This episode features an interview with Brady Pyle, Chief HR & Inclusion Officer at Space Center Houston. Over a 30-year federal career, Brady held various HR leadership roles at NASA, including HR Director for the Johnson Space Center and Director of HR Services, earning two NASA Outstanding Leadership Medals. In 2013, Brady created his leadership blog, OutOfThisWorldLeadership.com, which now ranks among Feedspot’s Top 100 Leadership Blogs. In this episode, Shawn and Brady discuss how space exploration's unique challenges shape forward-thinking organizational strategies, strategies for cultivating internal talent and establishing robust leadership pipelines, and utilizing AI in leadership and employee development.
This episode features an interview with Brady Pyle, Chief HR & Inclusion Officer at Space Center Houston. Over a 30-year federal career, Brady held various HR leadership roles at NASA, including HR Director for the Johnson Space Center and Director of HR Services, earning two NASA Outstanding Leadership Medals. In 2013, Brady created his leadership blog, OutOfThisWorldLeadership.com, which now ranks among Feedspot’s Top 100 Leadership Blogs.
In this episode, Shawn and Brady discuss how space exploration's unique challenges shape forward-thinking organizational strategies, strategies for cultivating internal talent and establishing robust leadership pipelines, and utilizing AI in leadership and employee development.
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“When leaders are moving from individual contributors to leadership roles, a lot of times they were selected because they're the technical expert. They're the smartest person in the room. We had to teach them as you move into that role, you've got to train yourself to use coaching skills, to ask questions. Because if you're constantly giving answers, you're not going to grow the capacity of the team. You're the team's lid. If you want to grow technical expertise in your function and in your field, those are the people we want in our management and leadership positions. You're asking questions, you're developing those creative solutions from your team. The role becomes more of coaching and facilitation and less of giving the answer.” – Brady Pyle
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:56): Getting to know Brady
*(16:21): Leadership development strategies
*(27:02): Implementing effective recognition programs
*(32:35): Building trust in leadership
*(42:44): Differences between NASA and Space Center Houston
*(45:43): The role of AI in leadership development
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Links:
Connect with Brady on LinkedIn
Learn more about Space Center Houston
Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn
Shawn Pfunder: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Cohesion Podcast. Today I'm joined by Brady Pyle, he's the Chief HR and Inclusion Officer at Space Center Houston.
Shawn Pfunder: It's a leading non profit science and space exploration learning center that serves as the official visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center. I previously served in a variety of HR roles for NASA, retiring in February 2023 after a 30 year career with the federal government. Welcome to the show, Brady.
Brady Pyle: Thanks so much, Shawn. Excited to be here. And yeah, that title's a new one. Our CEO was especially excited when he learned he could call me the cheerio of the organization.
Shawn Pfunder: That's great. I mean, it's better than, I don't know, the flakes of the organization or the lucky charm, I don't know, lucky charms might be okay. That's true. There could, there could be other options there. No, that's great. I love that acronym. That's really cool. Well, what we do is like, we love to kick off by just finding out a little bit more information about you.
Shawn Pfunder: Got some, I don't think they're silly. I think they kind of uncover your personality a little bit, but I've got four questions for you to kick things off. The first one is what are the top five most opened apps on your phone?
Brady Pyle: All right. So I usually start my day with the Space City Weather. That's an app that, that talks about the local weather here in Houston.
Brady Pyle: I use LinkedIn quite a bit. I use Facebook quite a bit as well. And then probably the other frequent apps, I, I actually look at Fox News and CNN, usually realizing the truth is somewhere between the two.
Shawn Pfunder: I saw it, you know, there's an app out there. That will rank the news stories. So it's sort of based off of, are they in the middle?
Shawn Pfunder: Are they left? Are they right? And then be like, now you figure it out. Pulling it together. Yeah. Pull it all together. Well, and LinkedIn a lot. That's no surprise. I want to do like a digital HR, HR, HR. Yeah, for sure. Well, your next question, what is a common myth about your field of expertise?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, so I, I like to think of having an expertise in the field of leadership.
Brady Pyle: And I would say a common myth there is that people think about leadership, about management positions and management roles. And a lot of times you can find leadership and people who have good influence throughout the organization. Sometimes your poorest leaders are in management roles and your best leaders are not.
Brady Pyle: And so that, that's, Is a common myth that I've seen throughout my career. Oh, that's
Shawn Pfunder: interesting. That's a different, I don't want to dive completely and I'm nowhere to talk about this, but that's a slightly different take than what I've heard in the past, which is, it's almost a cliche, which is there's a difference between a manager and leader, but you take it a step further and say.
Shawn Pfunder: Hey, you could have a leader that's an, that's an IC, has no direct reports somewhere in the company. Just as a quick follow up, what does that usually look like if they're not in a management role, but you would consider them a leader or may even invest in them as a leader?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, absolutely. So I like to think of leadership the way John Maxwell talks about it.
