Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host, Roberta Nleila. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. Communication and soft skills are crucial in your career growth and leadership development. Whether you're about to speak in public, make presentations at work,
00:28
Pitch to investors or an entrepreneur looking to showcase your innovation to a wider audience, you'd be glad you joined us. By the end of this episode, log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on this podcast. Let's get communicating.
00:56
Welcome Mr. Donald G. James, former NASA engineer and leader. Welcome to the show. So please tell us a little bit about yourself. Thank you very much. I'm very excited. You know, I'm a very happy retiree from the American Space Agency, having spent 35 years in my career always with NASA. And even though I started off studying aerospace engineering and
01:25
doing a lot of thinking in that lines, I found my passion evolving more towards education and young people and how do we get more young people to work in the space program. And so that's where much of my work has led me. I have worked primarily at one of our research centers in California. I've been to all of the NASA centers, not necessarily working, but sometimes visiting or doing some part-time work.
01:54
And I ended my career in Washington, DC, when in the Obama administration, the administrator at the time, Charlie Bolden, selected me to be the associate administrator for education, a job that I was very honored to be selected to have. And I held that position until the subsequent election in 2016, when I announced my retirement. My passion as young people, early career professionals,
02:24
and how to help them, because I certainly was helped as a young person. I had many people in my team and my network that guided me, that scolded me if necessary. So I've just felt a strong obligation to give back and do what I can. And that continues. I've been out of the federal government for six and a half years, and I've still continued to give talks and mentor students. I have students.
02:51
all around the world that I talk to periodically about their career and life. And that brings me a lot of joy. But I also have enjoyed my retirement and traveling and I have two grown children and it's great to see them off in their careers and all of that. And I like to read and I try to exercise as much as possible to stay healthy and learn how to cook again. That's sort of a nutshell.
03:18
my life and at 66 years old, I feel very blessed to know I've had a great life and career. And I just hope that I can do my part to inspire young people to consider careers and not only just NASA, but the broader aerospace program as I see it unfolding. And I'm happy to talk about any of that going forward. So thank you. Thank you. First of all, what an illustrious career.
03:48
And we're going to talk about my pleasure, how you got, what made you decide of all the things you wanted to do. You went that direction and going to talk about mentorship as well, which is very key. Yes. Is you say you inspire young people. So you started as an intern. Yes. How did that happen? Yeah. So, you know, my journey really began when I was a young boy. My brother and I were very fortunate that.
04:17
Our father was in the foreign service and so we traveled a lot. And so that really got us interested in just aviation and travel. Cause you know, airplanes and jet airplanes and big jumbo planes, you know, were really fascinating to us. And so both my brother and I said, well, we want to be pilots. We want to fly planes. And so fast forward, trying to figure out how do you do that? My brother's a few years younger than I am. And I said, well, I'm going to.
04:43
major in aerospace engineering because aerospace has air in it and that's got something to do with aviation. That was about the extent of my connection there. And then I found out, you know, you have to pretty much get into the military to learn how to fly planes. And I discovered something very interesting when I was in college in the ROTC program, the Reserve Officer Training Corps.
05:07
that unlike my brother, the military culture didn't suit me very well. I didn't have anything against it, but I just wasn't used to that type of culture and environment. And so between that and the fact that at the time when I was in college, the United States had stopped the Apollo program, shows you how old I am. You know, this was before STEM became a big thing and there wasn't a lot of inspiration in aerospace because we weren't sure what we were gonna do after Apollo.
05:36
And I became really disillusioned a little bit. And so I changed my direction. My brother did it. And he actually went into the Marine Corps. He actually has a pilot. In fact, he's a pilot to this day. He's a captain with American airlines. He has to retire next year. He'll be 65. So he had a different relationship with his military experience than I did. So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And so I pursued.
06:02
international development and economics because we had been privileged to live in a lot of developing countries, mainly in Africa and Southeast Asia. So I wanted to do something to help the countries, if you will. And that's what was in my mind all the way through graduate school. And then halfway through graduate school, I thought, wow, what am I being trained to do? I didn't want to be an economist. And most of the jobs that I looked out, you needed some experience and I didn't have any experience.
06:32
Someone told me in graduate school about this program called the Presidential Management Intern Program, which is a program that the federal government created for graduate students, primarily in public administration, international affairs, political science, and all of that, to become mid-level careerists in the government right out of graduate school. It was a pretty competitive program. I applied, I got in, and out of the blue, I got a letter from NASA.
