Employee Experience, Connection & Leadership with Jane Datta – Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The Employee Experience Podcast Season 2 Ep. 1

Season 2 of The Employee Experience Podcast is Launching with Jane Datta – Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration

This week’s guest on The Employee Experience Podcast is Jane Datta, Chief Human Capital Officer and Lead People Champion at NASA.

If given the chance, what would NASA’s Chief Human Capital Officer say to a room of global leaders? What does layered communications look like for employees at the USA’s national space agency? 

In this week’s episode, Gillian chats with Jane Datta about a day in her life as a people leader at NASA, the impact of the pandemic on the role, the key components of employee experience, the importance of acknowledging ‘that’s it’ moments, and much more.

Jane joined NASA in 2007 as the director of the agency’s Workforce Policy, Planning and Analysis Division in the Office of Human Capital Management. Here she played an important role in coordinating activities to increase efficiency across the agency, such as the agency-level integration of workforce planning with budgeting and strategic planning. Datta also oversaw agency-level human capital policy, accountability, recruiting, hiring, and student programs.

“We welcome the whole employee. We really believe fervently in the balance of your work and your personal life, which is not a new concept. But we’re having to re-examine what that flexibility looks like. Have we got it all figured out? No. But I think the intent is there and I think employees feel that intent and that’s, I think, the more important part. Did we get it exactly right? No. Do they know what we intend and that we are trying? That’s what matters.”

“The kinds of leaders we need have got to be creative, they’ve got to care, and they’ve got to be willing to continue to learn. That takes time. Being a supervisor is not just an ‘other duties as assigned’. It is a serious endeavor.”

Listen back to hear more…

About The Employee Experience Podcast

The Employee Experience Podcast, hosted by Gillian French, is the podcast series for leaders pursuing innovative ideas to engage and connect with their employees. Listen to trailblazers across internal comms, employee engagement, and HR share the best ways to connect with employees, build healthy cultures, and deliver an employee experience where everyone can reach their potential.

Catch Season 1 of The Employee Experience Podcast:

• Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer at Vayner Media, on building the best human empire
• Leslie Caputo, People Scientist at Humu, on empowering people to improve themselves
• Gary Keegan, CEO at Uppercut, on the secret to elevating performance (Part One)
• Gary Keegan, CEO at Uppercut, on the secret to elevating performance (Part Two)
• Niamh Gunn, CEO of the Dialogue Code, on creating a workplace for Humane Leadership
• Dave Ulrich, the father of Modern HR on shaping how people and organizations deliver value
• Scott McInnes, Founder of Inspiring Change, on engaging people to build a great culture
• Stan Slap, Author and CEO on the secrets to building a world-class company culture
• Ryan Jenkins, bestselling Author on how to decrease loneliness at work
• Margaret Heffernan, bestselling Author and CEO on how to improve the Global Employee Experience

Full Transcript

Gillian French:
It’s wonderful to have Jane Datta, the Chief Human Capital Officer of NASA with me today on our employee experience podcast. I think Jane, you have probably one of the coolest jobs in the universe, not even in the world.

So, I’m delighted to have you here with us and to share your experience on the employee experience. So thank you.

Jane Datta:
Thank you, Gillian. It’s a great pleasure to be here with you. Looking forward to our conversation.

Gillian French:
Great. So listen, Jane, I think our listeners would be just enthralled at what your day looks like. What does the Chief Human Capital Officer at NASA do? What kind of projects are you involved in? I think that would be really interesting for our listeners.

Jane Datta:
Sure. Well, let me say at the outset that the CHCO role, the Chief Human Capital Officer, which is a government term. It’s a government term for the CHRO role. But I would say that my role is probably a mix of a CHRO and a chief people officer. And so in my day I’m running a business of HR services that support our missions. I’m standing for the workforce, I’m looking to the future. And then there are lots of efforts going on every day, week and month. And so I’m trying to pay attention to the most important workforce efforts that we are addressing here and now. So my day is some combination of all of those things.