Brady Pyle: Leadership is influence. So if you think of someone who has influence, yeah, that can be an entry level. employee who comes to the organization with new ideas, maybe they recently graduated with a degree, have the latest knowledge from academia that they're bringing into the organization, and they can influence the organization, strategies, policies, ideas, immediately as a brand new employee and not having a management role.
Shawn Pfunder: Awesome. Yeah, that really, did you ever read Seth Godin's book, Linchpin? Do you know, have you heard of that? I've heard of it. I've not read that particular one. A little bit like that. And the interesting thing about linchpins, as they develop, they opt out of the management roles. So they become critical to the business, high potential to the business, but it's okay.
Shawn Pfunder: I don't need to manage a lot of people. I can be a leader in another way.
Brady Pyle: Yeah. And Shawn, just playing with that a little bit, the NASA really learned that, that we had to push kind of a dual career path. That we didn't want everyone in management and leadership positions. Sometimes we wanted their expertise to deepen, and some of your best technical experts don't have the proclivity to, or don't want to be bothered by managing people.
Brady Pyle: And so, how do you play to those strengths in the organization, and so you needed a dual career path where folks could grow that technical expertise and continue to Grow from a compensation perspective as well.
Shawn Pfunder: That's awesome. I feel like I should slide you 20 bucks under the table and you can show your Radford Carta ladders that you had at NASA and everything else on that dual, that dual track, which is a kind of holy grail to get that down and make sure other people understand it, but.
Shawn Pfunder: That's fantastic. The next question, we'll get back to the personal questions on here. This one's, it can be harder to answer. I think sometimes it's the, it's like, it feels like an interview question. What's an insult that you've received that you're proud of?
Brady Pyle: So when I entered Space Center Houston, our budgeting process has been marked in the past by Kind of a view of scarcity, and we're a growing organization now.
Brady Pyle: We're in good financial position, but our chief financial officer told me when I first submitted my first HR budget that I was spending too much and I think meant it as an insult, but I kind of pushed back and said, look, we need to invest more in, in people. And fortunately, the CEO was, was there in alignment with that position and wanting to invest more.
Brady Pyle: So we, we actually expanded our training and development offerings and some of our benefits and wellness budgets as well. So the, the spending too much notion has, has turned into, Hey, we're investing more and more in our workforce and in our people.
Shawn Pfunder: It's fantastic. I'm sure you've been in those meetings or had conversations with a CEO.
Shawn Pfunder: You were talking about vision, mission, values, whatever it is you have set up. And that always comes up like our most valuable asset. And then, oh, let's invest in training and development. Let's invest, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's too much. You're going too far. Hold on a minute. Our, our people are the diamonds in the rough, but no, no, no, no, no, no.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, final personal question. I want you to put your, uh, your X Files hat on and I can, I've seen in your background that you've got sci fi stuff, things like that. So like, if you could know the answer to one mystery, what would it be?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, I would say right now it's figuring out how we can get to Mars.
Brady Pyle: And not impact the human body. So the things that we haven't figured out for the journey to Mars yet are the effects of radiation on the body with that kind of journey, if you will. And then the effect on even eyesight, bone density. There's a lot of stuff that we have to figure out to make that kind of trip and NASA's doing a lot to try to study that with longer duration flights on the space station, but we're still in low earth orbit where radiation's a little bit different than when you go deeper space.
Brady Pyle: And so a lot of people would like to figure that one out.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, that's fantastic. I love that you know, I'm going to say about the business, about the organization, these are things that you care about instead of just the people. Do you know how long it would take us right now to get to Mars? Yeah. Absolutely.
Brady Pyle: It's, it's roughly a year journey to get there and then a year to get back. So you have to really time it the way the, the way the planets align to consider your launch. Like even when we send robotic missions to Mars and to deep space, you know, the planets are constantly moving. So you've got to figure out the right window of time for those launches to where you can get there in an optimal time.
Brady Pyle: So there's a lot of rocket scientists figuring all that out.
Shawn Pfunder: That's awesome. Speaking of that, like you were at NASA for 30 years, and I'm curious, did you start at NASA working with people doing HR type of stuff, or is that something you sort of fell into as you were there?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, so it's a little of both.
Brady Pyle: My, my journey was, I knew when I went into college, I was studying political science and public administration. I knew I wanted a career in the government. Texas A& M at the time was one of the few universities that had a co op program for non engineering students. So I knew I wanted to go there and then be part of the co op program.
Brady Pyle: Well, my first co op assignment was at the Department of Health and Human Services in their personnel or HR office. I had interviewed in Washington, DC, but they said, Hey, we usually hire grad students. I was a sophomore at the time. So they said, go work in our Dallas regional office. And I just fell in love with HR.
Brady Pyle: And so. I went into our HR management grad program at A& M and one of the things I did is I conducted a study of HR offices and federal HR offices in Texas. NASA said, Hey, we don't have time to fill out the survey, but we'd be glad to talk to you. I talked to them and said, man, I'd love to work here because they had a generalist concept HR consultants basically.
Brady Pyle: And it was one of the few federal agencies at the time where all of your customers were kind of on campus. So when I worked in Dallas for Health and Human Services, we serviced a five state region. So most of your client interaction was, was on the phone. So NASA said, well, we're not hiring. And then they came back to me later and said, Hey, if you'd be interested in grad co op.
