#539 Building Culture the NASA Way: Brady Pyle interviewed by Niels Brabandt

Building Culture the NASA Way: Brady Pyle interviewed by Niels Brabandt

Article by Niels Brabandt

Culture is one of the most frequently discussed and least effectively managed forces in organisational life. Many companies define values, print posters, run workshops, launch surveys, and still find that little changes once the initial enthusiasm fades. In this leadership interview, Niels Brabandt speaks with Brady Pyle, retired NASA HR executive, Chief HR and Inclusion Officer at Space Center Houston, and author of Building Culture the NASA Way: Mission Critical Principles for Creating an Organization's Culture.

The conversation matters for decision-makers because it moves culture away from slogans and towards disciplined leadership practice. Brady Pyle explains how NASA improved employee engagement by becoming intentional, listening to employees, acting on data, involving leaders at multiple levels, and treating culture as mission-critical work. Niels Brabandt guides the discussion towards the questions most organisations struggle with: Why do leaders collect data and fail to act on it? Why can culture not simply be delegated to HR? How do inclusion and innovation belong together? And how can momentum be sustained when daily business returns?

The interview offers a practical and unusually candid view of culture-building from an environment where performance, safety, complexity, public service constraints, and human collaboration are inseparable. It is not a romantic story about NASA. It is a leadership conversation about what every organisation can learn when culture becomes a deliberate system rather than a decorative statement.

The interview context: culture beyond posters and workshops

Niels Brabandt opens the interview by describing a familiar organisational pattern. Companies say they want a strong culture. They define values, place posters on the wall, run workshops, and briefly create the feeling that something meaningful has happened. Four weeks later, many employees experience the same organisation as before, only with more visible value statements.

This framing is important because it separates symbolic culture work from operational culture work. Brady Pyle's contribution is valuable precisely because he does not reduce culture to communication, branding, or sentiment. His book, Building Culture the NASA Way, is presented in the interview as a set of mission-critical principles rooted in practical experience at NASA and later at Space Center Houston.

Pyle's central message is that culture must be built intentionally. It does not improve because leaders wish it to improve. It improves when organisations listen carefully, select a critical few priorities, involve employees in solutions, communicate progress, and keep repeating the cycle with discipline.

Why Brady Pyle wrote Building Culture the NASA Way

When Niels Brabandt asks Brady Pyle about his motivation for writing the book, Pyle explains that NASA was not always the best place to work in government. For years, the organisation ranked around third to fifth in government ratings. The issue was not a total absence of engagement. NASA already had good engagement scores in the 70 percent range. The problem was complacency.

Pyle calls it organisational arrogance. NASA thought it was already good enough. It was not paying sufficient attention to what employees were saying about how to make the workplace better. The turning point came when the organisation became intentional about engagement and culture. By the time Pyle retired from NASA, he says engagement had increased to 85 percent.

The book was therefore written not as an abstract theory of culture but as a translation of practical strategies. Pyle also explains that the same framework has worked at Space Center Houston, a very different environment with around 200 full-time employees and another 300 part-time and seasonal employees. The contrast matters: the principles are not limited to an 18,000-person government organisation. They can be adapted to smaller, resource-constrained organisations as well.

The data trap: collecting feedback without acting on it

One of the sharpest moments in the interview comes when Niels Brabandt asks why organisations invest so much in surveys, appraisal systems, monthly feedback tools, consultants, data storage, and evaluation processes, only to do little with the information they collect.

Pyle's answer is direct. At NASA, the issue was not lack of data. It was lack of sufficiently intentional action. The organisation already believed it was good. That belief became a barrier to improvement. Once NASA focused on a critical few improvements each year, pulled teams of employees together to develop solutions, and communicated those changes back to the workforce, culture began to shift.

For business decision-makers, this is a central lesson. Engagement data creates no value unless it changes behaviour, systems, priorities, and leadership conversations. Survey fatigue is rarely caused by measurement alone. It is caused by measurement without visible consequence. Employees are more willing to participate when they see that their feedback leads to decisions, investment, and change.

Culture cannot be delegated to HR

Niels Brabandt challenges the idea that culture can simply be assigned to HR while business leaders focus on operations. Brady Pyle rejects that approach clearly. If culture is delegated to HR, the organisation is in trouble.

