Author Talks: What makes teams effective under pressure

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Eliza Cooper chats with Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator of the NASA Psyche mission and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure (Basic Ventures/Hachette Book Group, April 2026). Elkins-Tanton underscores the critical role leaders play in shaping team culture—and how small behaviors can make or break results. Drawing on experiences from high-stakes space missions and billion-dollar crises to everyday meetings, she shows how leaders can prevent costly silence and solve problems before they escalate. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Why did you write this book?

One day in 2017, I was sitting in a conference room for a regular meeting. But this team was working on a space probe that was going to journey into deep space. The probe would work in space for over a decade. The energy in that room got my attention.

Every problem had to be found and solved before launch, and everyone was in that room because of their particular expertise, which really helped with issues of status, such as who gets to speak. Everyone was alert; energy was crackling through the room.

People were offering ideas and laughing at jokes. We were solving problems and planning the work ahead. It was such an effective use of time and so much fun.

Then, a week or so later, I was at another organization in a different meeting. This was the type of meeting that you would likely recognize from your own experiences. It moved slowly. An attendee was on the phone. There was an agenda, but we weren’t following it. I began wondering, “Why can’t every time that humans work together be like that first meeting?”

How do you create success for a project that is also success for every individual on the team? What are the practices that make a difference? I started collecting a list of specific reasons that some teams succeeded and others didn’t. I saw pretty quickly that those different experiences and specific examples fell into three categories. There are things we can do for ourselves to become better team members, things that a network team can do together to become more effective, and things that leaders can do to enable the team. That’s how the book came together. It arose from the authentic experience of seeing a great team, followed by a huge amount of reading reference material and understanding the background and theory.

Was there anything that surprised you in the research or writing of your book?

One of the things that surprised me the most was how important those small, everyday annoyances are when someone is rude or makes a passive-aggressive remark during a meeting or while working with a team. These things happen often, and we tend to just think about them for a minute and let them go.

But it seemed to me that these behaviors were more destructive than they appeared on the surface. These are the moments that break the flow of a meeting. They draw attention to the emotional state of one person rather than keeping it on the topic the team is trying to address.

One of my favorite examples is a study conducted by Dr. Arieh Riskin. He and his research team formed 24 neonatal intensive care teams. He gave the teams a simulated health emergency in which no harm was done, and no infants were at risk.

In half the teams, the participants were asked to be normal, polite, calm leaders, and the other half were asked to display moments of rudeness. Immediately, in the teams where there was rudeness, team members would ask questions of and offer information to one another less frequently. And as soon as fewer questions were being asked and less information was being shared, these teams began making mistakes in diagnoses and medication.

If you’re a rude leader, think of all the information you are never going to have because you have silenced your team. You might really wonder about that information. What might you have known? What are the things that you'll never know? Seeing that the science really substantiates the fact that those single rude comments—or signs of passive aggression—really are the tip of the iceberg of the damage they cause was a big surprise to me.

What is metacognition, and how does it enhance an individual’s thinking or self-awareness?

Metacognition refers to thinking about thinking: What’s your knowledge of your own thinking process? Metacognition involves planning, assessing, monitoring, strategizing, and evaluating. It sits above you, looks at you, and says, “How am I doing?” Every day, we all walk down familiar mental paths or processes that we’ve done over and over.

Applying metacognition to these well-worn paths, thinking about how and why we do them the way we do, and how they can be better, is the way to constantly self-improve.

Early on in the Psyche mission [which began in 2023 with the goal of exploring the Psyche asteroid by 2029], we were trying to plan what scientific instruments we wanted to put on the spacecraft to measure the asteroid when we finally arrived. One of the instruments that interested us was made by several organizations around the world.

As I was gathering everyone’s opinion, one person said, “We should definitely use the one that this specific organization makes. There’s really no better one to use. It’s the one we’re using on this other mission.”

