An Astronaut’s Advice on High-Stakes Collaboration

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's hard to imagine a more challenging work environment than the International Space Station. During her 24 years as a NASA astronaut, including a six-month stint on the ISS, Cady Coleman learned pivotal lessons about everything from managing stress and assessing risk to cross-cultural communication and navigating bias. She shares how the skills she picked up can be applied in all kinds of careers. Coleman is the author of the book Sharing Space: An Astronaut's Guide to Mission Wonder and Making Change.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Got 30 minutes?
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0:12.6	Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the H-Byr idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard.
0:33.0	We all feel pressure at work.
0:40.0	We all feel pressure at work.
0:42.0	We're all trying to execute and challenging conditions. We all feel pressure at work. We're all trying to execute and challenging conditions.
0:44.4	We all need to get along with our coworkers and figure out the best way to work together as a team.
0:49.2	But imagine doing all of that in a space station orbiting 254 miles above Earth.
0:55.6	During her 24 years as a NASA astronaut,
0:57.9	Katie Coleman learned a whole lot about how
1:00.0	to perform and collaborate in high-stakes situations. She logged two space shuttle missions to conduct
1:05.6	scientific experiments and launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory Telescope. And her last mission involved
1:11.9	working within a multicultural crew of six aboard the
1:15.4	International Space Station for more than five months. She's here today to talk
1:19.6	to us about how you prepare for that kind of job and do it well once you're up there and
1:24.8	tell us how we can translate those lessons into more regular work back here on Earth.
1:29.7	Her new book is called Sharing Space, an astronaut's guide to mission, wonder, and making change.
1:35.2	Katie, so great to have you here. You studied chemistry at MIT and then polymer science and engineering at
1:54.7	UMass. Why did you want to get out of a normal lab and go to space? Were you drawn
2:00.2	to those higher stakes that I was just talking about?
	...

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