Pyle describes HR as a steward of culture. That distinction matters. HR can coach, advise, build systems, support leadership development, facilitate feedback, and help translate values into practices. But HR cannot replace leadership behaviour. Culture is experienced through the daily relationship between employees and leaders.

Pyle states that two-thirds of engagement scores are based on employees' relationship with, and perspective of, their leaders. That observation should concern every executive team. Culture is not primarily what the organisation says. It is what leaders repeatedly do, tolerate, reward, ignore, and model. Leadership development is therefore not a side activity. It is a culture lever.

Leadership development is a must-have, not a nice-to-have

Niels Brabandt asks whether leadership development must be treated as essential rather than optional. Pyle's answer is unequivocal. Leaders do not develop effectively merely because they are placed into real-world practice and left to work it out alone. Organisations need a strategy.

At NASA, and later at Space Center Houston, Pyle explains that leadership development was based on the 70-20-10 model. Seventy percent comes from on-the-job experience. This includes placing leaders in the right roles, giving them progressively more responsible leadership assignments, and ensuring that they do not skip critical development steps. Stretch assignments and projects are central.

Twenty percent comes from contact: mentoring, coaching, and people who pour into leaders. The final ten percent is formal training, conferences, and structured learning. Pyle's point is not that training is irrelevant. It is that training alone is insufficient. Leaders learn concepts in classrooms, but they build capability through experience, feedback, mentoring, coaching, and accountability.

Inclusion and innovation: a NASA lesson from failure and learning

The interview also addresses inclusion and innovation, including the political and organisational pressures surrounding such initiatives. Niels Brabandt asks how public service and resource-constrained organisations can pursue this work while dealing with daily workload, understaffing, budget pressure, and political resistance.

Pyle answers from NASA's experience and links the issue to lessons following the Columbia accident. One of the critical cultural lessons was that data and information existed in the system but did not reach leaders effectively. The leadership question became: How do leaders ask better questions? How do they ensure that information travels upwards? How do they create conditions in which different voices are heard?

For Pyle, inclusion is not a narrow branding exercise. It is a mechanism for better thinking, better information flow, and stronger innovation. A culture of inclusion means that people are at the table, that their voices are heard, and that the organisation becomes more capable of generating creative and effective solutions. In this framing, inclusion is not a distraction from mission. It is a condition for mission performance.

Combating organisational arrogance through benchmarking

Brady Pyle also highlights benchmarking as a way of combating organisational arrogance. NASA had to reach outside itself and understand that it did not have all the answers. That mindset is relevant far beyond the space sector.

Successful organisations are often at risk precisely because they are successful. Their achievements can harden into self-protection. Their reputation can become a substitute for curiosity. Their historical excellence can make it harder to hear uncomfortable evidence.

Niels Brabandt's interview with Pyle therefore points to a central leadership discipline: strong cultures remain curious. They benchmark. They listen. They learn from other sectors. They refuse to confuse past excellence with future readiness.

Making inclusion full-team work

At Space Center Houston, Pyle explains that the organisation's values include being space enthusiasts, being people-driven, and being champions of curiosity. He connects this to a culture strategy of inclusion and innovation. His title was also updated from VP of HR to Chief HR and Inclusion Officer, reflecting the strategic importance of the topic.

Pyle is careful to define inclusion broadly. He says inclusion is about making sure everyone is included. He notes that opponents of some DEI efforts often criticise them for segmenting the workforce. In his experience at NASA, one important part of the work was ensuring that white men were included in inclusion and innovation efforts as well.

This is a significant point for business leaders. Inclusion succeeds when it is framed as a full-team capability rather than a symbolic label. It must increase participation, trust, voice, curiosity, and contribution across the whole organisation. When inclusion is connected to innovation and mission performance, it becomes harder to dismiss as a peripheral initiative.

Sustaining momentum when daily business returns

Niels Brabandt asks one of the most practical questions in culture work: How does an organisation sustain momentum once the initial programme, celebration, or launch is over? Pyle returns to the NASA method: a yearly focus, regular review of engagement scores, focus groups, upward feedback for leaders, and a disciplined choice of a few areas for improvement.