Brady Pyle: Yeah, I'm in. So start here and then figured I'd be there a couple of years and move to something different. Like a lot of people do that enter NASA that aren't, Didn't grow up dreaming of working there. A lot of people say, Oh, I worked there a few years and then we never leave. It's just too exciting.
Brady Pyle: You're learning something new about the space program. You're working around these just amazing people. It's a unique place.
Shawn Pfunder: You know, you said when you first started is your journey and getting in there that you, you did an assessment of the health and human services that working with people, do you remember any findings or things that you discovered then that that are basically, that are potentially the same now or were there findings that you came across where you're like, Oh, we don't have that problem. Solve that.
Brady Pyle: So 30 years ago, there was a lot of literature and a lot of talk about achieving strategic partnership between like the CEO and the head of HR. And so there was a lot of push about getting a seat at the table, achieving that strategic partnership. What I studied in my graduate school thesis was around, can you achieve that strategic partnership at the next level?
Brady Pyle: Like today, what we would call the HR business partner and the client. So it was a relatively new idea at the time, but it was one that I saw that NASA was moving towards and I think a little bit ahead of its time and how it structured HR and how it achieved those partnerships. And so it was great to be part of that and learn that from the inside and grow over time with that.
Shawn Pfunder: That speaks to something I don't know if a lot of people know, and I probably, I mean. I'm a moron with a lot of this stuff, but when you say HRBP, I'm familiar with that role. What's unique or different about a business partner, so somebody that's in HR that's a business partner beyond the, I listen to clients or I solve crises that I'm going to like, Go, go drink and, and tell my friends about it, even though I shouldn't.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. What's, what's unique about an HRBP versus just a generalist or somebody that's working with people?
Brady Pyle: Great, great question. So, I think you said it earlier about how I was speaking about the business, knowing the business. That's really where it starts. So, the model at NASA, our HR, we call them HR reps and then HR business partners over time.
Brady Pyle: We would sit in staff meetings, technical staff meetings, kind of understand what was going on in the business. And then it was our responsibility then to go figure out, okay, what are the, what are the right workforce strategies and HR strategies that can help push the business forward? And so we would sit with the leader of those organizations and say, Hey, here are some ideas about, you know, employee engagement, culture.
Brady Pyle: How do you develop your workforce? How are you developing your leaders? You know, how are we preparing successors? NASA is a unique model in that probably 95 percent of the leadership roles are filled internally. So it's, it's a lot about internal development and growth. They'll pull in people from their contractor workforce that, that's kind of the, the staffing model at NASA's.
Brady Pyle: Like at the Johnson Space Center, you have 3000 government employees. There's about 10, 000 contractors that work nearby. So that's your pool of talent that you draw from for mid level, uh, leadership roles. So that's a lot of what, what an HRVP does differently. You're, you're accomplishing all the basic HR stuff.
Brady Pyle: You know, you're taking care of the paperwork, you're taking care of the reassignments, employee counseling. Fortunately at NASA, you didn't have a lot of employee relations issues or investigations, but you did have a portion of that, but it's, it's Going to the next level of understanding the business and then how do you contribute?
Brady Pyle: How do you get a people oriented approach and strategy to the business?
Shawn Pfunder: Wow, I love that you just call it investigations instead of headaches, Marius. No, investigations. And now I know that your job was really boring without a lot of those. So you mentioned leadership development as one of the things that you would focus on.
Shawn Pfunder: And I know this is something that's That's important to you, obviously, from our initial questions. I want to talk about Space Center Houston, sort of as a path to get there. 30 years of working with people and then developing leaders. I don't know at what point you sort of came into that and focused on that.
Shawn Pfunder: I guess talk to us about your, your biggest lessons learned in doing that. And maybe even some of the, not specific programs necessarily, but the tactics that seem to work the best.
Brady Pyle: Yeah. No, great question, Shawn. So I started focusing on, on leaders and their importance to the organization very early as a junior consultant.
Brady Pyle: So Yeah. Yeah. In my initial years, I think I, I had a sense for the importance of that frontline leader role to culture and engagement. And over time I kind of learned that, yeah, Gallup shows that anywhere from 60 to 70 percent of engagement scores are driven by that relationship. And so that's always been back there for me.
Brady Pyle: And when I got to Space Center Houston, you know, I'd had years at NASA of how we develop leaders. And we didn't really have much in a way of a leadership development strategy or an approach at Space Center Houston. And I just brought over the strategy that we used at NASA. So we've, we followed the 10 principle of the Center for Creative Leadership.
Brady Pyle: So that says 70 percent of your development is on the job. It's the assignments you have, it may be special projects, it may be rotations to other areas, but 70 percent of your development is there. 20 percent is based on contacts. So that's your mentors, that's also executive coaching plays in there. And then 10 percent is learning new skills through training courses.
Shawn Pfunder: Interesting.
