Star Trek captains offer 4 leadership lessons that could save your career

With ship captains as protagonists, the Star Trek franchise has generally been a good platform for showcasing the high stakes pressures and exhilarating triumphs of leadership. That also would make it a entertaining showcase for leaders to just take away some valuable classes and ideas.

With the new Star Trek: Picard collection, which premieres on Jan. 23, 2020, and Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Obtain, there’s a new set of leaders to discover from. And for technologists and enterprise leaders who are fans of the Star Trek captains of the past, here are 4 massive leadership classes that under no circumstances get aged. (Disclosure: TechRepublic is owned by ViacomCBS.) 

SEE: The viewer’s information to Star Trek: Discovery

one. Evacuate the place station, but go away the baseball

My favorite second in the Star Trek franchise occurs in the final episode of season five of Deep Room 9. The Cardassians seize the place station and Captain Benjamin Sisko and his Starfleet staff are compelled to flee.

However, when Cardassian leader Gul Dukat goes into Sisko’s business, he finds that Sisko has eradicated anything of price–other than for Sisko’s most treasured item, his memento baseball. A single of Gul Dukat’s associates claims, “I will not fully grasp.”

It is “a message from Sisko,” Dukat clarifies. “He is permitting me know he’ll be again.”

LESSON: Even when you put up with setbacks or defeats, display confidence that your team will persevere and are living to struggle an additional day.

2. Collaborate with your frenemies, but protect your tail

A single of the very best episodes of Star Trek: Voyager is “Counterpoint,” episode ten of season five. Voyager is passing through the territory of a strong and bureaucratic race called the Devore, which has an extraordinary prejudice versus telepaths. The Devore forcefully boards Voyager, but the Voyager crew efficiently hides its telepaths so that they can not be captured.

Later, the Devore leader Kashyk returns in a shuttle and in plainclothes and asks for asylum on Voyager. He claims he appreciates they are hiding telepaths and he and Captain Kathryn Janeway do the job alongside one another to discover an ingenious way to proceed to conceal the telepaths though receiving Voyager out of Devore place.

But when a Devore ship catches up with the them, Kashyk claims the only way to conserve the program is for him to return to the Devore ship and just take again command. Of class, then he returns to Voyager in uniform with his crew and attempts to seize the telepaths, now that he appreciates the programs. But, Janeway had expected him and hid them in a unique way–which dismays and impresses Kashyk.

“Very well played, captain,” he claims. “It would seem I under no circumstances did earn your trust.”

Janeway replies, “I had to just take a several safety measures. You fully grasp.”

“Much better than any person,” claims Kashyk.

LESSON: Feel like a chess champion–generally various moves ahead.

SEE: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ fights for extra than Trekkies’ hearts (CNET)

3. Pick a struggle with a Nausicaan (a.k.a. embrace your previously issues)

Arguably, the very best episode of Star Trek: The Subsequent Technology is “Tapestry,” episode 15 of season six. Captain Jean-Luc Picard has a close to-loss of life expertise when his artificial coronary heart fails and he finishes up in an afterlife expertise with an aged good friend and nemesis from the semi-omnipotent Q species.

Q delivers Captain Picard the prospect to go again to his youth at Starfleet Academy to transform the incident that landed him with the artificial coronary heart–a struggle with a pack of seven-foot Nausicaans who were hoping to cheat 1 of his pals in a bar activity. With Q’s assistance, Picard quickly realizes that altering his past and having a safer route would transform the class of his existence and job in means that would make him a great deal extra mediocre and a lot less fulfilled.

After he’s revived and recalls the expertise, Picard tells his next in command, William Riker, “There are many areas of my youth that I am not very pleased of. There were unfastened threads, untidy areas that I’d like to get rid of. But when I pulled 1 of all those threads, it unraveled the tapestry of my existence.”

After listening to the entire tale about the struggle, Riker tells him, “I wish I had a probability to know that Jean-Luc Picard.”

LESSON: Embrace your previously issues, will not run from them. They display how significantly you’ve occur and they can assistance people relate to you and your journey in means that can build stronger bonds of trust.

4. Possibility is section of the activity, if you want to sit in the massive chair

In the opening scene of the film Star Trek: Generations, Captain James T. Kirk is invited to assistance a young whipper-snapper captain christen the new Company just before its maiden voyage. It is generally a PR stunt to just take the ship for a brief jaunt all around the photo voltaic system with journalists on board for the trip–and a skeleton crew to basically get the Company out of spaceport and again.

But, some thing unanticipated comes about–as it generally does in Star Trek–and the Company receives a distress phone from a pair of ships in threat. The Company is the only ship shut ample to assistance so it has to reply. With a hardly functional ship, the young captain struggles to use his normal methods to discover a way to assistance, and last but not least asks Kirk for assistance.

When Kirk delivers an notion for how to improvise, the new captain delivers up the chance that the transfer could destroy the ship.

“Possibility is section of the activity if you want to sit in that chair,” Kirk claimed.

LESSON: You have to just take threats to make massive moves and satisfy your mission. Become a good calculator of hazard if you want to be a good leader.

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Editor’s observe: This posting was very first released on Sept. 22, 2017.