Being In Charge of 1,800 People: Interview with Dr. Ken Byrnes (Part 1)

Kale:?It is my special privilege and honor to welcome Dr. Ken Byrnes of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, one of the most preeminent guests that I’ve had so far, certainly within his field.

Dr. Byrnes, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you sacrificing your time to be in this interview.

Dr. Byrnes:?I’m happy to be here.

Kale:?Fantastic. Well, for those of you that don’t know, Embry-Riddle is essentially, if I’m not mistaken, the preeminent flight training facility for pilots within the United States.

Is that a stretch or is that pretty much accurate Dr. Byrnes?

Dr. Byrnes:?It’s accurate to the point, but it’s much more than flight training. For us it’s education. It’s a four-year degree granting institution with many programs including, PhDs, engineering, business and most of it centers around aviation and space.

That’s the main focus of this university. We’re pushing a hundred years of existence.

Kale:?Wow, that’s pretty impressive. Now, you are the chairman of the flight training department and also an assistant dean, is that correct?

Dr. Byrnes:?Yes, but my main role is to manage and lead the flight training department at Emory-Riddle and on the Daytona Beach campus. We have two campuses. We have one at Prescott as well, but the Daytona Beach campus is where I’m situated.

We have the largest department in this university operating close to a hundred aircraft, flying a hundred thousand hours a year, with about 1,300 students at any given time flying in our airspace and learning how to be professional aviation professionals.

Kale:?Right now, you’re not only in charge of all those 1,300 students, but you’re also in the staff. What is your department made up of, all the total that you’re overseeing?

Dr. Byrnes:?It’s mostly flight instructors, at any given time between 150 and 200+ flight instructors.

Then we have a group of managers, operational managers who oversee them. We also have our chief instructor and different support functions like flight dispatch and flight supervisors.

We have aircraft maintenance, a very large maintenance department as you may imagine. We also have a very advanced simulation center with simulation staff to support as well.

We also use a lot of student assistance, so we have over 300 full-time employees. Then we augment with close to anywhere from 50 to a 100 students working in different positions, like dispatchers, student assistants and those types of things.

Kale:?I was trying to mentally tally as you’re going through that.

You’re at any given time pushing almost 2,000 people. Is that safe to say, in the 1,800 to 2,000 range depending on your season?

Dr. Byrnes:?Yes, if you include all the students, we’re up there at some point. There are actually over 1,700 students in the degree program itself, and we only fly 1,300 at a time, so there are a lot of moving parts, a lot of moving people, that’s for sure.

Kale:?That’s incredible. Now, how long have you been the chairman in this position of the flight?

Dr. Byrnes:?I have been in this role since 2009, so going on 13 years here.

Kale:?Did you come up through the university?

Is that something you promoted into or did you come into it fresh out of some other industry?

How did you end up being the chairman?

Dr. Byrnes:?I was promoted up. I started many years ago as a flight instructor and just continued to work through it.

At the time, September 11th had occurred, so there weren’t many jobs in the industry and I continued to get educated and work my way through the ranks, up through various levels, and eventually to the chairman role.

Kale:?Fantastic. Now you got to see it right from your previous chairmans that you served under and helped develop these programs.

As you stepped into that role, and it’s been several years, what has been the primary difference that you saw from a leadership standpoint of stepping into that role, being new into that role, and having that level of responsibility versus now 13 years later?

Presumably you’ve learned some lessons, you’ve figured some things out.

What are you doing now that’s different from 12–13 years ago?

Dr. Byrnes:?I had the benefit of understanding the organization and working closely with the previous leaders of the organization and having a good idea as to what I would do differently.

When I did get to the role, that helped tremendously. However, I had different leadership roles all throughout my career here. I already had some formation of being able to lead people, and growing in that respect.

What maybe I didn’t know right off the bat was that my primary job was to set the culture for the organization. To set the goals. I did that right away. We did it together, with some senior staff of the department.

Growing in the leadership role, I would say I’m a more seasoned leader now, but I think when I stepped into it, I had a good idea about leadership theory, and that really helped me early on.

Being able to set expectations for everybody. Day one: set the goals of the organization and communicate, and also to build that organizational culture around that.

Kale:?I love it. Now you mentioned you touched on two things and one goal. I thank you for bringing that up, because I wholeheartedly agree. That is absolutely critical to any organization, but especially when you’ve got a larger organization like yours.