Brady Pyle: That framework is really important, was really important for us at NASA. It's been important here because usually when you talk leadership development, leaders jump right to, Hey, I need to send people to a training class. And so, or I need, I need that here. So what we did at Space Center Houston is we first said, as we grow, half of our new positions will be filled by internal talent.
Brady Pyle: So that was a big move for us because usually the new positions were, we recruited externally. And with that, we said, Hey, we need a training and development approach to, to kind of build leaders up. To accomplish the 20 percent on the contacts, we started a mentoring program. And then we also. I brought over from NASA, NASA had used the BetterUp organization, which does leadership and executive coaching virtually.
Brady Pyle: And so we were able to bring that to Space Center Houston. And just to give you a sense of scale, NASA was 18, 000 employees, Space Center Houston is, you know, we're about 200 full time, about 450 total. We have about 25 to 30 leadership roles. So we were bringing that, those tools there, and then we didn't really have any leadership courses.
Brady Pyle: So we brought in a three day course that gave folks kind of the basic understanding of influence skills and how they can be better leaders. But. Those strategies and approaches, Shawn, I'm, I'm actually, I'm speaking at a, at a conference here in Houston about building out of this world leaders. It's not rocket science because a lot of the approach can be used anywhere.
Shawn Pfunder: I'm not a big numbers guy, meaning I like numbers because then I can get creative to solve problems. So as soon as I have 70, 20, 10 or 50 percent of the leaders, I've never heard, having been in this business. You know, 20 plus years, I've never heard the 70 20 10 before. And I can be a curmudgeon, probably more, in my brain, it's probably more 70 29 1 kind of setup and pulling these things together.
Shawn Pfunder: In your career, did you see that that model kind of fit even for you personally, the 70 20 10?
Brady Pyle: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I, so, so on the 70 percent side, and actually what I talk about, what I'll be talking about at this conference on Monday. is showing the map of my career. So I spent about 10 years as an internal consultant.
Brady Pyle: And then I moved into a frontline leadership role of the consulting group that I was part of. Then I moved over to a frontline leadership role in training and development. Then I went off to Washington, D. C. to headquarters to learn that perspective. And then I got outside of NASA to learn from the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation.
Brady Pyle: I spent some time with them as well as part of a leadership development opportunity. Then I came back and I was the deputy HR director for about three years. And then I went and spent time, spent nine months as a frontline leader in engineering. Because again, we talked about the importance of that frontline leader role to employee engagement and culture.
Brady Pyle: And I wanted to walk in the shoes of that role for a while. Now, I got a little bit of a side eye going from deputy HR director to a frontline leader. Why is the HR guy here, you know, and what's going on? What's wrong with our organization? But fortunately we got beyond that and we're able to move forward, but then I moved into the HR executive role here in Houston.
Brady Pyle: Then I was able to move into a role where I supervise the HR executives across the NASA Field Center. So the 70 percent for me was progressively more responsible roles, broadening perspectives. So there was a lot of intentionality to grow and develop me as a leader. The 20%, the mentoring and coaching was also huge.
Brady Pyle: Having not just mentoring from my supervisors, which, which were always awesome and they always get great, uh, mentoring advice and perspective, but I had mentors outside the organization as well, where I could learn different perspectives and again, broader perspective of the organization. And then going to leadership courses and stuff was, yeah, probably 10 percent of my development, but most of it was that on the job and then getting the mentoring and coaching.
Shawn Pfunder: Wow, we have to back up because you said something I've never heard. I happen, at least in my career and everything, you went and headed in an engineering team. That's remarkable to go from HR to heading an engineering team. If I thought about doing that, I think that they would start testing me with engineering content.
Shawn Pfunder: It'd be like, all right, Shawn, tell me about Kubernetes or tell me about like inference and training AI systems or something. I'll be like, ah, tell me about that transition. How did you mention like it was weird, but then you worked, you worked through it.
Brady Pyle: Yeah, so, and I want to be real clear here too, because we had, there was a branch, it was a branch level job in a, in an engineering division that the way the engineering organization was structured, you had a branch chief and then a deputy branch chief.
Brady Pyle: And in a lot of cases, the deputy branch chief kind of helped with administrative work or other things. So I went into that deputy branch chief role. So it was actually a step, a step back from a deputy HR director was, was. A step below kind of the executive team, and we actually had a peer level organization around that.
Brady Pyle: And then stepping into a deputy branch chief role, where I wasn't, I wasn't responsible for technical decisions. So I was looking a lot at how the culture was. I was assigned to one branch that actually had issues with employee engagement. So I worked a lot with that team and that leader. One of the things we realized is they were feeling underappreciated.
Brady Pyle: A lot of them, they were having some attrition in that area. Some of the younger engineers were leaving and they couldn't figure out what was going on. Well, the leader was one, probably more micromanaging than he needed to be. He wanted to know where everyone was. And I would remember sitting in his office going, okay, you're in your office of your 30 people that are here, you know, are they in their office?