So I think what it requires is an ability to be able to change your lens very quickly, back and forth, long term, short term, top-down, on the ground, services, strategic efforts. And so every day is a combination of all of those things in some form or fashion. And so there’s a lot of gear switching to, “Where am I now?” And trying to pay attention to a lot of those things on a consistent basis so that I’m not losing sight on where things are. It makes it fun. There’s a lot of diversity of work. I love every bit of it and every bit pulls a different aspect of my skills and capabilities to brings them to bear.

Gillian French:
And I would think you have obviously a diverse workforce just in their skill set and what they’re doing. What’s the size of the employee community there?

Jane Datta:
Sure. So at NASA, we have about 18,000 civil servants. These are government employees. But we also have many, many more contractors and partners and grantees and interns and many, many segments of the workforce that are not accounted for. The work of me in my office is largely around the civil service workforce because we represent the core of the workforce at the agency. But it’s also important to note that it’s civil service workforce in the context of all these other workforce segments who also participate in our missions and they better.

Gillian French:
Yeah. And you said there, obviously, your role is varying from short term, long term. And do you think your role has changed significantly over the past two years? Do you think you’ve had to adapt to new skill sets? And what’s your view, I suppose, as well, just of holistically of the CHRO and their role for the future?

Jane Datta:
So the answer to your first question, is absolutely yes, change

Gillian French:
Two questions in one there. Sorry, Jane.

Jane Datta:
No, I thought it was a good place to start. So, I actually stepped into this role in January of 2020, which is of course right before the pandemic began and so I think it’s fair to say that when we recognized it as a pandemic as opposed to an emerging issue to address, but really it was urgent and important, there weren’t really any benchmarks, there was no history of how do we handle this. So in the moment, I had to connect with the leadership of the agency. We formed a team and we figured it out from the, with a clean sheet of paper, how do we address this? What do we do for our workforce? If we are going to send everyone home, which we did, we went to sort of 25% telework some of the time to about 95% teleworking all the time within the space of a week. So it was just a very sudden change for how it is that we were operating.

And we had to start with some principles, the principle of safety first, safety of our workforce, and then we’d figure out what the impacts were a mission. But that was very clear and unambiguous. And when you start there and you then figure out all the other pieces and what tools you need and how you help supervisors and leaders and how you communicate and all of that kind of flowed from there. But I think what that taught me was that the role of the CHCO was really to think in the shoes of the workforce. For how this might feel to them. And the supervisors too, I must say. Because the supervisors are really on the front lines of helping the workforce. And so what did they need to know? Keep it simple. Start with one thing, one foot in front of the next one.

So, what I wanted to point out about the experience of the pandemic was that it really reinforced the importance of the kind of chief people officer aspect of the role. And it really required things of the role of the CHCO, in addition by the way, to everyone’s role who sat in any kind of leadership or managerial seat. So it wasn’t unique to me. But I think it was an important feature of the role and it was a way to demonstrate what it looks like when you actually walk in the footsteps of your workforce and your supervisors.

So I would say that I think that this is what’s happening even now that we’re pulling out of the pandemic and we’re moving into the future of work, I feel like what we learned then still applies and then some. So I think would emphasize the chief people officer piece of the role as being ever more important, not just for what I do at my agency but in organizations worldwide.

Gillian French:
Yeah. And I really love that piece on the supervisors/people managers because I think during the pandemic there are a lot of high-level decisions made where organizations came out and said, “No one will ever work in the office again. They can all work…” And the feedback I got was there were a lot of people managers and supervisors on the ground going, “We won’t be able to manage this work.” And decisions being made without their input and probably without the input of CHROs as well. But it makes sense. Get your people managers and walk in their shoes and good employee experience will follow from there. But I think it’s good to keep those principles now in…

As we say new way, new world of work, but it’s really just, it’s an ever-evolving. We’re definitely not there yet. We’re not frozen yet. We’re still kind of in flux or the pendulum is still going. I don’t know what way you’d describe it. But we’re certainly not in a steady state. Would you agree?

