NASA wants to farm Mars.

The space agency just launched a competition to find ways to produce food on the planet, as it looks to send people there by the 2030s.

But you have to get there first—and it’s a three-year round-trip voyage. That’s a lot of time to spend in a confined space with other people.

Kellogg professors Leslie DeChurch and Noshir Contractor have been studying this challenge with NASA for more than a decade. This week, we examine the critical markers of effective teamwork that they developed for the agency to keep crews from falling apart; they’re applicable to teams on Earth, too.

Plus, we’ll discuss how we can tell a story that reflects the career we want.

An interplanetary handbook for effective teamwork

To help NASA assemble a team that could weather and survive such extreme conditions, DeChurch and Contractor collected a wealth of behavioral data from a dozen Earth-based simulations of long-term space missions that took place in Houston, Texas, and Moscow, Russia, between 2016 and 2020.

The researchers then created computerized models that produced a set of best practices covering everything from leadership structures to relationship repair, while pointing out five critical markers of effective teamwork.

For example, there’s team viability, which is the ability to work together over and over again. Conflicts are inevitable, but the researchers found that one of the strongest ways to preserve relationships on a long-haul space mission is to pair crew members together to help them simmer down when they are getting on each other’s nerves. In a case where no personnel reshuffling is possible, even pairing the strained teammates on a new shared task can knit the relationship back together.

Leadership dynamics is another critical marker of effective teamwork. The ideal hierarchy, in these types of situations, is one where members can fluidly claim and cede authority.

“Roughly half of the people who join the astronaut corps come through the military, but the other half are scientists,” DeChurch says. “So one of the things that’s important in these space crews is that they let expertise drive who is influential. If I’m the mission commander, but Noshir has the best idea, Noshir steps forward and I step back.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Focus on your story, not your résumé

Suzanne Muchin rues the day people started referring to their careers as “paths.” You know: you start at junior software engineer and work your way up to VP of engineering.

This expectation assumes all factors remain static: your interests, personal growth, and circumstances. Reality is far less linear, so we eventually outgrow the path.

“You do get to this moment where you ask yourself, am I mattering? Is there more?” Muchin says.

Breaking out of this box necessitates telling a new story that reflects the career you want, a strategy that can help align your actions with your interests. To do this, Muchin says, you need to be able to articulate—to yourself—the answer to one key question: What is mine to do?

Crucially, the answer has nothing to do with your title, she says.

“‘What is yours to do?’ has a lot to do with what you would do when you’re not being asked to do it. ‘What is yours to do?’ is the thing that, when you’re not being paid to do it, you do it anyway.”

Muchin’s answer, for example, is that she unleashes ideas that matter, so that they matter to more people. This understanding allowed her to craft a career that, to anyone else, would seem unmoored. At various times, she was a member of the founding team of a national teacher corps, a social-impact brand strategist, and a founder of an incubator for profit-generating impact ventures.

“I was always only one thing to me, and I was actually doing it wherever I went. Whether I was a professor, whether I was an entrepreneur, whether I was on the radio—I was always trying to unleash ideas that matter.”

Hear (or read!) more at Kellogg Insight.