Brady Pyle: Are they working? Are they not? You know, how do you know? And what does it matter? You know, you're going to evaluate them based on their performance and what you're hearing from the customer, right? So, we had a lot of discussions about that, but on the appreciation side, what was interesting is, I took the team through a workshop on the five languages of appreciation in the workplace, and explained to them they could create a culture of appreciation amongst themselves.
Brady Pyle: They didn't have to wait for the leader. To do that, they could work together, and as a result of some of those efforts, they were actually one of the lowest scoring employee engagement organizations that we had across NASA. And the next year, they were seen among the top five increases at the agency. Now, when I applied for my executive role, I took credit for that, but I don't think that was completely fair.
Brady Pyle: But that's, you know. I took credit for getting out of the way.
Shawn Pfunder: I don't have to do this. You can do it. Yes, exactly. Yeah. That's magical. When that happens, like, isn't it always like that? I like, I feel that way because we talk a lot about top down, bottom up, all those types of things, but the teams, organizations.
Shawn Pfunder: Groups of people that take responsibility for something that they may think, no, this has to come from the CEO, or this has to come from the head of HR. I love it when I see things like that, or I can be a part of it, or I just get out of the way. Well, so you mentioned, you know, Engagement, then the engagement scores that come with it.
Shawn Pfunder: What do you mean, or what are the elements of like when we talk about engagement, what are we saying? What are you saying when you talk about it?
Brady Pyle: So, so of course the federal government has a way of complicating that quite a bit. So they've got a. They've got an annual engagement survey, a federal employee viewpoint survey.
Brady Pyle: That's 145 questions, you know, multiple dimensions. Now NASA really managed that very well because they, employees could see, they listen to this, they pay attention to this. So we had response rate my last year of 85%, which that's kind of unheard of. So when I came here to Space Center Houston, we didn't have any kind of measure of engagement.
Brady Pyle: So I've always been a big fan of the Q 12, Gallup's Q 12. So I basically took that and then about Another dozen questions from the viewpoint survey to create our engagement survey here. And what I'm looking at are, you know, how our supervisors are doing and leading people, you know, what is the, what's the general sense of the culture in this as a workplace, you know, or do folks feel included?
Brady Pyle: Are they able to bring them their full selves to work? You know, so there, there's about 30 questions we have on our engagement survey, which we're actually releasing. We actually just released today for this year, but We used that last year. We used the results. The, the two big themes that came out for us last year were, again, people didn't feel recognition was consistent across the organization.
Brady Pyle: So we put an employee team together and said, Hey, let's look at our recognition program. They came up with an idea of an annual recognition event where we're looking at different award categories about service, leadership, accomplishment. Um, They came up with the categories, kind of designed that. We had the first event here in August.
Brady Pyle: And then the second team was looking at our performance system. So we had a lot of indicators in the survey around people were reluctant to give feedback to leaders and then also just the, the notion of their opinions counting. And so we brought in an external training around giving and receiving feedback, some practical tools.
Brady Pyle: That people could use to, to give their perspective and then leaders to listen and hear those perspectives. And then we, we brought a team together to kind of revamp our performance planning and appraisal system and process as well. So, that's the NASA approach. What we did at NASA every year is we looked.
Brady Pyle: Every organization level that had enough aggregate responses would get a report and then they were encouraged to look for a pick one or two things you're going to focus on and improve them and then tell the employees, Hey, we're doing this based on what you told us in the survey. And so that's what has led to that response rate and that, that level of engagement.
Brady Pyle: And there's. All these things you can do to, to make the organization better and to improve. And then pulling employees in on the solution, having teams of people create the solutions adds to the engagement.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. That second part of doing something after the engagement survey surprisingly doesn't happen a lot.
Shawn Pfunder: I've like, I've noticed, and there's a part of me that You know, in chatting with executives or team members, comps, teams, HR, or whatever, if we know we're not going to do anything. Whether we don't have the bandwidth to do anything, I don't know what we get doing the survey.
Brady Pyle: Yeah, don't ask. Yep. Hey, Shawn, that actually, I would describe my first 10 years or so at NASA, maybe 10 to 15, being that way.
Brady Pyle: So the government, you participated in the survey. I mean, this survey was administered. Whether you did anything with it or not, and I think people assume automatically that hey, you worked at NASA, so NASA has always been number one on these things. Well, my first 10, 15 years, we were probably in, I don't know, 3, 4, 5 range.
Brady Pyle: No one really paid attention to it. No one did anything with the data. And we had a new leader of HR who came in and said, Hey, I really want to focus on this. And so that was her strategy and approach was we're going to attack the two or three things with the most growth potential. And so one, one at the time was, we weren't really big on, on telework.
Brady Pyle: This was many years ago when it wasn't a big thing. Telework. Telework, yeah, yeah. I know,
Shawn Pfunder: I know it was many years ago when you called it telework. Yes. Hey, kids. Remote, what are you talking about?
Brady Pyle: Telework, telework, yes. So she started an initiative called Work From Anywhere. And then really pushed this notion of, Hey, a lot of roles at NASA could work from anywhere.