Jane Datta:
I would agree. And in fact, I don’t know that we ever will be. So I think we just need to accept that there’s some amount of progress and change that will occur. I don’t know that it will occur in a linear fashion. It might be that you have periods of stability. But I think if we were to look, have a crystal ball and be able to see the world of work even five years from now, we might not recognize today.

Gillian French:
I know.

Jane Datta:
And that’s okay because what it promises is the ever-increasing ability to be productive and fulfilled by all aspects of our lives. And that really ought to be the goal for humankind. And so the more tools, the more practices, the more ways of interacting that we have, the more choice our employees have. And that, I think, pays dividends both to the organization and its work as well as to the workforce.

Gillian French:
And that probably brings us nicely into the employee experience. What, in your experience, and you said some lovely things there that I totally agree, think about humankind rather than labeling it maybe percentages and not really characterizing people for what they are. But what do you think are the key components for employee experience or what are you doing in NASA that really I suppose fulfills your employee experience offering?

Jane Datta:
There are a number of things that we’re paying attention to. Let me just start with, I think we have to feel committed to the work and the mission. You have to start there. So at NASA, one of the ways that we do that… I mean people love our mission, so this isn’t hard.

Gillian French:
I was just like, I actually looked it up and I was saying, “Oh my god, how blessed you are. Your vision is exploring the secrets of the universe for the benefit of all.” I mean imagine heading into the car every day knowing that that was the company you’re working for. It’s just unbelievable.

Jane Datta:
Exactly. And we have a very loyal and long-standing workforce because of that. But even if you’re working in a business function like my staff do or something that’s not directly touching the products of our mission, nonetheless I think we all feel a connection to the mission.

So in HR, one of the things I do is I sponsor what we call launch watch parties. So you invite people, I invite my staff to join us on Teams or whatever your collaboration tool is and you actually watch the televised launch. But the difference is you’re not all at the launch. Though many, many people go and we actually encourage and sometimes fund people to go to the launches when they can. But it’s a way of sharing the experience together so that you can react to what’s happening, you can share the excitement.

So connecting employees to the mission is a really big feature. And of course, we don’t have just human space-wide missions. This applies to science missions and many other aspects of the mission work that we do at the agency. We actually have speakers come and talk about the missions. So technical specialists who explain what the James Webb Space Telescope pictures actually mean. What are they telling us? They’re beautiful works of art in my opinion, but they also have some very specific meanings when you have someone to decode them for you. So understanding what that is, it’s really important, not just for my workforce but for anybody at NASA. So that’s one thing that we do.

And I think if you start there and there’s this commitment to the mission, a lot of the people side gets a little easier. And I think it can happen in any organization. I know we’re particularly lucky because we have this most incredible set of missions. However, I believe it is possible no matter what.

Another thing that we do is we welcome the whole employee. So we really believe fervently in the balance of your work and your personal life, which is not a new concept I will say. But I think in recent times this idea of how it is that you balance the flexibilities that we obtained over the last few years with returning to some of the old norms but not all of them. We’re having to reexamine what that flexibility looks like. Have we got it all figured out? No. But I think the intent is there and I think employees feel that intent and that’s, I think, the more important part. Did we get it exactly right? No. Do they know that we intend and are trying to, that’s what matters.

The other thing I’d say is I think we’ve kind of acknowledged at NASA, that extremes hurt. So when you make dictates everybody in the office or no one come to the office or everybody work at this time or on this day, if it doesn’t have a purpose behind it I think it is less than responsive to what the employees really need to be both engaged and productive. So we really are focusing on extending flexibility. And it’s easy to think of employment as kind of a transaction. I come, I do this work, I leave, you pay me. But work is so much more than that. And so if we accept that and really embrace the fact that the whole employee needs to come… When they are working, they need to bring their whole selves. I think that it’s incredibly fruitful for the purposes of the mission and doing the work and retaining the workforce and making it just an overall excellent experience. I do think supervisors are key here and we have focused a lot of our tension on supervisors and helping them.

