There aren’t many careers where trust plays as important a role as it does for astronauts, something that wasn’t lost on Canadian astronaut, author, and physician Dave Williams. He has carried the lessons learned aboard the International Space Station with him throughout his various careers.
The relationships we build and how we work as a team to leverage the skills each member brings are the foundation for trust, Dr. Williams said. He recalled how, on his second trip to the International Space Station (ISS), upon docking he was met by Russian Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, who talked him into going to the Russian section to look at images of Earth on Yurchikhin’s laptop. Williams, acutely aware of his tight schedule to get the spacesuits to the airlock, kept checking his watch. About five minutes into looking at the photos, the Commander said “Dave, don’t worry I know you’re supposed to bring the suits across. I’ll help you,” he recalled. Working together, he and Yurchikhin finished the task ahead of schedule and “I had a new best friend on the space station for the remainder of the mission,” Dr. Williams said.
Dr. Williams shared his experiences with Scotiabank employees during a candid conversation with Nicole Frew, Scotiabank’s Chief Compliance Officer. It was the first of a series of Trust Talks exploring the ways organizations and individuals can develop, nurture and sustain trust and the role trust plays in diverse, high-performing teams.
Leading with trust, Dr. Williams noted, is what sets Scotiabank apart from its peers. “By building all of this into the corporate values of the organization, things like integrity and accountability, trust all of a sudden is everywhere and that’s what you really need to be able to succeed in a competitive environment.”
Having experienced the impact of broken trust, and what happens when we tap into its true potential on the ISS, in hospital emergency rooms, and as CEO of a hospital, Dr. Williams takes a unique approach to high performance, leadership and empowering individual and collective performance. He shares those lessons in Leadership Moments From NASA: Achieving the Impossible, available in bookstores in July.
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Photo: Dave Williams, Canadian astronaut, author, and physician.
Like many kids who grew up in the 1960s, a decade dominated by the race to the moon, Dr. Williams dreamed of being an astronaut, but his route there was circuitous. As an undergraduate he did research in neuroscience, which led to studying medicine and becoming an emergency doctor. It was after that that he became an astronaut, aquanaut, and commercial pilot and finally in 2011, CEO of Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket, Ont., where he led a team of 4,500 staff and volunteers.
It was while working with NASA that Dr. Williams learned how not doing the right thing can have catastrophic consequences. “Even though we intuitively recognize that [doing the right thing] is what we should focus on, sometimes it may take longer, may cost us more and may not be politically expedient, it might not even be supported, but it’s critical to have integrity and do the right thing,” he said.
Losing the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and then Columbia in 2003, along with their crews, is a prime example of this, Dr. Williams said. Launch day for Challenger was unusually cold, causing the two O-rings in the solid rocket boosters to become brittle and fail, although they were designed to never fail, resulting in catastrophic losses. While the engineering team had raised concerns about burn-through on the primary O-ring, many of NASA’s leaders never heard about it, Dr. Williams said, adding those who did were under a lot of pressure from politicians and the media to launch.
They made the wrong decision, Dr. Williams said, acknowledging that’s easy to say in retrospect. “The right thing would have been to listen to the people who were speaking up, ask further questions and if necessary, delay the launch.” Yet, 17 years later, Columbia was lost for again normalizing a deviance — this time damage to the tiles.
We all make mistakes, Dr. Williams said, but in sectors such as aerospace and healthcare the trick is to ensure errors don’t impact anyone else. That can be done by training everybody across the organization, developing protocols, and ensuring compliance to those protocols.
When you do make a serious error, the first step to rebuilding trust should be to acknowledge what went wrong, apologize to the people affected and commit to a path of action, he said. If there was a bad clinical outcome at Southlake, even if the staff wasn’t responsible, they followed these steps. “There’s nothing worse than telling a patient or their family ‘we’re going to fix that’ and a year later the exact same thing happens to someone else,” he said.
Dr. Williams drew on his experience on the ISS to respond to a question on trust and finding our way out of the current pandemic situation. Working with astronauts and cosmonauts from different countries and backgrounds, speaking different languages, and being able to come together as a peak-performing team takes trust, he said, adding that the pandemic illustrates we live in a global village that requires cooperation. Globally, people are questioning the scientific establishment with regards to vaccinations and public health protocols, yet it is those protocols that at the end of the day have allowed scientists to collaborate on a handful of vaccines, and have them approved and in arms in record time, he said.