Brady Pyle: And that initiative and that push greatly closed the gap on that particular engagement element. That one, there was work life balance. We called it work life fit at NASA because we said, Hey, there's really never going to achieve balance. But you got to figure out what's the right fit between your work and your life's priorities.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Brady Pyle: Focusing on, on those couple of things. So we did that that year. And then each year after we rose to number one. And then for the 12 years since, NASA has been number one, but it wasn't always that way. And it took intentional effort to get there. And that's, that's the story I like to tell other organizations because it wasn't, what we did was not.
Brady Pyle: unique to NASA, I mean, the approach we took and, uh, how we looked at the data, how we listened, and then how we engage employees on solutions, again, can be done anywhere. That's, it's definitely not rocket science.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, that's the impression I get about the stories that I hear about NASA, the work or a lot of scientific endeavors.
Shawn Pfunder: It's, it's Relentless forward progress. So even if it's not as far as you were hoping to get or not as far as you want to get, you're moving forward just a little bit at a time. Well, at the risk of asking you a question that you've already answered, because a lot of times when we talk about some of these elements in engagement, leadership, things like that, I'm wondering what your opinion is or your insights are into trust and the trust.
Shawn Pfunder: You know, the best ways to build trust with an employee, maybe some of the ones that aren't as obvious as do what you'll say you're going to do. How big was NASA? It's 18, you said? The 18, 000 employees across the agency. Yeah. Yeah. And then down to, and then, then to 200, where you know everybody by name and give high fives every day.
Shawn Pfunder: But what, I guess, all the way across all of that, tell me a little bit about trust.
Brady Pyle: Yeah, so from a, from a NASA context, trust was a huge part of building culture for us. So we talked about trying to build a culture of inclusion and innovation. So we made the tie from, you know, there's a lot of different perspectives.
Brady Pyle: You're bringing in diverse perspectives. You're building inclusion where everyone's voice is heard. That's And then you lead to more creative and innovative outcomes. As, as part of our training strategy around that, we actually used, uh, Cuppy's Speed of Trust, both for the organization and for leaders, because that training has a lot of practical behaviors, practical tips for leaders and teams about how to build trust.
Brady Pyle: So, Highly recommend that. I would say here, I, what I've observed, what I've seen, particularly in a smaller context, is, again, another practice I saw at NASA, if every employee counts Then every leader like, like myself needs to get to know every employee, make sure they're, they're greeting them, make sure the door is open, talk to them regularly.
Brady Pyle: So I try to engage at least with our people leaders. I'm engaging with everyone at least once a year, most of them more frequently, depending on the organization and the size. And then I have opportunities where I'll host a ask me anything lunch, or if we have different policy changes coming out with an opportunity just for an informal dialogue, Hey, here's what's changing.
Brady Pyle: Do you have questions? We have a lot of different ways people can ask HR questions. So we have those kinds of forums, which can be intimidating for some. So we put up a QR codes that are anonymous of, Hey, ask us anything. We'll put it out in our weekly newsletter. What the answer is. So we try to do a lot of different things to, to build that trust.
Brady Pyle: Where I have seen both at NASA and here when leaders are not trusted, is when they don't treat everyone with the same level of respect. If it depends on your position, title or where you are, whether I as a leader, I'm gonna speak to you, that that creates distrust. It's interesting at NASA when we select astronauts, you know, there's an extensive assessment process.
Brady Pyle: But some of the key differentiators are the discussions we have with the receptionists and the nurses. How did the candidate treat you? Oh, wow. And they don't feel like that's part of the process, right? Because it's not the formal. But at NASA, teamwork is hugely valuable. So we've had some really top notch, smart people be screened out because they're treating certain team members as lesser than.
Brady Pyle: And I think that's an important lesson.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, so two things related to what you're saying. So I get the impression that the type of leader that you are and how you encourage people to build trust is that the people that you work with probably know your favorite Star Wars characters or what you like to eat for breakfast.
Shawn Pfunder: Is that true? Like that they get to know you that well?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, I think I'm a pretty open book with, with what I like on some of that stuff. I can also be kind of silly too. That was a technique I would use at NASA. I remember I was working with one team that they said, Hey, we don't sing for birthdays and do that kind of thing.
Brady Pyle: Well, we were having some difficult budget conversations. The mood of the room was just dreary. And so I said, Hey, let's sing happy birthday to Joe. You know, so we did and Shawn, I, I can't sing. So that lightened the mood. People were laughing and I go, I need to find more opportunities. So I found more opportunity.
Brady Pyle: We sang for safety day and different things and just try to lighten the tone and the mood a little bit.
Shawn Pfunder: And this leans towards, we talked briefly before the show about servant leadership. And I thought, of course, I would bring it up and you'd be like, what's that? And then I would explain it to you. Like a genius.
Shawn Pfunder: But you mentioned that you do use that or you appreciate that. And the one thing that I brought up, I'm interested to, to learn more about your take on it is one of the things I loved about servant leadership that I always remember is the manager, your employees, like they're volunteers, like that they could just walk tomorrow.
