NASA Cultural Changes

Recently NASA has gone through a very traumatic situation which it is hard for any agency to cope with, on February 1^st 2003 space shuttle Columbia and the seven crew members were lost. Before that happened NASA had almost a magical presence and its reputation was flawless. No one could have ever seen something like this happening, everything was running so smooth and then before anyone working for NASA knew what hit them this accident occurred. NASA jumped into action after a short grieving period, they began to assess how something like this could happen and what they could do to prevent this from ever happening again.

Sean O’Keefe the leader of NASA needed to address his employees at of all of the proposed changes which would eventually be implemented. A diagnosis of NASA was done and there was a very obvious need for a change in the way they did work and the way their leadership handled the issues at hand. After carefully studying many of the surveys which were conducted the leadership at NASA was able to recognize certain problems with the culture that had been at NASA for a long time.

The results were that this study made it obvious that the general consensus is that employees do not have enough professional respect for one another. This was one of the major problems at NASA, behavior like this can have huge implications on an organization like NASA. If employees do not have enough respect for each other and their professional opinions, it might be harder for someone to come forward with a safety issue in fear of getting disrespected or mocked. Among some other big issues is that there is very little upward communication and perceived organization support, these issues also go along with my theory of employees being scared to speak their minds. I think that Mr. O’Keefe recognizes that this is an important issue and this is why he choose to speak publicly about it rather than just pass the new agenda on to his leadership.

I think Mr. O’Keefe was very believable in his address to the employees of NASA, he was very sincere about wanting to bring a change to the culture of NASA and recognized that in part this incident was also his fault. They always say that the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem, in this video Sean O’Keefe does just that. He tells the world that the leadership at NASA including himself had failed, he talked about an email which he received that day and said that it was suggested to him for leadership to just get out of their office and go interact with all of the employees. I think that since Mr. O’Keefe reflects on himself and his leadership at NASA so that they can improve; these statements make him sound very believable. He recognizes that no one is perfect including himself, this brings out a very human characteristic in him and it shows that he does want to change NASA’s culture for the better.

Mr. O’Keefe talks about NASA’s values because an organizations looking to improve needs to take into consideration their ethical, value, and goal considerations if they are to improve. By taking this into consideration Mr. O’Keefe can “understand the old culture, encourage change in employees, involve employees, and lead with a vision” (OD, pg. 70). Sean O’ Keefe recognizes that large-scale change takes time and this why I do feel that they are on the correct path.

There are many lessons to be learned from this whole ordeal, I know that I will definitely take a page out of Mr. O’Keefe’s book when I look to becoming a better leader. I see that it is imperative to not make anyone feel as though their opinion does not matter for this person could save a tragedy from happening. If we do not let our employees be free and respect each other’s professional opinions a lot of important information can be lost. It is important that every voice in an organization be heard and that every voice have a channel for them to be heard. I think that this incident at NASA could have been avoided had the culture been different. I will remember this exercise and use it to propel myself to ensure that my work place culture has a much more open atmosphere; I will also make it a point to “live in the new culture”(OD, pg. 70) and not regress back to the old way of doing things.     

Reference:

Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experiential Approach to Organization Development (Eighth ed.). Prentice Hall.

C-SPAN (NASA). (2004). NASA Cultural Changes [Video]. Available from http://www.c-span.org/video/?181348-1/nasa-cultural-changes