When Over-Collaboration Leads to Indecision
HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Leadership , case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts—hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.
Collaboration is a good thing—until it gets in the way of action. Too much collaboration can stall decision-making and hold you back.
In this HBR IdeaCast episode from 2018, host Sarah Green Carmichael speaks with leadership coach Rebecca Shambaugh about how to curb over-collaboration in yourself and on your team. They discuss how perfectionism, workplace culture, and even well-intended leadership messages can lead employees to over-consult and under-decide.
Their conversation starts with how to spot the behavior.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: What does the classic over-collaborator's life look like, and feel like?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: (laughs) Well, I was probably on one of those spectrums, you know, and I think one of the things that you – as a manager, if I have a direct report or a team member who's over-collaborative, they tend to not have a lot of self-confidence within themselves. So that's why they continue to reach out and get other people's inputs. They want to please everyone, right? And it's impossible these days to please everyone. They may not be able to prioritize very much.
So, there may be key areas where you have to prioritize or collaborate and get key influencers – your managers, if you will – input or ideas and perspective. But there are other things that, you know what? You should just really make that decision, or you should really delegate that. So they're doing a lot of activities that aren't really producing a lot of progress – i.e., getting to a decision.
And they come to you and they say: 'I just don't have time for the high value projects, because they're eating their time and continuing for months and weeks to collaborate with people and not really come to agreements, or decisions.'
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One question I have about that is how much can we emphasize the individual's responsibility for that situation, versus the company culture or the managers' mixed messages? In some cases, it's easy to see that, you know, people might not have a bias for action because they'd been kind of told to wait for permission to act. How can you diagnose whether it's you or your company that's causing the problem?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, it could be a combination of both or sometimes it's just the direct relationship with your manager, more than anything. I always say, you know, look in. And I invite people to first examine their own belief system, their own narrative, that's causing them to show up and seek out everyone else's opinion or you know, doing things that are more task-related.
Or, perhaps you tend to be more in the perfectionism zone, where everything has to be 100 percent right before it goes out the door. Hence you over-collaborate, right? You try to get to consensus with everybody because you tend to be a pleaser.
I think also when we coach individuals, we sort of put in front of them an activity-based tool where they look at their whole day or their whole week, and [we] invite them to do a personal audit. And say: 'Okay, what are the priority areas that you know, you really feel like you are responsible for – your key objectives?'
And when I'm personally coaching women in particular – and sometimes men – they'll give me 10 or 15 key priorities. And that's the first thing – you can only have three to five, and do three to five very well. So you've got to somehow re-prioritize or delegate or take something off of that to-do list.
You could be spending 60 percent of your time in low-priority areas. So, [the] first thing is to do that critical self-assessment of ourselves. The other thing is, what good managers do, they help you to provide context. So sitting down or meeting with your manager and saying: 'Look, here are all the activities I'm doing. Help me to really prioritize what you see as the top areas.'
And the first response managers will give you, after they see your personal audit, they'll say, 'I had no idea you were doing all this, and I didn't know you were making all of these phone calls to get an agreement on something that probably one or two people could really help you to make that decision.'
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So often, the advice that we tell ourselves or that we give to other people is about learning to say 'No.' So while aas a manager we might say, 'This person really just needs to learn to say no.' You might even tell that person this is what you need to do. We often blame ourselves if we're feeling overstretched, like 'God, I should just be better at saying no.' Is that realistic? I mean is just declining to take on more work a realistic solution?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Yeah, I mean the whole piece around is it important to say no and, how do I do that, I guess is perhaps more of the question there too… I think before you say no, I think you need to understand the bigger picture and the rationale of their thinking and why they want to give you this project.
For example, sponsorship. Notably, women have a lot of mentors, but they're under sponsored. And the sponsors are the ones that give you the lift; they give you the visibility; they give you those projects that aren't in your sight that could really give you greater opportunities to be more engaged in the business and so on and so forth.
So if a woman is totally stretched on a rack and doing her best job, but she says, 'How can I just take on one more project?' I invite women to really step back and put on the pause button and say, 'Help me to better understand what's your vision for this project? How do you see this mapping out to my growth goals – areas that I can really benefit from, from a career growth perspective, from a visibility perspective and just from a pure advancement and promotion perspective?'
And they may know something that you don't know. And then to me it's all about negotiations: 'Okay, well if I am going to be doing this extra project – which sounds something like I've always wanted to do but didn't really have the access to it – something else has to give. And so I'd like to propose that I re-source a couple of these other activities out, so I can be putting all my best discretionary effort into this project.'
And so build the business case around that – be solution based. Sometimes you don't have to say no, but also looking at other alternatives to really redesign your day-to-day activities [and] responsibilities so that you can do this.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL:And why do you tend to focus on women when you're talking about this topic?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: I think women tend to, by virtue of their socialization early on – and I don't want to generalize and put women just in a box, and this doesn't mean that men aren't in this position as well. But women tend to want to please their, they tend to be more facilitative in nature, hence more collaborative.
They tend to like a little bit more harmony, you know – less competitive. And so, sometimes we default to some of these styles that disempower us. It doesn't mean that women don't have it within them to be more strategic in terms of how they're spending their time. But I think they need to, number one, give themselves permission to do that.
And they need sometimes the feedback and the coaching and the tools and the skills to shift – number one, their narrative and their belief system about themselves. And be able to believe that they, that they can do this role, that they can speak up, they can make an ask, versus the concern they're gonna rock the boat.
So in the first book I wrote, 'The Sticky Floors,' a lot of times women – their own beliefs – will sabotage their best interest, right? And self-limit their ability to grow and advance and to really evolve beyond. So we have a tendency to disempower ourselves and you know, be more critical on ourselves than sometimes men do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It's interesting because I recently read some research that we published in Hbr.org that suggests that in single sex groups, women will share sort of unglamorous tasks equally. Whereas groups of men, it tends to be like the same two guys doing those tasks over and over again. And so I wonder if that's a case where womens' collaborativeness helps – like if you happened to work in a group of all women, you're kind of rotating those chores. Whereas you know, men, it seems like that the two same guys are kind of out of luck over and over again. So even though I agree with you that there's a lot of research on over collaboration and women, I do think there are guys out there who really struggle with this too, and I think the evidence bears that out.