Shawn Pfunder: They like, they don't need you. They don't need this job. So how do you treat them in that situation? So I'm curious what your thoughts are about that and then just servant leadership in general. You teach leadership. Do you use some of those elements in what you teach?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, absolutely, Shawn. So ever since I stepped into a management position, a leadership role, I've looked at it as an opportunity to serve.
Brady Pyle: I read a long time ago, a friend of mine wrote a book on shepherd leadership where he talked about it's a leader's responsibility to remove the irritants like a shepherd does or sheep. Figure out what's irritating them and remove those irritants and remove barriers that your team has. So it's kind of your role to run interference, help them out and figure out how you, how you can serve them so they can be at their best for the organization.
Brady Pyle: And I think, yeah, that's long been a philosophy and approach that, that has resonated. We try to teach at NASA. I still say we, but at NASA. When leaders are moving from individual contributors to leadership roles, a lot of times they were selected because they're the technical expert. They're the smartest person in the room, right?
Brady Pyle: And we had to teach them, as you move into that role, you, you've got to train yourself to, to use coaching skills, to ask questions. Because if you're constantly giving answers, you're not going to grow the capacity of the team. You're the team's lid, right? And that might be a, that might be a high lid. I mean, given your technical expertise, but this is another reason we created that dual career track.
Brady Pyle: Cause we said, Hey, if you want to continue to be the technical expert, we've got a path for you. If you want to grow technical expertise in your function and in your field, those are the people we want in our management and leadership positions. And so you're asking questions, you're developing those creative solutions from your team.
Brady Pyle: You know, the role becomes more of coaching and facilitation and less of giving the answer. So yeah, that's a, that's another aspect of the servant leadership model that we try to push as well.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. I've often thought about it or heard about it turning the hierarchy sort of sideways. Yeah. And the way you describe it is almost, I'm trying to picture it in my mind, it's completely inverted so that you have the employee at the top, you have the people that you're trying to support.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. What are you doing to make that happen? An example from bank communications employee engagement to HR for a long time. Simpler sponsors this show, this is their show, and so they have a platform that then tries to make it easier to engage with employees. And sometimes we fall into the trap of Well, I told you, like, we published this, like, read the freaking manual, like, get into this.
Shawn Pfunder: No, I told you what to do. Do what I told you to do. If you missed it, it's your fault. It was in your email. It was in the email. Right. Right. Yes. Instead of, oh, no, what can I do differently to help you? What can I do differently to make sure that you know what's going on? How can I meet you where you are instead of demanding that you meet me?
Brady Pyle: Shawn, that's actually one of the first tips that I share with leaders is I ask, Hey, what's your most powerful leadership tool?
Brady Pyle: And I maintain that it's a mirror. And I said, when you're, when your expectations as a leader aren't met, or when you're in conflict with someone, Pull out your most powerful tool and start with yourself, you know, where the expectation is clear. What could you have done differently to contribute to a better outcome?
Brady Pyle: And so, yeah, it's very, very much along those lines. When you were talking about kind of the inverted triangle, if you will, the other piece to that that we like to talk about that we add to that is at the top is your customer. So as a leader, you're holding up, you're trying to remove barriers, remove irritants of your team.
Brady Pyle: Who is then serving the customer. So the ultimate goal of the, the people profit chain, if you will, moves from the leader through the team, ultimately to the customer.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, and that's where Vision Mission comes from. I mean, you could try to have an organization where our vision is make you all rock stars.
Shawn Pfunder: But that doesn't, it's hard to rally behind that. If it's go to Mars, that's a little bit easier to rally behind that and find out where are we at, what's going on, what are the latest. And don't get me wrong, that's probably long term vision. It might just be the. I don't know, make the wheels for the rover and everybody gets behind that.
Shawn Pfunder: But yeah, in order to make that a reality for the customer. Well, a couple other quick questions. I want to understand a little bit because you were there for a long time at NASA. Are there any differences between what you focused on at NASA, heading up HR, doing leadership development, people development, engagement, things like that?
Shawn Pfunder: Going from 18, 000, of course there's changes, but I want to know what they are, to 200, and it's a non profit, right? Non profit, mm hmm. Yeah, what have been some of the differences? Things that are rewarding or easier and things that are more challenging?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, so I, I think it starts with, you know, we talked earlier about the importance of knowing the business.
Brady Pyle: And so the, the business at NASA was, and, and most of the employees, I mean, three fourths of the employees are scientists and engineers. Right. Moving over to Space Center Houston, you know, we're a nonprofit in the museum industry. So, our employees are very different, the work and the business is very different because we're trying to engage Yes, our purpose is to bring people and space closer together.
Brady Pyle: So we're out there on the front lines trying to help people understand the past, present and future of human spaceflight, understand that story. Showing different artifacts, taking them to the Johnson Space Center to, to see astronaut training, to see mission control, but the people of a talent are different.
Brady Pyle: So I would say what's similar is the strategies and approaches you can take to build culture, to build leaders, to develop teams. When you bring in the knowing the business and knowing the kind of talent that you need to bring to bear, You've got to really understand that because it's very different.