The key is repetition. NASA did not treat culture as a one-off campaign. It returned to the data year after year, formed employee teams to work on solutions, and made visible changes based on employee input. Over time, Pyle says response rates increased to 90 percent and engagement scores rose to 85 percent because employees could see that their feedback mattered.

This is a powerful reminder for executives. Culture momentum is not maintained by inspiration alone. It is maintained by governance, routines, measurement, communication, and action. Daily business will always return. The question is whether culture work is integrated into the rhythm of leadership or treated as an occasional event.

Continuous improvement as a cultural mindset

Brady Pyle's final leadership lesson is deceptively simple: there is always something leaders can improve and always something organisations can improve, no matter how good they are. That mindset protects organisations from drift.

This is especially relevant for high-performing organisations. Mediocre organisations know they have problems. Successful organisations often believe their performance is proof that their culture does not need attention. Pyle's NASA experience suggests the opposite. Even good organisations can become better when they treat employee feedback as evidence, not inconvenience.

For decision-makers, continuous improvement in culture requires humility. It requires leaders to accept that the organisation's reputation, mission, or historical success does not exempt it from listening. Culture-building is not the pursuit of perfection. It is the discipline of repeated, evidence-informed improvement.

What business leaders can take from the NASA way

The interview between Brady Pyle and Niels Brabandt offers a clear set of lessons for business leaders, HR executives, public service leaders, nonprofit executives, and transformation teams.

First, culture requires intentionality. Values on a wall are not enough. Second, engagement data must lead to visible action. Third, culture cannot be outsourced to HR. Fourth, leadership development must combine experience, coaching, mentoring, and formal learning. Fifth, inclusion should be understood as a full-team driver of innovation and mission performance. Sixth, momentum is sustained through routines, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

These lessons are practical because they do not depend on copying NASA's size, budget, or prestige. They depend on leadership discipline. As Pyle emphasises, people often assume that their organisation is not NASA and therefore cannot learn from NASA. His response is that the strategies are practical and transferable.

Conclusion: culture is mission-critical leadership work

This interview is valuable because it refuses to romanticise culture. Brady Pyle does not present culture as a slogan, a poster, or a workshop. He presents it as mission-critical leadership work that requires listening, humility, systems, leadership development, inclusion, and consistent follow-through.

Niels Brabandt's questions bring the conversation back to the reality of modern organisations: data without action, HR without leadership ownership, values without behaviour, inclusion without clarity, and initiatives that lose momentum when daily business returns. Pyle's answers show that the alternative is not complicated in theory, but demanding in practice.

Building culture the NASA way means making culture operational. It means treating employee voice as intelligence, leadership development as infrastructure, inclusion as innovation capacity, and continuous improvement as a way of life. For decision-makers, the lesson is clear: culture is not what an organisation claims. Culture is what it repeatedly builds.

Niels Brabandt

---

More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify

For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.

Is excellent leadership important to you?

Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com

Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn

Website: www.NB-Networks.biz

Podcast and Videocast Transcript

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

You all know that culture is important. The question is, how do you build culture? And now you probably say, well, who can tell me? I can tell you, can tell you. We have an expert on the matter with us here today. The translator of the NASA way, a retired NASA HR executive, the chief HR inclusion officer at the Space Center, and used to someone who really had to navigate from public service and everything that comes with it through his whole career. I'm very proud to have you here. Hello and welcome, Brady Pyle.

Brady Pyle

Hi, Niels. It's great to be with you today.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Thank you very much for taking the time. We're getting straight into it. You wrote the book about probably anything you learned and did in your life, Building Culture the NASA Way: Mission Critical Principles for Creating an Organization's Culture. Many organizations struggle with this. They say, we want to have a culture and we aim for something. And then we have posters on the wall which say, these are our values. And then we have workshops and everything feels good. And 4 weeks later, anyone says, I think it's the same it was before, just with posters on the wall. I think that was not what we aimed for.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

My first question, of course, is what was your main motivation to write this book right now at this point in time?

Brady Pyle

Yeah, the main motivation, Niels, we learned at NASA, NASA wasn't always the best place to work in the government. We had to actually make intentional efforts. We were 3rd to 5th in the government ratings for many years. Because we weren't paying attention to our engagement scores. We weren't paying attention to what employees were telling us about how to make the place better.