So I think there’s sort of a mutual investment which also comes from what I just shared. And one of the ways in which we invest is not just in helping them make some half choice but also learning and development. And if I’m investing in you because I’m caring to talk to you about what you need and where you’re going in your career and we have actual resources to help you connect to the learning experiences that you need, that’s a kind of investment. And then in return, you’re asking the employees to invest the best of themselves in the work that they do. So those are some of the employee experience features that I have tried to acknowledge and emphasize, especially over the last few years.

Gillian French:
That seems exceptionally sensible and it makes total sense. Giving people purposeful work, training and developing them, giving them choices, working with them on what works for them and works with the team and informing them, and keeping them abreast of changes like that. That all seems and the right way to operate. But we see in so many organizations that just don’t get that right.

What would be your observations of organizations in this current environment and what they’re getting wrong? Is it the extremes of calling people all back in or keeping everybody all back out? Or where do you think organizations are going really wrong in the employee experience?

Jane Datta:
For sure extremes would be on my list. But that’s a manifestation of do it because I tell you to as opposed to a what’s the rational basis for asking for this.

So I would say that it’s perfectly reasonable for an organization or a supervisor to say, “I really need everyone here for X, Y, Z.” I think what is gets missed or overlooked sometimes is why? What is it about what you need? In some cases, this is because there is a belief which I think is, I actually believed it myself, that there is a need for in-person interaction for some of what we do. And it’s perfectly legitimate to say that. Sometimes though, the personal interaction piece of it is sort of secondary to you having to be here to do this work versus just calling it for what it is. Doing team building, bonding as a team or as a home organization, and understanding and connecting with each other is a perfectly legitimate work need. Let’s call it that and say in order to do that, I need everyone to do this or that.

So I think organizations go wrong when they don’t take the time to explain or to think through what it is that they’re asking. And people will respond to that negatively but once they understand what the intent is, I think they’ll throw their lot in to the effort. So we have tried really hard to have that, a good amount of dialogue and to have… The supervisor does in the end decide where you can work and what your telework schedule is and because we’ve got to get the work done, but what we are encouraging them to do and providing all sorts of materials to help them learn is how to make sense of this with their people so that everyone can be all in on it with them.

Gillian French:
Yeah, I think so. And I think leadership is the key. In a sense, you’re going there with the people piece and the supervisor piece. And I’d merely say my observations over the last probably only a few months is that there’s a real pull for certain leaders to bring people back in for control or extremism and maybe there is a change in the style of leadership that we need going forward in this new world of work, I’ll just call it that for argument’s sake, where there’s just constant change. That’s the only inevitable. Constant change is going to… There’s lots of it. It’s a fairly turbulent environment out there. So we probably need a different type of leadership. And that’s the struggle is the pull to go back to the linear get in and that feels safe to have everyone around and go back to what I know worked and got me results versus this pull of new leadership that trusts, inspires, and treats people like adults and as long term and sustainable.

What’s your view on that?

Jane Datta:
Totally agree and in fact that we’ve talked… I think we have focused a lot on the messaging, consistent messaging, from senior leadership. And we have been blessed with really people-focused leaders at our agency. That is a differentiator for us I think. And because of that, we have been able to then take that overall message and support all the way down to the supervisors. So, I believe that our supervisors are the ones that we need in the future. As I mentioned earlier on in our conversation, supervisors are where the work and workforce come together. They are really on the front lines and so they’re the ones who are having to make those decisions in the moment and deal with the particularities of what someone needs versus what the work needs and resolve those conflicts. And they may seem little and they are, but they matter in the long run because it’s about employee engagement and it’s about keeping the workforce feeling trusted and part of the decision-making process, which I think is incredibly important.

