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Management Commitment and Leadership 45

Supervisors look to the actions of their bosses for clues to determine what
is really considered important. What questions is the boss asking? Which
objectives does the boss support with his or her personal time? What sub-
jects does the boss discuss during performance reviews? These are the ini-
tiatives that will be given priority by subordinates. Requests that are simply
communicated by memorandum with no other visible management support
are likely to receive minimum attention from the supervisor stretched to his
or her limits.
In an environment where supervisors are looking to superiors for clues
to guide priority setting, management leadership and decisions have a pow-
erful influence in shaping what is perceived as important. Decisions that
skew the allocation of resources or rewards toward any one of the organiza-
tion’s key objectives can create conflicts. The remaining objectives, includ-
ing incident prevention, become more difficult to achieve. In many cases the
perceived necessity for special focus on only a portion of an organization’s
objectives may be driven by powerful external pressures—for example, the
special need for cost control during industry down cycles. However, man-
agement must realize the potential pitfalls of decisions that provide support
to a select few key performance areas while in effect neglecting the others.
America’s space program provides ample material for case studies on
the effects of management decisions and leadership on safety performance.
The impact of misguided decisions is illustrated by the work to expedite the
initial Apollo mission. During preparation for Apollo 1, an environment de-
veloped where intelligent individuals rationalized a dependence upon luck
to prevent serious incidents rather than diligent execution of the work re-
quired to be successful. Astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton con-
tribute many of the misguided decisions to pressure from NASA’s ultimate
9
boss, President Lyndon Johnson. Widespread unrest during 1966 regarding
the Vietnam War and other issues had President Johnson anxious to focus
the country’s attention on a success story. Johnson’s communications to
NASA were forceful in his desire for the initial Apollo mission to fly on or
ahead of the February 1967 scheduled launch date.
Apollo 1 was a complicated spacecraft with thousands of systems that
needed to work perfectly for the mission to succeed. Like earlier capsules,
the Apollo craft was equipped with a pressurization system to ensure an in-
terior free of contaminants. The use of pure oxygen to pressurize the cap-
sule was a design compromise made years earlier by the space
administration. An inherently safer nitrogen-oxygen mixture, similar to
breathing air, had been vetoed primarily because the extra containers added
weight and complexity to the craft.
Numerous failures had plagued the Apollo program—a primary reason
the Apollo team was behind schedule. Though it was understood that pure