07:02
Chronicle this in the book that I wrote and it said we'd like to interview you and I was like NASA Where did they find me? You know, so you didn't apply No, they reached out to me and I was like, you know what? They probably went back in my CV and realized I studied engineering in my freshman year, but I was still kind of puzzled by that I think I have a better idea why it actually turns out that NASA hires more non-stem people every year than they do stem people and so they need
07:32
capable people to run finance departments, legal departments, public affairs, education, you name it. They need people to be able to do that. But at the time I wanted to do something else and I was living with my dad and they called and said they wanted to hire me and I kept putting them off. I wanted to go save the world, right? And finally after a while, I think my dad was getting a little nervous that I wasn't saying yes to an actual job in hand.
08:01
And he said, you know, you might want to think about this son. I think he was hoping I would, you know, fly the coop, so to speak, get out of the house. And he said, look, you can get, take this job and get some experience. And if you don't like it, you can go off and do something else, but at least you'll have some experience. So based on that, I called and asked the people and I said, okay, I accept your offer. This was at Goddard space flight center in 1982. So I took that job, but in my mind.
08:28
I was just going to get some experience and then go off and save the world, right? Well, 1986 completely changed my life. And most people will remember that January 1986 is when Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. And that singular event had a big impact on me. It had an impact on me because I was invited to get involved in some of the post-accident
08:54
public relations, if you will, with our teacher in space program. Remember, we had a teacher on the Challenger that died. She had a backup. Every astronaut has a backup. And her backup was a woman named Barbara Morgan. And the head of NASA education asked me if I would work with Barbara to go around the country and connect with teachers and students because we were grieving, right? This was a major traumatic event for not only NASA, but the country.
09:22
And so I felt honored to take this on. And it was during that process, and specifically one event in particular, where I decided this is where I want to make a career. Because I realized that just because of where I worked, I had the opportunity to inspire and influence hundreds and thousands of people, just because I work for NASA. And I felt that that was a great calling.
09:51
So I decided after that, that I was going to make a career at NASA. And that ultimately led me to being the head of education toward the end of my career. So that's kind of my roundabout journey. And one of the messages that I like to share with students when I talk to them, even early career professionals is to not get too fixated on a particular vision, strict path forward in your career. Because...
10:21
there's opportunities that come up. If you have blinders on because you know, you want to do this and that and the other, you might miss something that actually might be more exciting or more in alignment with your passions and interests. Cause sometimes we just don't know what they are, right? I didn't know I wasn't gonna like the military culture in college. I, you know, I had a lot of military friends. I had nothing against the military. But when I actually got into it, I thought, wow, this doesn't feel right. My brother had a different reaction to it.
10:49
So I invite people to take opportunities like that and then use my example to say, it's okay to dabble in things. It's okay to change your mind. It's okay to be open to the possibility that maybe what your ultimate calling is, is not what you thought it was when you were in fifth grade, when someone said, so, Mr. Berna, what do you wanna be when you grow up?
11:13
I used to say teacher and they said you're too smart and teachers are the list page you're going to be poor so that's not an option you have to go to university. And the irony is the irony is I ended up in the last decade teaching in South Korea after 15 years of doing the business stuff. It's almost like I came full circle to say.
11:37
You know, there was probably something deep inside of you that felt a calling to that, but you figured out how to make it work. And the thing is that you were open to that possibility rather than saying, no, I was told I have to be corporate and be the CEO one day. But you know what, you could have made a whole lot of money and been miserable too. So you have to listen to your heart and trust people and things like that. So that's my journey and how I got into NASA.
12:04
I'm glad you highlight the devil and test the waters and see what resonates with you. And we live at an age where there's so many careers. I grew up in the 80s. Back then, there were very few careers I knew as a kid I could tap into when I grew up, but there's so much more these days. Exactly, exactly. And so the times are different now and, you know, the types of jobs that are available now are completely new to when, you know, we were in school and things like that.
12:34
but it's our foundational capabilities and skills that I think will carry us and carry anybody through their profession. And so that's why I took an interest in the matter stuff, which I hope we can talk about. For sure. And so you highlighted earlier that NASA doesn't just hire engineers only as well. Right. The only profession that I haven't seen at NASA are dentists. I don't know any dentists that work at NASA.
13:04
If we have dental problems, you go to your personal dentist and you have your insurance to cover it. But we have doctors, we have lawyers, we have accountants, we have public relations people, we have communications people, we have operations people, program operations people. There's a lot of jobs for which a degree in science or engineering or mathematics is not required.