So we have focused on the supervisors, particularly for about three years. When we first went out because of the pandemic, we began these sessions, they were at that moment probably once a week. We now still do them but it’s more like once a month. But they’re virtual. And so we’ve had up to 1000, 1200 supervisors from across the agency join our sessions and they cover a whole range of topics. They involve Q&A so we can get at some of the questions that they have.

But here was the finding that we didn’t expect, they actually learned from each other. And so there isn’t an easy way outside of the center, which is the geographic construct that we have for organizing our workforce. So we have a lot of connections within a center, but across the whole agency, being a supervisor is very similar. And so this idea that they would hear from their peers, learn from their peers and be able to ask questions that others also had but didn’t think to ask has really, really helped us do well throughout the last three years.

So I hand it to them and I think to your question, those are the kinds of leaders that we need. They’ve got to be creative, they’ve got to care and they’ve got to be willing to continue to learn. That takes time. Being a supervisor is not just duties assigned. It is a serious endeavor. It’s almost a discipline of its own. And when you think about it in those terms, you realize that if it’s a discipline of its own, I need to pick people who are adept, who have the right mindset, who can learn what they need even if they don’t start out knowing how to do all of these things.

Gillian French:
Yeah. And I think that’s sometimes within organizations, they have these career pathways and they tend to promote the person who’s best at the job that they’re doing and they don’t have any other options for them. So they tend to go into people management because maybe it’s more money and it’s the only way to go. And not everybody wants to be a people manager.
So do you have different career pathways that people can go into expertise and that you have a specific program for those that really are interested in people?

Jane Datta:
We do. So we have traditional promotion opportunities into or through different levels of supervisory roles. But we also have career paths for people who want to work in teams but not supervise others. And so you have a choice all the way into the executive ranks. We have roles that are more, that can be individual contributor roles. And I think that’s important so that you don’t actually have people migrating into supervisory roles because that’s the only way in which their career can progress vertically.

Gillian French:
No, I totally agree and I think many organizations can do a lot of things, but getting your people managers right at that layer. Because as an employee, if you don’t get on well with your boss, there’s very little else. It has such a huge impact on your well-being and your employee experience. Really there has to be a lot of time and effort so it sounds like you’re doing the right thing for sure.

I’d love to know what is your biggest challenge at the moment. What’s the biggest challenge for you as CHRO within NASA?

Jane Datta:
My biggest challenge is probably helping the agency carve a path to the future for our workforce. And the only reason it’s hard is for… It’s for Great reasons. It’s that the landscape around us is changing. You’ve probably heard about the commercial partnerships that we have and the contributions that our partners have made. These are both domestic and international. And so we’re seeing the industry around us really expand in its capabilities. And so that means that we are working with more and more partners and they’re doing some things that maybe we used to do. And so there’s this collaborative partnerships and collaboration outside of the agency, which has always been a feature of our agency, but we’re actually now expanding the ways in which we are or the things over which we are partnering. And so that makes us have to examine, well what does that mean for the workforce that we need in the future? And then setting a roadmap to some future state that is, not a whole scale different than what we have, but accounts for some of these changes.

Gillian French:
I can imagine.

Jane Datta:
It’s a fun intellectual challenge as well as a cultural challenge for us because we love what we do. And so it’s hard to think about changing the nature of what we do in the future. But I think that there are some great minds at the agency, this is not mine to do alone. And, in fact, collaboration across the agency is kind of how work gets done overall.

Gillian French:
Yeah, we dream big and we work together. I saw that on the website as well.

Jane Datta:
Dream big. That’s exactly right.

Gillian French:
I’m trying to get recruited here. No, I’m joking. I’m joking. But no, it’s amazing.
But I want to know if… It sounds like there’s so much happening as in change and it sounds like you’re really good on communication as we’re talking through. I’d love to know how do you communicate some of these structural changes, some of the changes in the ways of working, what’s happening within the business? It must be really difficult to keep everybody up to date. And I saw a stat recently where 61% of employees, it was a survey done across Ireland with lots of employees and lots of HR professionals, but 61% of employees said that the communication was worse than it was in the middle of COVID within their organization. And actually, I’ve seen that trend in talking to other guests and speaking to other people within my network and feeling that companies were really good during COVID and were communicating on a regular basis but now it seems to have pittered off.