Brady Pyle

When we got intentional about it, when we used some very practical strategies that I outline in the book— part of the reason I wanted to write the book is the last 10 years I've spoken at a variety of HR conferences and different places, talked to different leaders, and they understand that the framework we use, the strategies we used are things they can do in their organization. And then I've, I've used that the last 3 years at Space Center Houston. Space Center Houston is a small nonprofit. We have 200 full-time employees, another 300 part-time and seasonal. So 500 people versus 18,000 at NASA. But the framework and the strategies work in this environment as well.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

So talking about you didn't pay attention, do you think that quite— because that is something that really stuck with me I think many people do the evaluations. You have the annual appraisal interview and you do the evaluation and you do the monthly survey. So you collect all the data, you have it at your fingertips. So how come that people say they spend an enormous amount of money on consultancy companies doing that for them or doing it by themselves? The hour, the hours that they have to put in there, the tools to evaluate everything, to store everything according to data protection laws. How is it possible to do all of that and then not act on it?

Brady Pyle

Well, for NASA, it was organizational arrogance. We already thought we were good. We thought we were fine. Our engagement scores were good. We were in the 70% range for employee engagement, which was good. But really, the intentional efforts took us from that to— by the time I retired from NASA, it was 85% engagement.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Wow.

Brady Pyle

Because we were really focused on the things that mattered And the difference maker for us was we would focus on a critical few improvements in the survey each year.

Brady Pyle

We would pull teams of employees together to drive solutions, and then we'd communicate those things out to the workforce. Hey, we're listening to you. We're making these improvements. We're making these changes.

Brady Pyle

And that happened at multiple levels of NASA. And that was a game changer in really building the culture.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

So you said it happened at multiple levels at NASA. So that sounds like the typical leader saying, oh, you know, just put this to to HR and they're going to figure it out somehow. I have to deal with the business. That's not a good approach, I think.

Brady Pyle

No, absolutely not. I think, I think if you're delegating your culture to HR, you're going to be in trouble. I see HR as a steward of the culture. So we're coaching leaders on what they need to do to build culture.

Brady Pyle

Two-thirds of your engagement scores are based on employees' relationship and perspective of their leaders. So pouring investment into leadership development, strengthening your leadership, strengthening your systems, which another thing that I talk about practical ways to do that in the book, is really going to drive your culture and push it forward.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Excellent. So you would say that developing leaders is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. It doesn't happen naturally just by real-world practice and letting them do what they think they should do?

Brady Pyle

No, you've got to have a strategy around it. And our strategy at NASA that we've replicated here at Space Center Houston is based on the 70-20-10 model. So that model says 70% of leadership development comes from on-the-job experience. So are you putting leaders in the right roles? Are you giving them progressively more responsible leadership roles from team lead to frontline supervisor to leader of leaders? You're not skipping steps. You're giving them stretch assignments and projects. So that's 70%.

Brady Pyle

20% is based on contact. So mentoring and coaching is really important here. Setting up mentors in the organization that can really pour into leaders.

Brady Pyle

The final 10% is what most of us think about when we think about leadership development, that's your training, your conferences. And so that was an important model at NASA to really reframe the thinking for leaders. When they would come to HR and say, "Hey, I need to develop this leader. Can you find a class for them?" We would say, "Well, hey, how are you pouring into them from an on-the-job?" training experience? Who is mentoring them? Can we get them executive coaching to really build out their leadership skills? Yes, the training and conferences are important to learn the concepts, but these others are much more important to developing leaders.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

So you need a holistic approach to leadership to actually make it work.

Brady Pyle

Absolutely.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Very good. And in your book, it also says that you need to build a culture of inclusion and innovation. And I do not want to stir a pot, but some people will say Look, this topic at the moment is, let's say, not low on the debatable level because some people put us under pressure to actually end all of this. So what would you say when people now say, look, Brady, I actually see your point. However, we are public service. We are so busy with the daily routines and work. We are understaffed. Our budgets get cut left, right, and center. And now you come along and say, could you please just besides doing all the work, do all of that on top? While at the same time people say, oh well, these couple of initiatives are suddenly suddenly politically not on the 'I want this' agenda. How to navigate all of that at the same time while you know that the typical answer which free enterprise would choose, get the consultants in, is not available due to the budget situation?