13:34
And so I like to share that because a lot of people have an interest in working for NASA. It goes, oh, I'm not really, you know, STEM or I'm not a scientist. All that says you don't have to be, you know, you just have to be capable and interested in learning. And I was. And so that's what made a difference. Right. So what qualities do you think you possessed that made you go from intern to top leadership at NASA?
14:01
So I say unabashedly that it was the qualities that's embedded in the title of the book that I learned primarily from my mother, which was manners will take you where brains and money won't. And what she meant by that is, it's okay to be smart and be as smart as you want. It's okay to have money. There's nothing wrong with that. But don't assume that those two qualities alone are gonna get you to where you want.
14:28
And you know this, right? There are a lot of very smart people who are incarcerated in prison, right? You know, Bernie Madoff wasn't stupid. He just was a criminal, right? And there are people who have a lot of money, but who are unhappy. Some of them even take their life. They have many marriages, they're alcoholics, whatever it is, but if you look at their bank account, you're like, what's wrong with this person, right? So we will- And we think, if I had your kind of money, I'll be a lot happier. Us regular people.
14:58
Thank you, thank you. So, you know, we know those things are not, and people understand this, I think, even though they still want to pursue that. And so my mom taught us this notion of manners in a way that I interpreted as from a very broad perspective, not just, you know, please and thank you and the niceties and, you know, sending handwritten thank you notes and opening doors. I mean, those are important things. Those are more etiquette things.
15:26
The manner that I took from her is how you show up in the world, how you conduct yourself. Are you really curious about somebody in a very organic, authentic way? Or are you curious about something because secretly you want something from them, right? So the question is, are you a giver or are you a taker, right? When I talk about being a giver versus a taker...
15:56
I include myself as the beneficiary of my giving. So I don't take a break, I give myself a break, right? I give myself the joy of exercising and eating well for the benefit of my health because I'm giving my body and my spirit and my soul nourishment that I need to go by. So I talk about giving a lot. And so the manner that
16:24
I learned to develop. Now, I'm not saying that I was stellar at this. There's also judgment. Judgment plays a big part too. And judgment's a little bit different than manners, right? It's how you make decisions and what decisions you actually make. But I found that what I think helped me was that people could trust me. People felt comfortable around me. People were I stood with certain things. People also understood that if I didn't understand something or know something,
16:54
I would admit to that and I would ask, you know, how can I learn about this and what can I do? And I think that paints a picture of a person that says, this is somebody I want to help. So I felt like a lot of people wanted to help me in my career. Because if you think about it, if you put yourself out to help somebody, let's say there's a young student, but let's say there's something about this student you're not sure about, but you said, well, I said I was going to help the students. I'm going to do it anyway.
17:24
And it turns out that the student is no good or they cheat or they don't show for work on time or they have bad manners in many ways. For those of us who supported that person and may have opened a door for that person, it kind of reflects on you, right? You know, this has actually happened to me where I actually made a recommendation to a young man to work in an organization. I knew the CEO really well and turns out...
17:52
He was like who I was just describing. You know, he didn't show up to work when he wanted to. He did projects that he shouldn't have been working on. And they actually let him go very quickly. And I learned about this and I was embarrassed. So I actually called the CEO and I said, you know what? I missed this in this person's character. And I apologize because you think about it, the next time I recommend somebody, they might say, well, I don't know, the last time you gave us this somebody, they were no good.
18:22
So you have to be careful. So I always wanted to be the type of person that somebody wanted to suggest for a higher level position and all that. Now, all that being said, and I tell this to students in no uncertain terms, you have to know how to do your job. You have to know how to fly the plane. You have to know how to fly the spacecraft. Please do not go into a NASA interview. And when they ask you, well, what makes you think you're qualified to do this job?
18:51
Please do not tell them, oh, well, I have impeccable manners. And I learned that from Mr. James. They'll laugh you out of the interview room. Now, you have to have competence. So I talk often about this triad of ambition, of competence, and manners. Ambition, competence, and manners. If you don't have any ambition, and that may be fine, maybe you just want to be a barista your whole life, and you just want to work six hours a day, and that's all you want to do, that's fine.