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, there's no question about that. And again, you know, we need balanced leadership and I think a strength of women we need to embrace and tap into more is the spirit of collaboration, and how do you do that? Collaboration is all about building trust, and trust is down in most companies. So it's important to be able to connect the dots and be cross-supportive to achieve a unified goal together.
I think men tend to just go and do it, right? They just go and do it. They tend to be more transactional, to some degree. So I think it's important to have both. But this is an area where we coach men on quite a bit, is to be inclusive, is to be more collaborative and to open up your aperture to a variety of different relationships beyond just you, to go to, to ask their perspective or view on a problem or issue or just their advice is to broaden and diversify your network so it is diverse, and you're not always going to the same people who look and think like you.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So if you're managing someone who is genuinely roo collaborative, male or female, one of the pieces of advice you've given to managers is to help them get over this by giving feedback that's goal-oriented. Can you give me an example of kind of what non-goal-oriented feedback would sound like but then fix it so that it's goal-oriented and proper feedback?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: I think if you're a manager, this is not always an easy conversation, but I always start off in coaching men or women to say, 'Tell me about how you're spending your time, what do you see as the key priorities?'
And really have them map that out for you – what their assumptions are around that. Because all they know is what they know and they could be operating in a vacuum that they don't know some of the top priorities. Or perhaps they may not understand that, you know, honestly, we don't need to get to consensus on this. You really need to step back, and let me give you a better sense from a feedback perspective of the organizational dynamics.
And in this case, on this particular project, you know, while you share with me [that] you reached out and got consensus with 10 people. The key people that will be advocating and sponsoring this, and moving this through for us, and who politically we need to really connect the dots with and help them to be aware and get their input are these three people. And helping them to understand why it's those three people as opposed to those 10 or 12.
Sometimes our team members just don't have that bigger-picture thinking or understand the organizational dynamics [or] what are some of the changes happening around the corner. So I think that that's really important.
And helping them to go through self-discovery, versus telling them 'You're spending too much time here. You need to get over and be more collaborative or be more directive.' We hear this all the time, but women, or people, just don't know what to do with that. You might be efficient, you're checking off all the boxes, but at the end of the day, It's holding you back from really tapping into the right relationships to really get the project moving versus stalling.
And then helping them to see that – you know, gosh, you feel like you need to get agreement from everyone. Well, you know what? Empowering them and letting them know that you are the one who knows more than anybody else on this project.
I remember I got this feedback many, many years ago when I was still working in corporate America and I was a perfectionist. I felt like I needed to get everyone to agreement. And then my manager came by and gave me this helpful piece of feedback. He said, 'You know, I appreciate all the hard work you've done here, but the end of the day I hired you because you know more than anybody else around this particular project and area of expertise. And I'm really relying upon you at the end of the day to make this decision.'
So empowering them and giving them the confidence to know that not only do they have the authority to do that, but you believe in their strengths and their experience and background to make those decisions.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: A common employee response to being told to spend time on higher value activities is to say, 'I don't have time to do those higher value activities because I've got too many of these low value tasks on my plate.' So if they've done the time audit, and they're spending most of their time on stuff that's really not a priority, they might come back and say 'That's the organization's fault or that's my manager's fault and this is just what I have to do. And this is the amount of time it takes.'
How can you as a manager help them see that they do have control over this? How do you help them problem solve, so that they can free up time to do the stuff that really will get them promoted?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Yeah. A lot of times, again, it gets back to our own belief system: We need to do all these things. And they in sometimes they need to be done way that I think they need to be done because no one can do them better, right? Or I, I love all these projects and because I get a lot of fulfillment, satisfaction out of it, but you know what? It's getting me nowhere. So it's an incumbent upon a manager to help them to move further into the traditional Covey quadrant, the third quadrant there on the top right – to be more thoughtful, mindful about your time and how it's being spent.
So I think it's really - and this is generally, not just necessarily women but men too is – is to really go over…you know, it's rare that a manager will sit down these days and say, 'Where would you like to grow? What's your future career lifeline look like?' And really together examine what they're doing and how those activities are growing new skillsets, are expanding their relationships, giving them more visible projects versus the mundane projects that really aren't seeding their growth and their confidence. Right?
So it's really helping them to recalibrate those activities, and then really creating a plan of action to make that happen. And I think that it's incumbent upon that just waiting for the manager to come in and observe that, but it's important for us to come and say, 'Look, you know, here are some ideas. Here are some things that I need to really talk to you about,' before things do go off the tracks, or you realize that you just can't do this job anymore.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: The research does show that women are often expected to be more collaborative. We get asked to volunteer for more projects, especially having the low value ones. We're often expected to lead through consensus, and we do. So I'm wondering for male managers of women – because we have a lot of men who listen to the IdeaCast – what do you wish that they knew about this?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, I think this gets back to understanding the diverse spectrum of styles amongst your team and really opening up your lens to see where those different styles can bring value to the things that you're doing. That's really important. And, and I think sometimes, look, we all have bias, right? Which can turn into stereotypes about how we view a certain person. If I'm more collaborative, inclusive, you know, and the other person is more directive, right to the point, likes to make a decision and move on.
You know, that's okay. But understand that people have different styles in terms of how they make decisions. So I think it's important to have a diverse spectrum on your team, of different ways of thinking about something, processing something; different communication styles. If not, you get the groupthink, you get the same people thinking the same way and communicating the same way. And that's just not going to work in today's environment.