So I’d love to get your view on how you communicate or the ways you do it and what’s worked and hasn’t worked.

Jane Datta:
Yes, I think the idea that communication is incredibly important has always been there for us. I think it was because we were amplifying all of our communication efforts over the last few years and are still going with that. So I guess the way I would approach it is that we are very intentional about how we communicate. You’ve probably heard about studies that say how many times people have to hear something before they remember it.

Gillian French:
10 I think. 10 I think.

Jane Datta:
Yeah, it’s gone up.

Gillian French:
Probably our attention spans have gone down so I can get that.

Jane Datta:
It’s maybe with the attention span. I’d also say there’s just so much to consume.

Gillian French:
Information, yeah. Coming at us, yeah.

Jane Datta:
What I call a noisy communications environment. So one of the ways in which we address that is we’re certainly leveraging all of the new tools that we have. And so it’s SharePoint and it’s an intranet and all that. But I believe that personalized communications matters. It’s not enough just to say, “Go look at that website.” That’s really great for reinforcing something you’ve already heard.

So we have layered communications. For really important messages we do it at multiple levels. So you’re actually if you’re in attendance for all of those events, you are actually hearing it multiple times. You’ve got the agency, you’ve got the center, you’ve got the work unit, you’ve got supervisor sessions, you’ve got probably other venues where people are talking to people. And the vantage of the people talking to people approach is that there’s context around what’s being shared. And in many cases an opportunity for people to ask questions so they can understand it better, versus purely written or purely recorded, which are really also great supporting communication approaches. It’s really a blended approach.

And we also feel like this is another example of where the home unit and the supervisor matter because that’s where it gets… You really have to understand what it means, what does it mean for me? But also what do I have to say about it? And here’s what I think. And it becomes more of a dialogue than a one-way. And so we really encourage active communications in all of those ways and person to person, supervisor to group, supervisor to employee, agency administrator to 18,000 people. We’re doing it at all of these levels and I think that it helps. It helps to keep everyone on track. It’s a lot of effort. It is a very intentional, planned resourced activity at our agency because with the amount of mission work going on, it’s really hard to keep everybody on the same path without that level of investment.

Gillian French:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I remember saying years ago, people can handle bad communication, but no communication is just… And I think that’s in the isolation of no communication, people can start making up their own stories and it ends up being a noisy organization with lots of rumors and different things. Well, it sounds like you have it well under control.
I’m going to just ask you a couple of quick-fire questions now because I can’t believe our time has passed by so quickly. I could listen to you all day. I’d love to know what’s your favorite book and why?

Jane Datta:
Well, I’m a classical musician and I recently read a book called Every Good Boy Does Fine, which is, it’s a musical reference. But it’s actually the story, a memoir of a famous classical musician. And the reason that… Jeremy Denk is the name of the musician.

The reason that I picked that was because it’s quite a story of persistence and really having a goal and seeking a goal. But it was also a lot about language and the beauty of language. If you think about communications that we’ve just spent a few minutes talking about, it’s one thing just to be kind of…

Jane Datta:
Not think about how to… I think it’s an opportunity to think about how to use language to express ideas and decisions in a way that can really work for the people who are listening or for whom it’s intended. And so in some ways, the teachers that this musician had along the way had very different approaches, but it was all about that. It was all about finding a way to get through. In the learning process. So I was able to make connections between that journey and the journey that I and my colleagues are on for understanding and learning.

Gillian French:
It’s amazing that you said that because I sometimes think in communication and how we operate in organizations, we’re just setting them up and communicating in one particular way. And it tends to be for the logical and the structured, whereas we don’t communicate through the heart-lighted people and engage their hearts and minds. And sometimes that can be very isolating for people that are more feeling-based, intuition-based, than overly logical. So it’s just been my experience of late that I’m noticing some of the stats where people, it’s like 50% of people are not feeling like they belong, 50% of people are disengaged. And it’s nearly like the hearts and the minds, those people are not being engaged in the workforce. And we need to communicate and operate and engage everybody and not just one particular style.