19:21
But if you want to be the CEO of Starbucks, you have to have some ambition, right? You also have to develop competence. You have to be technically competent at your job and continually learning so that you can offer value to your employer. And I say the foundation of both are your manners, how you show up in the world. Now, it is true that there are people who become
19:47
leaders who become heads of organizations that I question their manners. And some of them ultimately don't work out. Some of them still manage to be successful and all that. But from a moralistic perspective, I would argue that's not the kind of person that I want to follow necessarily, you know, that was only out for themselves. So they may be brilliant people. They actually may be right about everything that they do. They may make the company a lot of money.
20:14
But if they don't make me feel like I'm worthy of being in the same room with them, that I'm capable of contributing or at least being taught how to contribute, I'm not feeling the love, if you will. And I probably wouldn't stay very long. And maybe other people have a different point of view, but that's how I see it. So I think that's what made the difference. I mean, when I applied for my last job as associate administrator, remember this is.
20:42
one person away from the president of the United States, right? So my boss was appointed by President Obama. So that's how I was able to get to the highest level in the federal government. When I applied for that job, there were 84 applicants for that job, four of whom were astronauts. Why was I selected? Well, they were all qualified. And usually when you get into these jobs, last 10 people are all capable. But it turns out, because they told me that...
21:10
They wanted a different type of leader than an astronaut. My predecessor was an astronaut, wonderful person, good dear friend of mine. He had a great run and did a great job at what he did. He was famous. He was a great person, famous. But the leadership said, when he decided to retire and move on, they decided, you know, we don't want that kind of leader. We want a different kind of leader. Now there's nothing against my predecessor. It's just that that was a style thing. And I happened to fit the style. So then you get lucky. And I did.
21:39
But certainly your leadership style, your character. And when talking about your triad, the manners part, would you say that that's more the soft skills, the people part? Because the competence is the technical, the ambition, obviously, that's your drive, your character. So the manners is more the people part, which then makes you the kind of leader that is desired. Well, one thing I'd like to suggest and I do, right,
22:10
is that I don't make a distinction between soft and hard skills. I don't find that distinction useful. You either have skills or you don't have skills in certain domains. A lot of manner skills are way more difficult than engineering skills are, because often in engineering, there is a right answer, right? If you want to calculate delta V to get your spacecraft to a planet, there is a right answer for that.
22:40
If you want to figure out how to manage a group of PhDs with wildly different personalities, that's difficult to do. And yet there are skills that are involved in being able to do that. And a lot of these skills you can learn. So are they people skills? Most of the time they are. A lot of times they're organizational skills. A lot of times they're judgment skills. How do you decide what you want to focus on and so forth?
23:07
The implication of soft skills is that, well, they're not necessarily as important as let's say the hard skills. And I would argue just the opposite. They're skills, they're all skills. Oprah Winfrey has a range of skills, including manner skills, as well as business skills, and probably some other skills that I don't even know about. It doesn't mean that one is less important than the other. She's just brilliant at all these things, right?
23:37
That's why she's who she is. And the same is true for other people. And so I argue that you can learn a lot of skills, including what I call manner skills. Like let's take the art of listening. There's really four types of listening that are available to us. The first is hearing. You can hear things, right? You're hearing my voice right now.
24:01
You know, my children are very good at this. They can be watching TV and on social media. And I'll say, are you listening to me? He says, dad, I heard everything you said. And they can repeat to me verbatim exactly what I said. Then there's listening, where you know, you actually get a sense that someone's paying attention to you and they're absorbing the information. And then there's what's known as active listening, where you tend to paraphrase back, you know, so what I heard you say was this, and then you want.
24:26
Roberta to be able not as yeah, that's what I meant. So you're trying to capture intent. And then something that I've been working on in terms of analysis is what I call presence listening. Presence listening is best exemplified by let's say a therapist that you're talking to or a priest that you're doing confession with. Or if your best friend calls you up right now and let's say he or she is drowning in tears.
24:55
you know, the world has collapsed, you know, their partner left them or whatever, and you were together, they need you. You're going to be so present with your friend. You're not going to be distracted by your phone. You're going to absorb everything because what they want in that moment is you to get them energetically, that's presence listening. Those are all distinct skills, which actually can be learned. So.
25:24
I make the case, I hope that this, some of the skills that are necessary to be successful in your organization. Especially the listening part, how crucial that is, if you're a leader leading a team, because we always say people don't just come to work, just be employees, they come with their whole selves. I'm not saying bring all your dirty laundry from home, but you cannot just be this robot who takes off everything about you and you get in.
