Beyond Technical Skills: Growing Leaders in Highly Technical Organizations

Webcast Highlights:

• Outline different career paths to leadership and show the connection between these paths
• Recognize that development is a joint effort between the organization, the supervisor, the employee and HR
• Show the initiatives that NASA-JSC apply to create a development culture

Growing leaders in highly technical organizations can be especially challenging, considering the difficulty of cultivating leadership skills in employees who have had career success mainly because of their technical capabilities.

As a second layer of challenge, leadership roles in highly technical organizations go beyond traditional line manager roles; for instance, in a senior role like that of a subject matter expert or a project manager, the leadership capability is just as critical to the organization’s success.

Using NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) as an example, this webcast will explore the leadership needed in each of these career paths: subject matter expert, project manager and line manager. Each role requires a core set of leadership skills, yet the skills may be deployed in different ways. Webcast attendees will learn practical tools that can be implemented in their organizations to develop employees along each of these career paths. Also included are tools that can used by employees, supervisors, and HR practitioners to further employee’s career success.