Brady Pyle: The two organizations are very different in the talent that is needed to make their missions and organizations successful. I always think in terms of, probably because we use this a lot at NASA, I think in terms of Venn diagrams. And so there's, you know, the NASA side of things, space aviation, there's some overlap of commonality in the role and what you can bring.
Brady Pyle: But there's a lot of uniqueness as well. From an HR perspective, Shawn, this has been, I call it a playground because NASA is highly regulated, HR is, you know, the rules, we prided ourselves at NASA in the federal space of figuring out how to accomplish the mission within the rule set and not bothering our customers with the rules.
Brady Pyle: We figured out solutions. But over here, we get to make it up, as we should. It's awesome. It's like did you hear that team? Brady's making it up. It's that constraint. I mean, it's just, there's a beauty in not having those, that level of constraint within our jobs.
Shawn Pfunder: And I guess there's a couple of different ways to think of it.
Shawn Pfunder: There's generative AI. So on creating the content, sort of developing a companion feels like a weird word, but like your AI that you work with and things like that, I don't want to sound dystopian here because I think that there's something magical about person to person. But do you see AI playing a role in leadership and employee development?
Shawn Pfunder: And if you do, like what's good about that and maybe what's risky about that or even what do you see? You've been doing this a long time. If you could predict a year or two years from now, what do you see?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, I think what really resonated for me, Shawn, is earlier this year I was, had an opportunity to speak at some global HR conferences and it was on digital transformation and global HR.
Brady Pyle: And Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, and these leaders are coming together talking about the future of AI. And there's a lot of panic about, hey, AI is going to take jobs, it's going to, you know, game changer. And I think there's a recognition in our field that, that yes, it's a game changer, but what really resonated for me is there, there was the storyline that was kind of throughout those conferences that AI itself may take very few jobs that are structured today, but more importantly, the AI will take jobs of people who don't know how to use it.
Brady Pyle: So, figuring out how do you manage AI, how do you leverage it as a tool, will give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. And I think We're scratching the surface of it here at Space Center Houston. We're, I mean, we're leveraging it to help us with, you know, some of the mundane tasks of job descriptions, different writing things, right.
Brady Pyle: Helping with policy. What I've found with a lot of it is. It'll give you an 80 or 90 percent good answer. And so, so then you're refining and so that saves you a lot of time and gives you opportunity to focus your time and energies on other things. And so I think we're going to continue to get smarter about how to leverage it from a leadership development perspective.
Brady Pyle: I think, yeah, I think we're going to have to figure out how, how we prepare our leaders to not only use it, but how do they. You know, how do they get comfortable with the team and the organization leveraging it as a tool? I, I think of it as a, it's a, it's another tool that has come along.
Shawn Pfunder: One thing that gave me comfort recently was possibly there's a coach that's AI and it feels an awful lot like a person and maybe you don't even tell me that it's not a person and I'm, I'm interacting with them and they're great.
Shawn Pfunder: Totally amazing, very smart, of course, like all of human, whatever goes into it. There's enough of a difference, like if I want to buy a, like a gridded, like high tech fleece, whatever jacket to go in, now I can get that just mass produced, robots make it, and I could buy that, and it could be high end, we would call it patagucci, or some of those other things.
Shawn Pfunder: Right. If I know somebody local that just, like, hand makes, and makes these things really amazing, I might pay. Extra just because I don't know. It's feel silly. Is it as good as the other one? Maybe not, but it's human. Like there's something about the artisanship and perhaps, I don't know, like it seems to make sense based off of servant leadership, the connection, building trust, knowing who it is that you're working with.
Shawn Pfunder: Those things will still be important. So I think you're right. It'll be a mix.
Brady Pyle: There's a lot to even our connection here, Shawn, of just non verbals, of kind of emotional connection that it, It's going to be hard, that part is hard to replicate, and so, not to say it won't ever be replicated, but at least right now, it's the human to human connection, the amount of communication that isn't verbal or text, you know, is still a big part of our lives.
Shawn Pfunder: Brady, so this has been awesome. Before I let you go, can you let our audience know where they can find out more about you, where they can learn about Space Center Houston? You got a book on the way or something else going through?
Brady Pyle: Yeah, yeah, no, thank you, Shawn. Definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm out there, Brady Pyle on LinkedIn.
Brady Pyle: Also out there on Twitter as well. Space Center Houston is SpaceCenter.org, get a website there. And if any of your listeners are ever in the Houston area, uh, definitely look me up and love to catch up when you're here and show you this place. We have about 1. 3 million guests a year, so it's a fun place to visit, fun place to see.
Brady Pyle: I've got a blog site called outofthisworldleadership.com. It's in the process of being revamped and updated. Had about 10 years of content out there on it and trying to get it updated now. And early next year, we'll have a book out there entitled Out of This World Leadership. So be on the lookout for that.
Shawn Pfunder: Awesome. Yeah. Relentless forward progress. That's perfect. Well, thanks a lot for being on the show and keep in touch. I'll find you on the LinkedIn and make my way to Houston. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Brady Pyle: Sounds great, Shawn. Thank you so much.