TL;DR
- Align your senior leaders before you announce the change. If they aren't on board, the support functions take the pushback.
- A clear culture strategy should come before any restructure, merger or headcount decision.
- If you treat people leadership as a technical discipline, technical organisations start to take it seriously.
- 70-20-10 still holds. Most development happens on the job, and skipping leadership levels costs teams.
- Engagement surveys only work if people see action. NASA's response rate passed 90% once staff saw that.
- Lessons from failure expire within a generation unless someone keeps them alive.
On 21 October we hosted IN ON HR, a digital roundtable with Brady Pyle, former Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA and now Chief HR and Inclusion Officer at Space Center Houston. Brady spent about 30 years in HR at NASA and led its move from a decentralised model it had run for 60 years to a centralised one, with a target of a 25% cut to the HR budget.
The room was made up of chief people officers, HR directors, L&D leaders, workplace psychologists and HR tech founders, from early-stage startups to large engineering businesses. The question on the table was what it takes to lead a change that big, and what the rest of us can borrow from it.
Read the full insights
Leave your details and the full write-up opens on this page. Inside:
- Why NASA centralised
- The one mistake to avoid
- How NASA developed leaders
- Planning for skills you can't see yet
- Bringing different cultures together
- Lessons that expire
- Key takeaway
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