We saw agreement from around the room, and we decided to go with that instrument. Years later, we were actually installing this instrument, which we had built the hardware for, on the spacecraft. And it turned out that the specific organization can’t produce this instrument. The instrument was not quite right. In the end, we had to frantically search the world for another vendor and find someone to build the instrument for us in time.

If I had looked into it when I was gathering opinions and questioned the common knowledge, we wouldn’t have chosen that organization. That’s a great place to use metacognition. Question why you’re making your decisions. Question what the facts are. Question what the evidence is. Think about your process and make it better.

It’s all about practicing mental self-improvement and self-awareness in every aspect that we do. As soon as you begin examining what you’re doing, not just doing it, you really do become more effective practically overnight.

How can leaders encourage effective problem-solving on their teams?

Recognizing problems and then solving them is fundamentally why teams need to exist. On the Psyche team, we have a motto: “The best news is bad news brought early.”

How do you make sure that you’re going to get that good bad news? Think for a minute about who is most likely to identify problems in your process.

The person who will first see the problem is the one with boots on the ground, soldering the wire, writing the line of code, or talking to the client. Those are the people who are going to recognize the problem. The only way you’re going to hear from them is if you have a team that respects and listens to every individual, regardless of status.

Even responding with ambivalence or silence to a problem brought to you can feel like punishment to the person who brought it to you. You need to reward those problem givers with your attention and your questions. That way, when something truly frightening comes up, your team will hold it up high and start finding a solution, rather than hiding it. The goal is to have a team where any member can raise concerns or suggest major changes to the problem, ideas, or solutions on the table, no matter who they are.

What have your experiences taught you about leading through crises?

Having been in many, many crisis meetings has been one of the most fascinating parts of my career. I’m not talking about a crisis on the level of war or national disaster. I am referring to a crisis on the scale of a billion dollars—a canceled project that cost 1,000 jobs, which began to mount in importance.

In crisis, the number one effective thing to do is to stay calm and to be civil and respectful. When the going gets tough, be even more civil and respectful. When people are in a panic or in fight-or-flight mode, their brains are not thinking of creative solutions. They’re just not in that space. So keep your team in the space where they can problem solve.

The second-most important thing is to believe that a solution will be found and lead that way. If you do not personally believe that there will be a solution, you should not be a leader because you will not be leading toward a solution.

Act quickly, but communicate your actions continuously and repeatedly. If they are in crisis, your team members probably won’t hear it the first time, or they’ll forget it. So keep communicating after those decisions are made.

Why are teams so often reticent to work on culture, and what can leaders do to encourage those conversations?

There are three top reasons I’ve encountered resistance to talking about culture. First, it feels like a waste of time. Second, it feels personal and therefore dangerous. If you think that culture is going to be a criticism of yourself and of how you act, then you might really not want to talk about it. Finally, the last time the team talked about culture, nothing happened.

So, start by focusing on the outcomes. If you’re talking about how you do stuff, a better-functioning team is going to be the outcome—faster and better results and a growth experience for every team member.

The meeting or the process or the workshop, whatever you’re doing, doesn’t have to be labeled anything about culture. It can be about how to be more effective problem solvers or how to level up your meetings. Keep the focus on the outcome or the goal of the process.

Then, of course, lead by example. Enforce the practices yourself and show that this time, you’re practicing change bit by bit, idea by idea. Encourage every person to do the same. This is one of the big messages that I have for my teams and in the book. Every single person is a leader because they have a vision and a concept, not necessarily because they have people reporting to them. So encourage every person to be a leader in this way.

How can we remain effective leaders and team members in the age of AI?

It’s key to think about how important AI is as an assistant for what we do. Think about what we, as humans, do uniquely well: making decisions based on partial information, bringing values and ethics into every step, and connecting emotionally.

Use AI in all of its incredible power, but don’t be distracted into thinking that it is a replacement for what we do as humans, because every endeavor is an endeavor about humans. It’s about us. Let’s keep doing it together, whatever that endeavor is.

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