I don't think it's a negative necessarily for men to come up and say, 'Why does she talk that way so much? Why she overly collaborative? She could have made that decision?' It's just our lens and our norm of what we have been used to. So it's inviting men to – this is the same thing about diversity and inclusion, right? Companies have a lot of diversity, but we're not tapping into and leveraging the best styles, the best strengths and experiences of everyone.
If we did, we would probably in most cases have better outcomes; greater levels of problem solving and decision making. So I encourage them to be open to those different styles and look at ways where you can utilize those styles for the benefit of everyone.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Because I could see if you were trying to get better at saying 'no' to tasks that don't add value, or acting more decisively while still being somewhat inclusive. I could really see it coming off kind of the wrong way – you know, 'No, I won't do that. And here's the decision I'm making!' And you know, it does seem that it's the kind of thing that does take a little bit of practice before it feels natural and before it comes across as natural to other people.
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Yeah. And I just want to say say layered in that is, what's really important in that is having the emotional and social intelligence, right? There's a time and a place to say 'no.' There could be layoffs and reorganization. Your manager comes up and says, 'Look, this is a tough time for the next six to eight months. I need you to jump in and help out with this.' Right?
You want to be a team player, you want to be understanding the needs and concerns of others and their schedules and their priorities. So I think when you are saying 'yes' or saying 'no,' it's just not a straight yes or straight no, it's really taking into consideration your colleagues, right? The bigger picture.
And your rationale for the yes or no should really think and link to the needs in the context of others, that decision isn't just more of a self-serving, self-oriented decision. I think when people on the other end know that you've taken their best interest in mind and it still may be a 'no,' right, that you've thought through this – maybe not this, but I could do this in the context of what you're trying to do. That would be something I can best align with and support you. That's being inclusive in your decision-making in your ask, and how you say yes and how you say no.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Becky, you have mentioned that you earlier in your career struggled with some of these issues and I'm wondering for you, what really made the difference? How did you change your own mindset around some of this so that you can be free of this problem?
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: Well, you do have to look inside, and sometimes what got you here is not going to get you there. I think I was a perfectionist. I mean, I would rework PowerPoint decks. I would over-collaborate, you know, because I doubted my own worth and knowledge.
I did a lot of the same things I coach people on. I went out and I talked about expectations and what's good enough and you know, how I needed to really better align my activities with the things that perhaps were more higher value. But I realized that all this is giving yourself permission, right? If I'm an over-collaborator, a perfectionist, one of the things that I realized in my journey of getting feedback and talking to other people around some of these similar challenges they have, but how did you navigate through this, right?
How did you come out of this as a great leader? And a lot of it is just knowing and believing in yourself. And as a perfectionist, I said, 'You know, 88 percent of the people I spoke to are not perfectionist. Why am I being more difficult on myself? Why don't I just join the world of imperfection, and realize that everything doesn't have to be perfect?'
So I think a lot of this starts within, in our own belief system and narrative and understanding how that can self-limiting for us, to a certain degree. Right? And I was lucky to have a manager who helped to empower me to believe in myself. And then after several experiences, after speaking up, after being more decisive, people sort of, the room shifted. People began to see me as a leader, right?
Partly because I started to believe in myself and I started to get that confidence. And I was intentional then, eventually, about that. So it's not an overnight process, but I think those are just some of the things that I give advice and guidance to when making those shifts, you know, early on, or during these situations where you feel stuck.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Becky, thank you. This has been really helpful and I appreciate your time.
REBECCA SHAMBAUGH: You're welcome. Sarah. Always enjoy it.
HANNAH BATES: That was leadership coach Rebecca Shambaugh in conversation with Sarah Green Carmichael on HBR IdeaCast.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review.
When you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at HBR.org.
This episode was produced Mary Dooe and me, Hannah Bates. Curt Nickisch is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Ian Fox, Maureen Hoch, Amanda Kersey, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
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So a woman named Carol Dweck who's a wonderful family psychologist, a Stanford professor. She wrote something that gave us a total breakthrough on this. She wrote, there are two ways to parent and one of them is the right way. So then she goes onto say, and she wrote this, I'll use her dated language. She goes onto say, you can either prepare the path for the boy, or prepare the boy for the path. And it was a bolt of lightning. I had been preparing every path, real and imagined so that my boys could travel them. I had been a weed wacker of a parent. So deep in fidelity, so deep in devotion that I didn't even want them to have to do the work of mitigating any paths. And what she showed us is that, or you can prepare the boy for the path, so that he will be able to thrive in our absence. ALISON BEARD: So how exactly does a manager do that in a corporate setting? My belief in humanity is that we all really want to achieve and the greatest expression of love is for me to set the conditions for you to thrive. Someone's not thriving if they're just doing well enough. Like I think we all want to be better tomorrow than we are today. And it's a leader's job to set those conditions. ALISON BEARD: So, who's a leader that you've seen do this in action? FRANCES FREI: Oh, the best example of it is a man named Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor. To those who know him, and to everyone in Peru where he's from, he's a CRP. He believes in the possibility of people. Like he believes that the way to bring Peru from a third world country to a first world country, which he plans to do in his lifetime, is by setting the conditions for individuals to thrive. So he cares more about the development of individuals than any CEO I have ever seen. Ranging from, I go down to Peru every year and teach, and we teach a new set of leaders every year, he sits in every one of the classes and takes notes on the people. I've never seen a CEO do that. He sets super high standards for people starting with the recruiting process. If you want to get hired at, in one of the Intercorp companies, which people are, it's a very long line to get hired there. It's going to take a really long time. And if you try to use any informal mechanisms to do it like, oh I have a friend, can you talk to him? If he senses that you're trying to use your connections, trying to do anything to mitigate a meritocracy, he does what he calls, he puts you in the freezer. He gives you a time out. Because he wants everyone to realize that at Intercorp, it's the meritocracy that rules. But he's also deeply devoted to people. And I think he gets to set even higher standards than anyone else in the world, because he is so devoted to his people. One famous example is that he and his top team, he decided to give them a reward for having done a very good job. And the reward was to go climb a mountain right near Mt. Everest. And so, this will reveal, his other rewards are like you get to go to school. And because he cares, he doesn't care about status. He cares about meritocracy. So the top people that were most responsible for this, there were some that were wealthy by then. And so they bought business class tickets to get from Peru all the way to the mountain, which is a very long journey. The others that were the young scrappy people that they had coach tickets. And then just at the last minute, right, like the day before they were going to take off, Carlos asked who has business class tickets? Everyone else and me, will meet you there. I'm going to take them on my plane. Which is like, he just never misses a chance to show you that it's not how much money you have, it's not how much, like he's devoted and he really cares about meritocracy. ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So this vision for leadership that you have from the very beginning, from the time that you're managing just one person all the way up, it seems to run a little bit counter to how people are noticed and rewarded in most organizations. You know, you're really sort of taking a backseat to your people and elevating them and their needs above your own. Is there a tension there? FRANCES FREI: I think that there, so yes there is. Because we, we sometimes get put into positions of leadership because we were a really good individual contributor. And then we form a team and we think well they're there to help us achieve even more. And so it's about me, me, me with more and more people. And it's, we find that that actually puts a pretty severe ceiling on what you can actually do which is that I'm thinking, how can I bring out the best in other people? So the second that I'm leading someone, it, how can I set the conditions for them to thrive? And I want there to be equal access to everyone thriving and I want more and more varied people to thrive. If I can do that, I will thump the team, that is, how can I get people to help me perform? ALISON BEARD: So that's a good transition from moving away from team managers to people leading larger groups and even organizations where they don't have day to day contact with all of their people. So how does someone like that make sure that everyone feels trust and love and a sense of belonging when they are absent? FRANCES FREI: The way to think about it is that if I can guide your discretionary behavior in my absence that's the whole game. So, you're making ten's, hundreds of decisions without my direct observation, even my direct knowledge. So if I can get you to make those decisions as well as if I was standing right next to you with my high standards and deep devotion and with our trust and you felt included, if I could get you to make those decisions as well as if I was right next to you, that's the whole ballgame. Because I can't be right next to you. There are two levers we have to guide discretionary behavior. And that's discretionary behavior in our absence. The first one is strategy. So usually we don't talk about strategy in a leadership book. I think it's essential for when people are in my absence, the strategy can help guide discretionary behavior. Go into a Walmart and watch 100 different employees confront the same situation and you will find 100 different employees do the same thing. Everyone at Walmart knows that their reason for being is on behalf of the customer so that they can make their lives more affordable. It's a disaster if you have 100 people confronting the same situation and there's a 100 different solutions. So when strategy is clear that takes a whole bunch of discretionary decisions off the table. It's surprising how many organizations the strategy isn't clear enough in the minds of everyone in the organization. Everywhere where strategy is silent, where strategy is not enough, that's where culture comes in. And culture is what describes to us how things are really done around here. I'm in a meeting and do I get to take up a lot of space or a little space? Strategy doesn't tell me that. Culture does. I'm junior at an organization. Is it my obligation to bring up any problems I have or should I do it more politely through the chain of command? Strategy doesn't tell us that, culture tells us that. So everything else for what's the way that things are done around here, that's the culture. Those are the only two levers that a senior person has for guiding, for leading in their absence. ALISON BEARD: You've been involved in some massive cultural transformations starting with your own organization, HBS. Tell me what you learned through that experience. FRANCES FREI: Yeah, so I think it starts with, culture change has to happen quickly. And so this is counterintuitive to most people. But meaningful change happens quickly or it doesn't happen at all. So if you're on a five year journey for a cultural change, I would just suggest you stop and use those efforts to do something else. So, meaningful change happens quickly and it's because otherwise you'll be sending mixed messages. Like I can change a culture when we're saying, changing the culture is the most important thing. So you should decide when you want to do it and then do it in an all in, and don't think oh, I'll change this part of the culture now and that part later, doesn't work. We have to do all of it now. That's the first thing. The second thing is make sure you have a really noble purpose and a really noble reason why you're changing the culture. What's the burning platform? If I didn't change the culture, what would be so bad about it? And in my experience, the easiest reason to change the culture is that we are, we are not living up to the dignity and humanity of a group of people. Whether its customers, suppliers, employees, there's some group of people who we have been systematically disadvantaging. And we're going to fix that. That's the easiest way to change a culture. There's like a burning platform, but about people so that we find it close to immoral that we've been doing it and now it's going to be the most important thing that we do. ALISON BEARD: And so, at HBS the concern was that it wasn't a welcoming environment for women. How did you quickly move to fix that? FRANCES FREI: Yeah so and that was, that was for students. And the burning platform that we had was that women had lower grades than men and women had lower self-reported satisfaction than men. Now, the truth is it gets talked a lot about in gender and I'll talk about it in gender. But it was also true for international students and domestic for LGBT. There were 12 categories because we collected a lot of data. We solved it for everyone in the same year. And here's the way to do it which is, one, make sure you have devastating data. It's best if the devastating data has to do with people. So, what is it that is like gnawing at you? So, for us it was achievement and sentiment. Women weren't achieving as well and they didn't have same self-reported satisfaction. So then we asked ourselves all right, what's getting in the way of achievement and sentiment for women? At HBS we grade on a forced curve. Half of every grade is class participation. It wasn't the grading difference, it wasn't in exams. It was really in class participation. And then when we went and double clicked on that more, it was that women were getting a much slower start in class participation. So there's some people that would come into the HBS classroom and they'd feel so comfortable speaking from day one. So what we did is we had to unlock what makes good class participation, but we also had to set the conditions so that people could find their mojo, their super power early. So one of the things we did is introduce the field method. So the case method, been at HBS for, since it's, practically since its beginning and it's everything you can learn by talking about what you would do. But there's also quite a bit that you can do of learning by doing. And that's what we call the field method, which is we'll put you in small group, experiential settings. We did