25:53
to the office and just work only. That's exactly right. I'll give you a great example of that. I had a boss once who was very businesslike, but I had worked with her for a while. And one day I was in my office and she comes into my office. And before she crossed the threshold of the door of my office, I'm sorry, it was the other way around. I was walking into her office. Before I crossed the threshold of the door, she started immediately into it.
26:21
We need to do this and we need to do this. And I had it. And I just stopped and looked at her and I said, good morning, Angela, how was your day today? And she looked back and says, oh, hello, Donald, how are you? And I said, Angela, I just want to remind you, I'm a relationship guy. I need a little relationship before business, right? I mean, it could be 30 seconds. So I did that and she laughed, she understood.
26:45
And I know sometimes in an emergency, you don't have time for niceties and things like that. And that happens. It happens in the space business a lot. If there's a fire on the spaceship, you know, the guys aren't going to say, well, Houston, how's your day going? Uh, we got a fire. So the context matters. That that's an example of where, you know, you want to be paying attention to your people and what they need. And I'm the kind of person that needs to.
27:14
connect with you as a human, usually before we get into the business. I've even had some people said, Donald, I don't got time to check in. I got three things that have to happen. Like right now. Got it. No problem. All right. What do we have to do? Let's get with it. It's just paying attention. And so the people know that, you know, that they matter. And like you said, their whole self matters in the moment.
27:41
I've had people that I've talked to for a while come to find out their favorite aunt died the night before. And I never even asked how they were doing it because I was so busy doing whatever I was doing and talking about it all the time. I never checked in. But that's important is for people to hear that you care about that. That's very crucial indeed. So please talk to us about your mentorship program of students and early career professionals. Yeah. So.
28:10
Since most of my career was in education, we led programs to hire interns. We had programs where we would go to school, we'd work with teachers, we would personally give talks and things of that nature. I personally mentored students, some of them with the organization of Black Aerospace Professionals, which is one of my favorite organizations to support. So I find that mentorship, if done properly,
28:39
is one of the most effective ways of helping a young person or an early career professional make it through their career. And typically it works best if there's more than just one person. Now you have to develop a trust relationship with the people in a way that when you suggest that they do things, they understand. Sometimes it's just a student.
29:03
watching you operate. Like I used to bring students to meetings that I held and they would just sit there and watch how the dynamics go. And they realized, wow, this is how this works. You know, sometimes they see, you know, as the proverbial saying goes, how the sausage is made. And it's like, man, I didn't realize I thought NASA was this big, super pristine techie thing and everything worked robotically and all that. No, that's not how it is at all. Right. That's what we all think.
29:31
Yeah, well, it doesn't happen that way all the time. You know, I've been in a lot of very interesting meetings about even spacecraft meetings. Cause I did work on the Orion spacecraft program in 2006 for a while. And I mean, there were arguments with some of the astronauts and the program people about how close the astronauts had to sit in the Orion spacecraft. Cause the younger astronauts is, well, I don't want to be...
29:59
having my space suit, touching his space suit. And then the older Apollo guys were like, are you out of your mind? This is not economy plus. This is a spacecraft and this is what you get. And you might have to sleep on top of somebody. And I'm sitting here listening to this like, God, nobody would believe this is what we talk about. You know, and then when you even get into some of the more interesting things like cost analysis, trying to figure out what do things cost.
30:26
It's not like buying a car where they produce a lot of cars and you go and you kind of get an idea what they cost. When you build a new spacecraft, you have no idea what it's gonna cost. So I found out that they do these studies called parametric studies. I'm like, what's that? He goes, well, that's when you give a good guess about what things are gonna be. And I said, guess? Guestimate. You guess? He goes, yeah, because we never built one before. So we have to...
30:52
say, well, the parts are probably going to cost this, but there's only one supplier for the O-rings. We have to get it from this. And there's all these factors that come in. So then they present to us, you know, the program leader as well. We think it's going to be about like this. And of course it never is. It's always a way more than it really costs. But, you know, I didn't know that until I actually was able to get in. So bringing students into an environment like that is helpful for them to see what they're.
31:21
dealing with. It also helps them see the dynamics of different people in an organization and the norms that might be expected of people. That will be different. NASA will be different than other federal organizations and it will certainly be different than companies and the private sector, which could be wildly different. So mentorship is important. A lot of times is that some of my mentors just gave me assignments and let me run with it and I...