Jane Datta:
I absolutely agree with what you said. We’ve all had those experiences where we’ve listened to a podcast or heard someone in our organization say something and you sort of suddenly realize, “Ah, yes, that’s it.” So I hope to have more that’s it moments myself.

Gillian French:
Yeah, me too. Yeah, “That’s not more, That’s it then. That’s not it. Anyway. This is a question I ask most of our guests, but I think, I don’t know, you’ll probably say what you said at the start, which is we probably can’t predict. All we know is that the future is going to be lots of change. But do you have any particular predictions for the future of work? Do you think there’s anything on the horizon that you see coming?

Jane Datta:
I think that we are all wrestling with what we call hybrid. Hybrid of course can mean a lot of different things. It can mean people who were there in a meeting and people who are on a video in a meeting. That’s one version of hybrid. Hybrid can also mean people who are only sometimes on site. So I’m using the broad hybrid. I think that we will stop focusing on hybrid and it will just be how we’re living our lives in a few years. But between now and then, we’ve got to get accustomed to it. But in the spirit of things are going to continue to progress, I think we are going to get, I think we’re going to stop sort of focusing so narrowly on, “Oh my gosh, this hybrid thing, it’s so hard.” The tools are going to get better and easier and more intuitive to use. That will help. But also I think the new patterns, new patterns will emerge and people’s comfort levels will increase. And so then we’ll be onto whatever the next thing is that we need to focus on.

I also believe pretty fervently that person-to-person in-person interactions will always matter. And I think that there are certain things that we need in-person interactions to do, even if it means traveling or venues that we don’t normally… It’s not really about the office. It’s really about figuring out how to stay… Networks and relationships and how to keep them alive and thriving. And that will, again, be a feature. And people who can manage their relationships well will really find that they can be successful as we move forward. So those are my two.

Gillian French:
Amazing. Yes, I think relational intelligence is the new bottom line. And I definitely believe that. And then there’s another lady Fredrika, she’s a psychologist and she’s challenging Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at the moment and saying that the first need is social. If we had food and we were in the jungle and we had water, but we were completely alone, we would just die because we need that social connection. And that’s never going to change. So all these external things will happen but we’ll always need that as humans.

Jane Datta:
I agree. I think that’s extremely well said.

Gillian French:
Yeah. And then the last question I have for you, and it’s a bit of a tricky one, but there’s so much around global leadership at the moment. If you had the global leaders in the room with you, what would you say to them? What advice would you give them?

Jane Datta:
Well, that’s quite a question.

Gillian French:
Or any type of leader. Is there something they’re missing or is there something they have to evolve to?

Jane Datta:
What I’d say is fundamentally their role is to set the direction and know how well it’s going. That they need to be able to give their people. So pay attention to having really good people in your organization and then trust them and give them choice. And I think that’s really the difference. But also, so you’re caring about the workforce, but you’re caring about the environment. You’re, operating in a system. And rather than just focusing on the bottom line, which you have to do, this is part of the deal, but I think how does that bottom line get accomplished when I see the whole thing as a system and I’m paying some attention to each part of the system and how well it works together? But I don’t have to do it all, I have great people. One of the things that NASA has is immense talent in its walls, both technical talent, but also just people talent. And so I think we can give our people a lot of freedom and flexibility because we can rely on them to understand what needs to get done, to go off and do it, and to do it in a way that is caring and professional. So if you don’t have good people, you don’t have that to start with. So that would be my advice.

Gillian French:
Amazing. A lovely way to finish. Thank you so much for your time, Jane. It’s been an absolute pleasure and I won’t forget this. It’s been really, really amazing. Yeah. So thank you so much.