What Astronauts Can Teach Us About Leadership
I am fascinated by space exploration, the universe and astronauts, as they are at the forefront of science. What I discovered after reading about an astronaut’s training program is that the aspect of leadership is more important than I had realised. I draw analogies from my years of experience leading on Earth.
Below these requirements on the NASA website, there is a note: "Astronaut candidates must also have skills in leadership, teamwork and communications."
Following the selection phase, candidates need up to two years of training to become fully qualified astronauts. There are demanding courses on life support systems, orbital mechanics, earth observations, space physiology and medicine. On top of this they need to know the basics of the experiments that they will perform in space on behalf of scientists from Earth.
In one of his interviews, Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to perform a spacewalk, shared his method for retaining this knowledge. He splits complex topics and systems into hand-written “one-pagers”, on which he stores all key ideas of a given topic. Then, before doing an experiment or task, he reads the one-pager that refreshes his knowledge and helps as guidance.