the field method before the case method so that people that would feel really great in small groups, if they were good at that, that confidence would spill over into the classroom. So one is that we created, we wanted more varied people to thrive. So we gave more varied ways to find your superpower. We got much closer to meritocracy. And the benefit of that was that men and women got the same grades, the self-reported satisfaction, the gaps closed and here's the really awesome thing. All of the gaps closed in satisfaction as an example and it got better for everyone. ALISON BEARD: And then you applied some of those strategies at places like Uber and Riot Games. What did you do there and what types of outcomes did you see? FRANCES FREI: Yeah so applied the same strategies and got the same outcomes. So, at Riot Games they were facing a pretty public crisis. It was in August of 2018. And it's like every senior team's worst nightmare. Everybody wakes up to an article that has all of these claims of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. And you just be like, oh my gosh, where have I been working that this has occurred? It's just a bombshell that goes off. Now, fast forward and much of what was written about in the paper by great journalists, much of what was written about, turned out not to be true. But some of what was written about was true. And so they had to do a complete refresh of this very culturally-driven organization. But the culture was now driving them unintentionally in the wrong direction. So what we did is looked at achievement and sentiment because that's the way we know to do this. And we found there to be enormous demographic tendencies associated with who was thriving. And so we set out to, we collected the devastating data and we set out to address those. We also in the cases of both Uber and Riot, they had really strong, cultural values that were each delineated. Like in one case there was 14 and in the other case there were six. So very culturally driven. And these cultural values were awesome. One of the famous ones at Uber was called toe stepping. And what it meant was that if you're a junior person and you have a good idea and you're being blocked by your manager, step on your manager's toes and go to their manager. Because we want great ideas to be surfaced, and that's what you want in a young company. Or one of them at Riot was default to trust. Well it turns out that over time, both of these had become weaponized. Toe stepping, instead of the junior person stepping on the toes going up, it was senior people stepping on the toes of going down. Default to trust, the same thing. Instead of when I'm explaining something to you and I want you to default to trust, so if I'm questioning you, default to trust so that like, understand that my questions are good and they're well intended. Instead I'm a senior person. You bring up a question and I'm like, look default to trust dude. Just do it. So you can see how, so the second a cultural value gets weaponized and cultural values, the more specific they are, the easier it is to get weaponized. As a cultural value gets weaponized, you got to take it out. There's no, and no matter how much you loved it, and founders have a really hard time with this. Oh, but it was good and it was well intentioned. There's no reversing it. So what we did in both cases is we got the entire, we invited the entire company to come up and author the new cultural values. Which is literally, you sit down with the old cultural values, you have a pen in hand and we all edit them together and then we talk about which of the cultural values would be super sad if we lost and why? And which are doing, which do we observe are doing real harm to other people and why? And then through that process we edited it and came up with new cultural values and these new cultural values are, because these are two strong cultural environments, the new ones got adopted super quickly because they were authored by everyone. ALISON BEARD: Frances, thanks so much for coming on the show. FRANCES FREI: Oh, I really loved it. Thank you for including me. HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School's Frances Frei in conversation with Alison Beard on HBR IdeaCast. Frei is the author of the book Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. We'll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. When you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at This episode was produced Mary Dooe and me, Hannah Bates. Curt Nickisch is our editor. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Ian Fox, Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.
Harvard Business Review
29-04-2025
- Harvard Business Review
The Growth of the Private-Sector Space Industry
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Curt Nickisch. I'm beginning with an announcement. This episode is my last episode as a regular host of the show. It has been a privilege and honestly, a blast. Over the years I've talked to hundreds of insightful people on this show. Creators, builders, researchers, deep thinkers, future thinkers, leaders you'd love to follow, managers you'd love to work for, coaches and mentors. All these people have cast too many valuable ideas to count, and I with a fantastic team, have been able to engage with these ideas, interrogate them, employ them, and present them in conversation to you, and I could not ask for a better audience to work for. Speaking of the show, IdeaCast, it's not going anywhere. It's in the best of hands, and I'll be listening and learning and getting inspired with you. Now for today's episode, we're going to look beyond the near horizon and explore the economic frontier of space. In the last decade or so, the space industry has evolved into a more privatized one. Government still plays a big role in financing contracts, but increasingly, its job is to foster a market where competition and innovation can flourish. This shift, generally in the U.S., from NASA doing everything to hiring everything out, is creating new opportunity for businesses and individuals in their careers. We're joined today by two guests who have studied the public and private sector aspects of the space industry. Matthew Weinzierl is a Senior Associate Dean and Professor at Harvard Business School. Brendan Rosseau is a strategy manager at Blue Origin. Together they wrote the book, Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. Matt, thanks for coming on the show. MATTHEW WEINZIERL: Thanks, Curt. I've been listening to your voice for many years, so it's a real pleasure to be talking with you. CURT NICKISCH: Brendan. Thank you, too. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: Yeah, great to be here. CURT NICKISCH: We've seen the rise of private sector space companies like SpaceX, like Blue Origin, where Brendan, you are. In your book you argue that this isn't privatization per se, but a decentralization. What do you mean by that? What are the implications of what's happening? MATTHEW WEINZIERL: I think it's a really fundamental distinction, partly because there's a misunderstanding that's easy to have out there in the world, which is, we hear so much as you said about SpaceX and Blue Origin and various other space companies, and it seems like the days of NASA and the Department of Defense and other international space agencies playing a big role in space might be over, and there's a sense in which that role has changed a lot, but the role is definitely not over. Why we call it decentralization, is that the way you think about the first 50 years of the Space Age is that it was really run from the center, whether it was NASA or the Department of Defense or other agencies, they set the agenda, they operated the vehicles. They really decided where we were headed in space, why and when. But what's happened over the last 20 years is that we've brought more decision makers into the fold. Private companies are being asked to develop vehicles and services that are valuable not just to public sector customers, but to private sector customers. And so, it's really becoming much more of a marketplace like our decentralized marketplaces are for most goods. The role of the government is still incredibly large in space, both as a customer for those services that those companies are providing, and for setting some of our key social priorities in getting them done, but now there's many other players. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: And actually, if you look at NASA's history, it's a really great case study in just those two things. What can the government be good at versus the private sector? The origins of NASA, of course, are the post-Sputnik space race, that culminated in astronauts landing on the moon. NASA was so good at doing that, it was such a remarkable achievement pulling off a goal that even a decade earlier to NASA insiders had seemed completely crazy. Why were they able to do that? And part of the reason is because they were rallying the country to provide national goods. Things like basic science, research, exploration, things that the market left to its own would grossly under-provide. What we call NASA's act one, The Apollo era, was a great example of what the strengths of that system can be. Fast forwarding to what we call act two, which was the space shuttle and International Space Station era, it's kind of '70s and beyond. The goals changed remarkably. Space flight was too expensive, and so the idea was to create reusable space planes and destinations in space that would be reusable. So the idea was, okay, iteration, get efficiency, bring down costs, and these are things that we don't typically associate with government programs. And in theory, that would create an opportunity for the private sector to come in and compete and bring all those gains of private sector involvement that we're familiar with elsewhere. But the model struggled to evolve. We kind of put all of our eggs into the space shuttle and ISS basket, and it was only the space shuttle was retired following the 2003 Columbia accident, that the private sector was given a real opportunity to try to be an agent in directing the U.S. space enterprise. And of course, that's worked out remarkably well and we're frankly just living in the ripple effects of that, where launch has now been largely commercialized with astounding effects even just in the past decade or so. CURT NICKISCH: Let's underscore this – launch being shorthand for just getting stuff up into space. How much have costs come down? MATTHEW WEINZIERL: It's difficult to compare perfectly across time, across different vehicles, but at the highest level, one way that we summarize it and that's commonly used in the industry is for the act two era that Brendan was just talking about with the space shuttle, you can think about the cost of getting a kilogram of mass to what's called low earth orbit where a lot of our internet and telecommunication satellites fly, as being on the order of $20,000 to $30,000 per kilogram to what's called LEO. With SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket, which is now the workhorse launch rocket in the world, those costs have come down essentially 90%. So we think about a range of somewhere more like $2,000 to $3,000 a kilogram. SpaceX's newest rocket, the Starship. The hope is that once that's flying routinely, it will bring costs down another order of magnitude, down to something in the hundreds of dollars per kilogram to LEO. So all told, that would be a decline of 99% in launch costs. And it's not just SpaceX, they've been the driving force, but there's a whole host of other launch companies and startups forming, trying to also bring costs down and in different ways provide access to space for satellites and other equipment at much lower cost. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: We focus on the cost because of course that's the most important thing. I mean, a 90% reduction in cost is hugely important, but what I think is sometimes harder to capture is just how much that change in costs and increasing access to space really transforms the community and the thinking and who does space. So for example, in the early two 2000s, we had maybe 50 launches, and if you look at who is actually launching on those, it was all national security satellites and commercial satellites from large conglomerate companies, and that shaped the ethos and the approach of everyone in the industry. It was extremely risk averse, planning took years, and it was meticulous and every little bit of risk really had to be burned down before the launch could happen. Part of that just came down to launches were so expensive, if you're going to pay the 100-plus million dollars to launch this thing, you better be sure that it's going to work. If you fast-forward, last year we had 263 orbital launch attempts from across the world. Not only are launch costs going down and launch availability going up, but because launches are so frequent and it's less of a huge hurdle that you have to cross to secure your launch spot and everything, it allows this whole cast of characters who really had no entry point into the space industry before to jump in and say, 'You know what? I've had this idea for how space and a constellation of satellites could be useful for us. Now's the time for me to jump in because I think my business plan can close and I think I can actually get a launch. So, let's try it out.' CURT NICKISCH: So what is the government's role in this market now? National security is still there. What's the mix of priorities that's now sort of at the forefront for the government's role in this market? BRENDAN ROSSEAU: Yeah, that is really the question ahead of us. There's so much excitement and opportunity, but also with a new model come new challenges. So the way that Matt and I have tried to break it down in the book is a three-pronged framework that we think are really the three critical steps that it will take to not only create a robust and growing space economy with huge benefits for everyone back here on earth, but also to make sure that it's taking us to a place that we want to go. The first step is to continue to establish and reinforce this market approach to space activities, recognizing the strengths of what the private sector can do, and increasingly allow more and more private activity, encourage more and more private activity through different government programs and smart investing. We've seen already the launch sector become more and more commercialized, and that's been a real success. More and more we are seeing the satellite sector, satellites that provide connectivity and internet and data and all sorts of things. We're seeing a huge amount of experimentation and value creation in the satellite sector now, so that's an area where there's strong market presence and market growth. CURT NICKISCH: I think most consumers have known that TV programs and everything come over satellite, but now it's like you can't go a day without- BRENDAN ROSSEAU: Oh, yeah. CURT NICKISCH: … seeing in your inbox that an airline is partnering with Starlink or a mobile phone company is using it to get better access in remote areas. I mean, it's brought the technology to just a lot more companies. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: It's remarkable. And for me, I think it's reinforcing the idea that at its core, space is just a place. It's a place that we can do certain things and use certain technologies to create value back here on earth. I think that's a different way of thinking about it than we did say, during the Apollo era when space was, we celebrated that it was kind of foreign and dramatic and everything, which it still has that frontier allure. But I think the real crux of what's happening now and why we're so excited about it, why two folks who like us who think from an economics perspective are excited about it is because we think with the market coming in and more and more companies seeing space as a place of opportunity and value creation, those companies need customers. And for 99% of them, the customers aren't going to be other space companies, it's people on the ground, it's people like you and me. So when you have an army of entrepreneurs and engineers and brilliant space technologists who are all laser focused on using space to create value for you and me and everyone else on earth, that for me has got to be a recipe for success. So the first step, as I mentioned, was to realize the potential of the private sector and continue to expand the role of markets in space. So that's step one, what we call establish the market. The next step is to recognize that markets are not perfect by any means. They're often very far from perfect, as we all know in our daily lives. So the next step, and this is a real key place of government intervention, is to refine the market by addressing market failures. So that's through policies that address market failures, like let's say orbital debris or other externalities that aren't priced into company's decisions, address those as they come up. And also, capture the opportunities that the private sector can't do on its own. The government still can play a really powerful role as an organizer or a coordinator of activity across different companies. And then step three recognizes that the role of markets is really just to create efficiency, but there are things that we care about in society beyond just efficiency. So step three is what we call temper the market, which is aligning it with society's moral and ethical judgments. And for us, this means answering really hard and fundamental questions about what should happen in space and why. Who has property rights and over what? Who sets the rules and who enforces them? That gets back to the national security question. As we celebrate that space as becoming more and more prosperous side of value creation, but who should benefit from the riches that we reap in space? And what is an equitable distribution of those benefits look like? These are huge questions that for a long time felt kind of sci-fi-y, but more and more by the day they are feeling pressing. CURT NICKISCH: Is there an example from history – I'm thinking here, I mean, you often hear people mention the railroads, right? Building railroads across the North American continent. The internet. There's also, to stay with trains, there's also, there are places where supply and demand curbs maybe never meet, and that's where government can step in and create public transportation that people otherwise just can't afford. So, what do you liken this to or what do you like to liken this to? MATTHEW WEINZIERL: Well, you've already named a couple of the areas that we often do talk about Curt, and then semiconductors, because that's another example that we sometimes make reference to. I think there's no perfect analogy, as you would guess. There's been some interesting work done by some NASA historians, in fact, to explore some analogies to space. The railroads is an interesting one maybe just to spend a moment on. There are a lot of really important similarities. The railroads pushed out into frontiers, they built infrastructure that allowed businesses to flourish, businesses we could never predict would flourish. A lot of the common examples from the railroad age are surprising success stories, and that's part of the beauty of market forces, and yet there are some major differences. So railroads were generally connecting to existing sites of economic activity, and therefore creating the surplus and the synergies between them. Whereas here, we're reaching out into places where at least there is not yet very much economic activity and trying to create it at the end of the line, so to speak. So we always want to be careful about reasoning from analogy. CURT NICKISCH: Right. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: The uncomfortable reality is, we don't know and we can't know. That's one of the double-edged swords of market forces coming in, is we're used to, especially in the space enterprise, five-year plans, ten-year plans, major programs where we can point at a calendar and say, 'At this date the space shuttle will be flying or we'll be doing XYZ, or the next space telescope will be coming up.' I think increasingly, if we look at the commercial activity in the space realm, it's going to be more and more unpredictable, and that makes it challenging, but also that's where the beauty of markets comes from. The killer app that no one thought of can pop out of the blue and take over very quickly. I think even though this commercial space revolution that we've talked about is young, we've already seen a few of those kind of incredible unexpected ideas pop out of it, especially reusable launch vehicles. They now dominate the world's launch pads, and 15, 20 years ago, that would've been pretty much unthinkable. So I would say we're cautiously optimistic about where this future space economy is heading. I think there's strong tailwinds across the board, but we should also recognize that it's still young, it's still very fragile, particularly it takes individuals making decisions to continue the momentum of what we see today. So I think the worst thing we could do is just kind of slap ourselves on the back and say, 'Okay, mission accomplished. We've got a commercial space enterprise.' And also, it could be skewed at point. We could have setbacks the role of different public priorities because the public sector still plays such an important role in shaping the space economy. Different public priorities could really skew the direction of space activities. So we don't really know where it's going to go, but I think we're hopeful that it will be a real source of value and one that we look back on and say, 'We're really glad that this happened.' CURT NICKISCH: It's funny, I mean, when I was growing up as a kid, I feel like the thing you would always hear is that, 'Oh, someday there are going to be space stations where drug companies are going to be developing drugs in zero-gravity environments,' and I don't think that's happened, but all sorts of other things that people did not imagine did happen. MATTHEW WEINZIERL: Well, and Curt, I don't want you to lose your childhood dreams. I mean, the idea that we might actually do some really important pharmaceutical or other R&D up in space or even manufacturing, that may be also having its own renaissance. You're right, those ideas have been around for decades, but very much as in where we saw launch costs come down over the past couple of decades, there's now at least potentially on the horizon, an era of commercial space stations, which we hope will engender a similar decline in costs and increasing capabilities to make possible some of the things that people have been dreaming about for decades and to also make possible things we never would've really thought about 30, 40 years ago. For instance, data centers in space – there are startups trying to figure out how to make that happen. CURT NICKISCH: That's fascinating. And now they can afford to try it. MATTHEW WEINZIERL: Right, exactly. CURT NICHISCH: You now have a situation where SpaceX has been so successful. It's almost like, is SpaceX a monopoly? MATTHEW WEINZIERL: That's certainly a question a lot of people are asking. I think with antitrust concerns, it's always a tension because often you acquire that lead by doing really remarkable things that generate a lot of value for customers. CURT NICKISCH: Right, to wit, costs coming down 99%. MATTHEW WEINZIERL: Right, exactly. And SpaceX is yet another example of a company that went much faster, farther than I think really anyone could have expected or even hoped, in terms of opening up the space sector. The tension is between celebrating the companies that do really well and gain dominance because of that, but then making sure that they don't turn into value capturers, rather than value creators. And our recommendation in the book is that we all, whether we're government contractors or government agencies or people trying to build our own businesses, we try to keep people nipping at the heels of SpaceX and posing real challenges to keep competition. One of those key market forces, healthy. And so I think keeping that at the core of contracting is a key idea. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: The concern becomes in those programs where they're specifically trying to create competition and bring in new entrants and kind of let the new guys come in and bring in more competition, when even those contracts are going to SpaceX, as we've seen happen, then I think it starts to get a little bit concerning but right now, I think we're still in a good point. And I think that the government has been forward thinking about this, about being intentional about bringing in competition. CURT NICKISCH: It's interesting, you talked about space as just another place, but you've also described yourselves as optimists. And in this arena there is, I don't know, it seems like story and drama and the frontier of possibilities is a big part of what motivates people to work in the industry and what motivates people to fund it. And I'm just curious what you think of story and drama as part of the branding space enterprises, how helpful it is or is this an issue for you in the space industry that you yourselves kind of come to terms with? BRENDAN ROSSEAU: I think a good place to start for me would be just kind of how I ended up here. So I actually, I've always loved space. I thought I was going to be an astronomer or astrophysicist. I just have always loved the space story. I mean, if you look at the relationship of humanity outer space, every culture across the globe, even before they were in contact with one another, seems to have had their own relationship with outer space. And of course, it's if I can be patriotic for a minute, I mean, it's a particularly beautiful aspect of the American space story. The quest and sacrifices to push out beyond the frontier is something that I think is also uniquely American and I've always thought of it as kind of like our space story is this gilded thread in the American tapestry. Like other things, it can be a double-edged sword. If we start doing space things from a commercial perspective or even from a public perspective, just because we want to be doing space things, I think that can be a distraction. And we have seen plenty of space companies start out with a lot of excitement and momentum only to later realize and have their investors later realize, oh, wait a minute, you guys kind of just wanted to do space stuff, and that's not really a business plan. I think the businesses and ideas that Matt and I are most excited about are ones where if you presented them to someone who really did not care about space, and you just said, 'Hey, there's this value that can be created in space, and it just so happens that space happens to be the best way to do this.' Whether it's transmitting satellite internet around the world to billions of people at a low cost, or providing data that can really only be captured from space or a million other things. There's a lot of things that space is truly uniquely good for. Ones that check that box are great, but also businesses that have that kernel of inspiration behind them, companies that even though they're pursuing real business models are doing something hard, they're pushing the frontier. They're not just any other company. There's many of those today, and that's why we're so excited. We see how motivated the founders and the workforces are, and that although they're pursuing commercial business cases, they're also pushing the needle forward. The hope is that yes, we can expand what space means to us to also be commercially viable and like a sea of true commerce, while also not losing that wonder and excitement and exploration. And today, the space economy has all of that. We've got people who want to settle Mars while also being dead set on very profitable businesses. So, I think you can do both. MATTHEW WEINZIERL: We teach a course at Harvard Business School that has almost 100 students enrolled, we've been teaching it now for a few years. And one of the really neat stories that keeps coming out for many of our students is that they found their way to space from a different technological or tech-heavy sector. So whether it's from various internet companies or other tough tech sectors, they find that space offers this combination of inspiration that Brendan was talking about, and really delivering practical value to people on earth through various different capabilities that just really excites them. And so it's great to see some of that technical talent and business people interested in technical sectors finding their way to space. CURT NICKISCH: There's a new administration in the White House. It has a close relationship with a very space-friendly person, right? Elon Musk. This is the same president who created the Space Force. There's also a climate of just, government shouldn't be spending people's money on things. If you could give advice to government leaders right now, what would it be? And alternatively, what about private sector CEOs? MATTHEW WEINZIERL: Maybe I'll actually start with the second one. One of the reasons we wrote this book, we wrote it partly for people in the sector already to try to give them a framework for thinking about what's happening in space that's informed by some of the basic ideas in economics. But one of the key reasons we wrote the book is to widen the circle of business leaders who are thinking about how they might create value in space. We often like to say, if every Fortune 500 or pick your group of companies had someone in the C-suite whose job it was, at least in part, to think about how space might change what they do and deliver value to their customers. The ideas that we would have for activity in space would just blossom tremendously, because that's where all the real knowledge is, is at the individual local level. And so we really hope that this book brings a large group of people in to just start thinking about what space might make possible for them through data, through manufacturing, through resources, and through so much else. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: The key thing that I would love to, if I could just get everyone in a room, all the public sector decision-makers in a room, the key thing I'd love to get across is, if we can all arrive at an understanding of what the public sector can be good at, what its strengths are, what we need the public sector to be doing. Things like basic research, organizing, activity, exploration, science, R&D, these things that are in a lot of ways the engine of the commercial space activity that we see today. If you pull the rug of all that out, I think you would really hamstring what's possible in space. So to the public sector community, I would say we need you, we need you to be forward-thinking, we need you to be organizing your programs and projects in such a way that you are encouraging competition and ensuring that this tide that is rising, this space tide is one that will lift all boats. I think that's really important, and especially now, because it appears that we may be at a fairly significant inflection point in the history of, well, I mean, our country and the government, but especially NASA and the Department of Defense and the relationship with space in particular. There were fairly significant cuts proposed to NASA. There are many significant changes that are happening with the Department of Defense's approach to space. I think some of that can be positive. I think that this change can be good as long as it is based in a solid understanding of, what should the government's role be here and why are we doing it? So I'm hopeful that as we make potentially dramatic changes to NASA and the Department of Defense, that they're smart, that they're enduring, that they're forward-thinking, they're ones that allow the commercial sector to kind of have a platform and foundation and then build on that to thrive. CURT NICKISCH: Matt and Brendan, this has been really, really fascinating and it's been a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for coming on the show. MATTHEW WEINZIERL: Well, thanks so much, Curt. What a pleasure to be with you. BRENDAN ROSSEAU: Thanks, Curt. CURT NICKISCH: That's Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau, the authors of Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. And if you have space to grow in your career, we can help. There are more than 1,000 episodes of IdeaCast , and HBR has more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them all at or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast . I'm Curt Nickisch.