31:49
succeeded or failed and you know then we would do what's called an after action review to figure out what happened, how did it work, what did you think, was that a good decision that you made or not and they were watching you to make sure there was nothing catastrophic that's going to happen. Another program that I support the Patty Grace Smith Fellowship Foundation is a mentorship program that Patty Grace used to be a NASA engineer and so
32:15
I try to encourage these students who have internships in other organizations to definitely seek out a lot of people in organizations to ask them questions and say, can I just go to this meeting with you? Can I participate? Because even if you don't have anything to do, just by watching it through osmosis, you're gonna learn some things. I hope that was a good answer to your question. Yes, it does. Because I also, my first job, I had a mentor and he showed me the ropes. And like you say, when he takes you to these meetings,
32:45
did a lot of work for government ministers back home in South Africa. So when he takes you to those meetings and you just a junior, it opens up this world, you know, just at the office and looking at that little world in the office, but it expands your horizons. It really does. And if you have a great connection with a mentor and vice versa, where there's a lot of trust, what I like to do is to share things with the students that
33:14
I wouldn't necessarily share broadly. And there may be, you know, my opinion about a particular individual or a style and how to approach it. I found almost to the person they really appreciate that. I think they feel that I'm just really being candid with them about, you know, how things really work. So, I like to tell stories and, you know, I tell stories about things that work well for me and definitely stories about things that did not work well for me, you know, and they're all useful.
33:44
And we love storytelling on this show. So please tell us one thing that didn't work well for you. I exercise poor judgment once where I revealed something publicly that I shouldn't have. And the details are not, I mean, they're important, you know, because it happened and I was appropriately scolded for it, but I thought it was innocent. I thought I was trying to be helpful, but it backfired.
34:11
I had anonymously posted on a particular website some information that I thought was benign and because I was anonymous I thought well no one's going to know where it's going to come from. In hindsight, you know, that was not a good idea. What happened was the person who hosted the website, unbeknownst to me, was friends with the director of the center where I work.
34:41
the subject of what I was writing about that I thought was a good thing. And he basically outed me. He could tell from the IP address who I was, and he sent a note to the director who was furious, and he sent his deputy marching down to my office to drag me out of whatever I was doing to come to his office to get a tongue lashing.
35:10
I got a tongue-lashing and I think two things saved my job. This is the manners point that I wanted to make. The first thing that I think saved my job is it turns out that the director's deputy happened to be a friend of mine. In fact, many, many years prior, when his wife booted him out of the house, I took mercy on him and I took him into my little apartment.
35:38
and we became roommates with another guy and that stayed that way until I actually met my now wife and moved out. And so we were close. But in that moment, when his boss sent him to get me, he was rightfully mad and he was doing his job. But the reason I said that I think that's important is that he knew me, he knew me well enough to know that whatever crime I committed was
36:07
more than likely not done out of malice. It wasn't done as a way to cause trouble with his boss, the director. But very few people would know that but him. And plus he knew me so he trusted me. The second thing that I think saved me is that I have learned a long time ago that if you ever find yourself in a meeting and you're on the receiving end
36:36
your boss or your boss's boss wrath over something you did. Even if you know you're right and you didn't do anything wrong, the worst thing you could do is to argue back. You need to sit there and take the tongue lashing and just listen, very good active listening, but usually not any response. And so I did. I listened.
37:00
The whole time I never defended myself. I never said, oh, but I didn't mean it that way. I just let him say what he had to say. And he was angry. I mean, he raised his voice and said, you know, I had privileged information and I had no right to share it and all this stuff. And I just looked at him and nod. And when I got to a point where his steam had kind of dissipated a little bit, I looked him right in the eye.
37:28
I called him by his first name, because we all call him by his first name, and I said, how can I make this right? I said, I apologize. How can I make this right? That's all I said. And for whatever reason, it magically changed his demeanor. I don't even know if it was that or the fact that I just listened to him. But I took responsibility. I made no excuses. And I said, how can I make this right?
37:56
And so we talked and I would say within 10 or 15 minutes, you know, he tapped me on the shoulder and he says, you know, you do a good job, Don, I'm really proud of you. And we shook hands and that was the end of it. But I really could have lost my job and I probably would have deserved it. So that was a judgment decision, but my manners saved me. I'm convinced of it. The irony is, is that because of the way that pecking order works at NASA,
38:26
When I was selected to be the head of NASA education as associate administrator, technically I outranked that director. You know, I went back to the center and he introduced me as his boss. That wasn't really the case, but he did that. But I think that had that interaction not gone well, it would have been problematic. So that's one example. Never argue back to a mad boss. Take it.
