1:09:07

Third question if you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Speaker 2: 1:09:15

Oh boy, it would be to stop putting so much pressure on myself that more people around me and watching me actually want me to succeed. Every day is not an opportunity for me to completely ruin my career. I can't tell you how many days I felt like oh my god it's so imperative because there's bad behavior that goes with that. You feel that impatience in meetings. You react badly to somebody because they're not agreeing with you and, oh my god, relax. It's not that bad. You have more time to work. The issue with the team.

Speaker 1: 1:09:48

Last question how can our listeners find you and how can they add value to you?

Speaker 2: 1:09:55

They can find me on my website, which is atlasexeccom, and my contact information is out there. There's information about my book and the things I've spoken on this in a couple of little video clips Definitely things out there associated with my ideas. As far as adding value, well, two things. One, if you read my book where you've heard me speak and you think there's something that I'm not clear on or something that I could say better, or something that I'm missing altogether, send it to me. Go to my website my email address is on there. Send it to me, let me know. I'd love to hear it. The other one would be I need a literary agent for the novel that I wrote during COVID. So if anybody that hears this is a literary agent willing to listen to and willing to read my manuscript, let me know.

Speaker 1: 1:10:46

Well, I hope somebody out there in the podcast world can do that. Paul, it's been humbling to go through your leadership journey, starting off in the Air Force and moving to NASA, at truly a depth and breadth of leadership experience that I don't have on the show very often, and it was well worth the wait. So I'm glad to have you on and I'm really excited for this podcast there because it's going to impact some lives. You dropped some very, very impactful leadership knowledge on this.

Speaker 2: 1:11:20

Oh, thanks a lot. I can't thank you enough for inviting me. I've really enjoyed the conversation, Joshua, so it's been my pleasure.

Speaker 1: 1:11:27

Absolutely hey. Have a great Memorial Day weekend, brother.

Speaker 2: 1:11:30

Thanks, sir, you too.

Speaker 1: 1:11:35

All right, team, it's time for after action review and full transparency. I filmed this podcast and totally forgot to do the after action review, so I had to go back and listen to the full episode which is awesome, by the way, because it gives me the opportunity to listen to the content and the information again and again. Everything that I'm doing is to be a better leader. That's why I do what I do, because I want to genuinely show up in this world and be the best version of myself possible, and the first key takeaway that I pulled was big decisions require strong teams and, make no mistake, as a leader, one of your most fundamental jobs you have to be able to do is to form and then continue to knock down targets with a team. That's one of the hardest things to do, because not every person on your team is someone that you've got the ability to select, so you have to be able to take them, mold them and then move forward and continue to move forward. The second key takeaway that I got was be willing to ask why. That's not a bad thing. Being able to ask why provides a healthy level of candor, because maybe there's a better way of doing something. And when someone on your team asks why that is a powerful question, and powerful questions demand responses. And maybe you're avoiding a tough conversation because you are afraid of confrontation. But as a leader, confrontation is just part of the game. Because what do we do? We move to points of friction. That's what leaders do Exactly on the battlefield. If you ever listen to any of these soft operators talk about leadership which, by the way, when I go back to that type of mindset they provide great content. But they provide great content from the very small, nebulous form of leadership leading small teams. If you want great leadership content for large organizations, seek people who have done that, if that makes sense. But that is moving to a point of friction is what we do as leaders. And the third key takeaway is every decision should be focused on clarity, not diplomacy. Politics has no room in leadership. That is one of the most frustrating things that I encounter continuously, again and again, and I see it all the time in the army and especially as I continue to increase in rank and influence and title and all of those things that really don't matter. Diplomacy sometimes needs to be thrown out the window and what is most important is clarity, because at the end of the day, when you have clarity, you're able to protect your team, you're able to make better decisions that overall help everyone in the long run.

Speaker 1: 1:14:31

All right, team, do me a favor If you like what you've heard. If you like this episode, make sure you share it with someone who is starting out on their leadership journey or is a leader in their own right. Make sure that you leave me a review, on whatever platform you've listened to this podcast episode, because you're awesome and you need to know that. And then, number three, make sure that you support the channel if you feel so inclined to do that, and you can go to McMillianleadershipcoachingcom. You can click the Leadership Resources tab. You can look at all the free resources that I have to include additional articles and a blog article that is written for this specific episode that distills down all the key takeaways. And, as always, I am your host, josh McMillian, saying every day is a gift. Don't waste yours. I'll see you next time.