Brady Pyle

Right, right. So I can only speak from my experience at NASA and then certainly here at Space Center Houston. And for us at NASA, when we started building a culture strategy around inclusion and innovation, it was really born out of frankly, out of some of the, the accidents that we experienced. So coming out of the Columbia accident, one of the things we learned is we had data and information in the system that didn't reach leaders. And so how were our leaders kind of asking questions? How are they bringing that forward? And so when we looked at culture strategy, we said we really need a culture of inclusion where everyone here is at the table, their voice is being heard, and then that way we come up with more creative, innovative solutions. We also need to be open-minded to different perspectives, different ideas.

Brady Pyle

We had a leader who really emphasized benchmarking, getting out there. Again, that was combating that culture of organizational arrogance where, hey, NASA, we thought we were the best. We thought we had all the answers. And so reaching out, really understanding that. So this notion of inclusion driving innovation, when I got to Space Center Houston, we had the branding initiative and our 3 core values were You know, we're space enthusiasts. We love telling the story of the past, present, and future of human spaceflight. We're people-driven. We believe in the inclusive power of people. And then we're champions of curiosity. We really want to inspire curiosity both in our crew members that we call employees and then our guests as well.

Brady Pyle

So when I looked at that, I said, hey, this culture strategy of inclusion and innovation fits with the values that are here. And so we actually updated my title. I came in as VP of HR. And I'm now the CHIO at Space Center Houston, the Chief HR and Inclusion Officer, because for us, inclusion is about making sure that everyone is included. I know the opponents of a lot of the DEI efforts really point to they were segmenting the workforce. And, and for us, inclusion is about making sure that everyone is included. The big thing for us at NASA was figuring out how to include the white guys. In the inclusion and innovation effort. And we did a good job of kind of pulling them in and getting buy-in to this notion of inclusion is about the full team.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Excellent. So of course, I now have to ask, when people now put this in place, they say you change something and sustaining something that was changed is not easy.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

So let's say I put all of this in place and we celebrate and we now have it. How do I keep the momentum? Because let's face it, daily business will come through the door and then the fascination very quickly vanishes.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

So how can I keep this momentum up? How can I sustain what I put into the organization?

Brady Pyle

Again, I would go back to what I learned at NASA and we would have a yearly focus. We would look at our both engagement scores, what we were hearing through focus groups, what we were hearing through We had regular leader feedback, what we called upward feedback, where employees gave leaders feedback on how they were doing. We would look at all that data and say, what are, what are a couple of areas that we need to focus improvements? And again, pull those teams of employees together to go work solutions. We did that year after year. And so what we saw with our engagement surveys, which in the federal government, engagement surveys are 120 questions. They're very unwieldy, to be honest. But we saw our response rate creep up to 90%. We saw our engagement scores, as I mentioned, go up to 85% because people were seeing, hey, they're listening to what I'm saying through this data. They're listening to the focus groups, they're listening to feedback that I'm giving, and they're, they're making changes based on it.

Brady Pyle

There is always something leaders can improve. There's always something organizations can improve, no matter how good you are. And so really having that mindset of continuous improvement and a true focus and intention is the way you, you keep from drifting.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Brilliant. So of course now I have to ask one more thing. When people now say, I think that Brady can be really helpful for us, either as a coach or trainer or a keynote speaker for our conference, how can people actually reach out to you?

Brady Pyle

LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me. I'm also— they can check out my website at bradypyle.com. That will show the book information as well, and they can connect with me there. I do a few of those engagements since I do have the, the full-time day job, but always glad to talk to people and engage and figure out how we can share ideas because A lot of times people can think of NASA and say, hey, we're not NASA, you know, we can't do that. But when I talk at conferences, when I talk to people, they go, oh, these are very practical strategies I can use. And so that's really the takeaway I'd want your listeners to have.

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Brilliant. I think these are the perfect final words. We see now you have a book where you see how to build the culture and you have an expert with you here today. So at the end of this podcast and videocast, there's only one thing left for me to say. Brady, thank you very much for your time.

Brady Pyle

Thank you, Niels.