38:55
Right and take responsibility and ask how you can make it right. That's right, that's right and understand the difference between excuses and reasons. I may have had my reasons but there wasn't any excuse. An excuse means I'm asking somebody to say what I did was okay, I'll give you a pass and I didn't really deserve that. You know I had no right to reveal things anonymously that people didn't know. The reason
39:22
if someone was willing to listen to it. Nobody asked me, so I never shared this. One day maybe I'll write this up, but there was a series of things that were happening that I thought were reasonable that I was trying to do. Now, different people can disagree upon analysis, but at the time it wasn't my place to say, well, let me give you my reason why I did this. And then if he asked me, well, what made you think you could do this? What was your reason? I would have summarized for him what I thought.
39:50
but I never would have made an excuse. I would have accepted my punishment had there been one and moved on. And what is one thing you can tell us about what worked really well for you? Yeah, so, well, there's a couple that I'm particularly proud of. One was that I was asked to work with another person to produce the first open house at
40:20
the NASA Center where we worked. We had never had one before. The NASA administrator at the time was a very interesting character. And a lot of people were afraid of him. He was very smart. He was kind of a brusque guy, but really brilliant guy. He told the director at the time, he said, you should open up your center and let the world see what you do. And a group of us had met with him and he had given us a lecture about
40:46
you know, how well we were reaching out to underserved communities and whether we do any of our public relations work in different languages and all this kind of stuff. And so when I was asked to take this on, I remembered a lot of the things that he had mentioned, and I knew he was going to come to the open house. And so my team, and I was a co-leader with another guy and we had a team of people, we went out of our way to really get creative about how we're going to get.
41:14
a lot of people to come to this open house. Long story short, we broke every NASA record for an open house that year. We had like a quarter of a million people come to the facility in one day. I mean, we had calls from the highway patrol complaining about the cars backed up on the freeway. We got calls from the mayor of the city saying, there's cars everywhere in our city trying to get in. We didn't anticipate.
41:43
that our marketing and outreach was going to be so well done. I put a lot of time into this. I did interviews in multiple languages. I had translators, of course. We went to art and wine festivals. We really went out of our way to make sure we had a lot of people. And we had a target. Our target was 50,000 people. We thought, well, the administrator will be happy with 50,000 people. And it turns out we had a quarter of a million. So that's something that I felt went well.
42:12
because of how we managed the team and the expectations and the project. And we had the leadership, who I was, was fully supportive. And all we did was make sure that they were never surprised by anything that we were gonna do. Any last words for somebody who's not sure about which career path to take? Yeah.
42:38
I'm a big believer in dabbling. What I mean by dabbling is, be willing to try different things, be willing to take different kinds of classes. Remember what happened with Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple computers. He attributed his inspiration for the fonts of Apple from his taking a calligraphy class at Stanford, right? And something he had to do an extra credit, so he decided to take calligraphy. It was very different than what he was studying.
43:08
And so you never know where your inspirations are going to come. Maybe it's a different language. Maybe it's a study abroad program. I learned a lot from my study abroad activities that I applied to my work. I learned how to engage people from different cultures and, and, and that I'm particularly proud of. And so dabbling, I think is, is important. And you mentioned when we first got together about one of the axioms that I often tell students, and that is.
43:36
being smart isn't good enough. You go to work for a place like NASA, everybody's smart. You go to work for big tech companies, everybody's smart. Most of them are probably smarter than you are, right? So they're smarter than I am, that's for sure. But it's not good enough just to be smart, to be impactful, to be effective, to be successful. You may be the smartest person in the world and think you're leading.
44:01
but you turn around and you find out that no one's following you. Why is that the case? I have worked with very smart NASA people who lost their jobs, lost their jobs because they had poor manners. I work with NASA people who never were offered promotions or always moved to the side and they don't tell you, they won't say, you know, the reason we're not promoting you is because we don't like- You don't have any manners. You were not raised right. They'll never tell you that.
44:30
First of all, it's probably illegal. We'll make up some other story. Well, you know, we had to go in a different direction and we wanted to pick so and so or whatever it is. But I know, because I've been on the inside, I've seen this happen, I've been in the discussions when we've had to choose people for hiring. I've heard what they talk about. Most of the time it's not about their technical skills. Well, I think they have better technical skills than somebody else. No, they says, you know what, that person seems a little arrogant to me. Yeah, I don't think they'd be a good fit on our team. That's what happens.
