What HR Leaders Can Learn From Rocket Scientists

Author

Nicholas Baily
June 25, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes

If employee recognition is so important, why do millions of government employees seem to perform well without much of it?

Case in point: The employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are among the most high-performing teams on earth. They explore the farthest edges of galaxies, dream up some of the most advanced technology humans have ever made, and build vehicles to go where no one has gone before.

Yet for all their groundbreaking work, they tend to avoid the spotlight. When the writer Dave Eggers visited the lab to profile its culture for the Washington Post, he noted that “no one at JPL—no one I met, at least—was willing to take credit for anything.”

This work ethic, too, is worth some deep exploration. How can people making history by their excellence shun conventional appreciation? Corporate leaders in HR insist that a culture of recognition is essential to a healthy and productive workforce. 

True enough, yet Eggers found more dimensions of worker satisfaction that many corporate employers could learn from. Among them: an embrace of intrinsic motivation (curiosity and collaboration) rather than only extrinsic forms (compensation and celebrity); the challenges of answering big questions and solving societal problems; and the sense of leaving a generational legacy.

“Yes, we are in the space business and in the knowledge business,” a JPL leader told Eggers, “but I’ve always believed that we’re really in the inspiration business, the inspiration that we have lent out and inspired generations of engineers and scientists. It cannot be underestimated.”

As it turns out, JPL isn’t an outlier. It’s just one remarkable corner of a vast and often under-appreciated workforce: the 2.4 million civilian employees of the U.S. federal government.

At a time when the Trump administration has cut almost 59,000 federal employees and given buyouts to 76,000 as of mid-May, all the while vilifying the federal workforce as lazy and low-performing, a cadre of journalists has taken a closer look at who does the work that makes the U.S. government, and the country, run. 

The author Michael Lewis got curious about this at the dawn of the first Trump administration, when the incoming president and his team decided to skip the traditional briefing given by the previous administration on the complexities of the executive workforce. Lewis’s reporting produced a series of Washington Post stories and a bestselling book, The Fifth Risk, which explored what happens when the government is controlled by people who have little idea of how it works. 

As a follow-up last year, Lewis and six colleagues followed federal employees as they hammered through their day-to-day duties. The series of profiles, called “Who Is Government?,” ran in installments in the Washington Post in 2024 and was published this year as a book by the same name, now a bestseller.

What they found was a workplace culture most business leaders and HR teams might only dream of: strong management, high retention despite modest pay, relentless resourcefulness, a commitment to metrics, and a sense of mission that inspires deep loyalty. But there’s still that missing piece—no one’s singling them out for praise. Lewis and his colleagues found inspiring examples of what makes them shine nonetheless.

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