Effective

Chapter 7Effectiveness Through Managing Workplace Emotion Appropriately

In space, some folks can actually hear you scream. At least, they can hear you scream at your fellow astronauts.

A 2023 NASA document called NASA-STD-3001 Technical Brief: Behavioral Health Mishaps makes for an interesting read on the interpersonal challenges of space travel. It’s not all smooth sailing, hundreds of miles above planet earth: the document cites at least three missions (Soyuz 21, Salyut 5, and Soyuz TM-2-Mir) that were terminated early or even evacuated due to “interpersonal issues [or] conflict.”¹

A Harvard Medical School article quotes a cosmonaut’s diary on one of these tense missions:

“Today was difficult,” Lebedev wrote about crewmate Anatoly Berezovoy on their 60th day in space. “We don’t understand what is going on with us. We silently walk by each other, feeling offended. We have to find some way to make things better.”²

Who among us, at work, has not at some point silently walked by a co-worker feeling offended? The cosmonauts’ struggles are very relatable.

That said, it may seem extraordinary to end a complex, expensive undertaking like a space journey because people are struggling to get along. But thinking back on our learning from Chapter 5, when the stakes are high, you cannot take the risk that bickering leads to someone’s death. So, at least three times, a government has taken the extreme step of pulling the plug on a space mission where emotions ran too high.

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