45:00
So being smart isn't good enough. Learn how to develop and cultivate a broad spectrum of skills that I call manner skills. How you present yourself, how you show up, how you listen, how you speak, how you present your body, things like that. And here's the funny thing about manners and so the technical competence, right? If you are arrogant, you give the impression that you are not open to learning new ideas because you're a new girl.
45:29
Technical skills can be learned. If I walk into a job, okay, I will have the competence, but there's something university didn't teach me that's being done now. I can learn that depending on what type of person I am. Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, this is probably why the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up because somebody was so sure that they were right. They could launch in cold conditions and it wasn't gonna impact anything because of the pressures of launching. And it turns out that they were wrong about that.
45:58
You know, and so you have to be willing to say, I'm not sure I have this right. What do you think? What's your view about this? This is why diversity and inclusion is so important because if you have a bunch of like-minded people in the room, we're all saying, yeah, boss, we're gonna do this, that's great. And they don't have that one person that says, I'm not so sure about that. You know, I wanna think about this. It might irritate people. They may not even be right. As long as one person is willing to stand up and say,
46:28
I think we ought to think different about this. Then you never know what value you're going to get out. And that's why it's so important. When I was a leader, I made it a point in meetings to always asking the person who never talked what they thought about things. And you know what I found out? Most of them had something to say and some of it was really good and some of it was brilliant. But they were shy, they were introverted. They weren't like me who has a big mouth, who always talks. But I would ask, I said,
46:57
I'd like to know what you think about this. And then it's amazing. But a lot of people will just ignore that because they think they don't have anything to offer because they're not talking, right? So when you actively ask them, the smuts come out. Yes, be curious. Be curious about people and what they think and where they're coming from. And it's so nourishing. It's just nourishing and be willing to hold the possibility that you may not know everything.
47:26
And the best astronauts I've ever met actually know that. They know they don't know everything. None of us do. And it's actually a good thing, I think. I think there's a heavy burden that comes with thinking you should know everything. That's right. And that's not the case. So yeah, being smart's not good enough. And you're always interviewing. I'd say that too. You're always interviewing. When you're a young person or anybody for that matter, people are interviewing you, right?
47:56
Right. And that's the intention. And you may never know if that person is somebody who can help you or hurt you, depending on how they react to you. So be careful how you engage somebody, even if it's a stranger on the airplane. You may never know that person might give you a job. Right.
48:15
And I write about two examples in my book that were stark, you know, about a young man that I would have hired in a heartbeat, but he was only 11 years old. He was 11, I couldn't hire him. He was too young, but he had impeccable manners, impeccable. And then there was another kid that worked at an airport and I had to take something for lost and found. And he was so busy listening to his music and bopping around, he barely had a minute.
48:41
to look up and say, what, you know, and then he didn't want to pay me any attention and he blew his interview. He blew it. He could have said something really nice and, you know, asked me about myself and then he found out I worked for NASA. Oh, I like NASA, you know, I probably could have helped him get a job, but he gave me no reason to want to help him. So you're always interviewing, pay attention to that. So as you can tell, I'm very passionate about this.
49:08
which we absolutely love it can literally just jumps off the screen. That relationship, the always interviewing is the reason why, as you said earlier, you were able to keep the job when, when the incident happened. I believe that's true. I really do believe it. Yeah. Thank you so much, Donald, for your words of wisdom, for teaching us so much about NASA and for giving us the wings.
49:35
to be able to dabble in different careers and find what we love. We appreciate you for your time today. You're welcome. My pleasure. Excellent stuff. Donald, before you go, where can we find you online? Would you like for our listeners to reach out to you? Please do, yes. I have a website. It's just my full name, donaldgregoryjames.com. Donaldgregoryjames.com. And the book is, Manners Will Take You.
50:03
Where Brains and Money Won't, Wisdom from Mama, and 35 Years at NASA. It's on the website, the look. You can find it on Amazon, ebook, audiobook. Feel free to email me. Mannerswilltakeyou at gmail.com. I answer all emails. I'm happy to talk to people. Mannerswilltakeyou at gmail.com. So thank you for this privilege to speak with you and your audience. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.
50:31
DonaldGregoryJames.com and menelswiltakeyouatgmail.com. Thank you, Donald, we are really appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating podcast once again. If you have a guest that you think would be a great fit for the show, please email me and my contact details are on the show notes. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Be Podcast Network.
50:59
Where there are many other podcasts that support you in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Bee Podcast Network, go to beeepodcastnetwork.com. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned for more episodes to come.