You had mentioned as you stepped into the role, that you knew there were things that you wanted to change. Things that you had seen the previous chairman do or however that flowed down.

Were the goals part of that?

Did they not have goals or that organizational culture before and you adapted that?

Or was it something that just needed to change because there was that shift with you taking the wheel?

Dr. Byrnes:?Yes I think that was one of the biggest parts. The leader before me was outstanding.

He was an incredible leader and he still is. However, I wanted to bring some clarity to that. Everybody knows that safety is primary when you’re in flight training, but I wanted to lay it out for everybody very clearly.

At this institution, because it’s aviation-focused, the communication level that I have even above my level with the dean, the provost, the president and even the board of trustees, I was able to get buy-in on those goals from the top all the way down.

It’s been our mantra. Even the goals themselves, there are 10 goals that we can sum up into three categories: safety, quality and professionalism.

When you walk into this department, you feel that. That’s our identity.

It’s very important that the goals are tied to that. It took some time obviously for that culture to build and to make it that clear. It’s on the floors and it’s in the people you meet and communicate with.

Kale:?That doesn’t happen by accident I presume. You’ve presumably been very purposeful of that, and you’re selling it not only to the people that serve under you as part of your organization or even the students, but also your higher ups?

Dr. Byrnes:?Absolutely. You have to have their support and their buy-in. I’m blessed that they bought in right away. To this day, every time I brief above my level all the way up to the board, that’s my first slide.

I actually haven’t changed it. In 13 years it has our goals on it. These are the goals, and now I’m going to tell you what we’ve done within these goals.

We developed objectives for every year based on those goals. We work through those and measure those types of things.

Kale:?Now certainly the university environment’s a little different than your typical workplace environment, because you’ve got students that have paid to be there and because they want something out of it.

How are you finding to get their buy-in into that culture?

Is that something that’s difficult?

Is that something that you’re continually changing?

You’ve probably seen several kinds of generations come in at different levels of students and attitudes in general.

Is that something that you’re having to be super purposeful about?

Dr. Byrnes:?It’s very interesting. How do you know a culture? You have to live in it, you have to be immersed in it, in order to figure it out.

For us, the most important thing is the people within the organization working. Are they involved with the culture? Do they believe in the culture? Most of them do. We find that, especially in the area of safety and professionalism.

We are in a way developing our next generation. Students generally go through the program, get their pilot certificates, and end up working for us as flight instructors and then moving on to the industry.

You’re one-on-one with a student and you’re teaching them how to fly, but you’re also mentoring them on everything other than flying. This is what the key is for us.

It’s very important that our flight instructor staff understand the impact that they have on the students and the fact that they’re not just instructors or teachers, but that they’re mentors that are guiding these people.

For most of the students, it’s their first brush with aviation in general. Teaching the values and what’s important is primordial.

We don’t just have a strong culture to have a good business, we have a strong culture because we’re developing tomorrow’s safety professionals.

We need to have a very large impact on those people because they’re going to come through our system and they’re going to go out in the industry. They need to carry those values and beliefs with them.

It’s honestly the most important thing we do. Anybody can learn how to fly. For us, it’s the impact we’re having on the people as they’re coming through and providing them what they need to be successful when they come out the other end.

Kale:?You don’t want somebody that just has their pilot’s license when they graduate. You want an actual pilot, you want an airman.

You want somebody that can handle the whole meal deal as far as being in the air and having appropriate decision-making skills and all that.

I love that you touched on the fact that it starts with your instructors, the frontline managers, in your organization. Your instructors are the primary impact of the culture on the students.

Is that what I picked up?

Dr. Byrnes:?Absolutely. It’s critical.

Kale:?What process do you have in place concerning your managers?

Is it just part of your hiring process that you are only looking for those certain types of people that have that attitude?

Or is that something you’re trying to develop after you bring them on to your organization?

Dr. Byrnes:?Because most of them come through the organization now and it’s a very mature culture, they’re already bought for the most part.

What’s interesting is I spend about two hours or so with every new hire class, and that’s all we talk about. We talk about safety, quality, and professionalism.

Whatever job you get, you want to know what’s expected of you, and that’s why I do that.

I make that case to them. Generally what will happen is we’re mentoring the instructors as well. For a lot of them, it might be their first job. It’s a non-stop process.

We do have an interview process that’s pretty strong. Then we have a very robust standardization process as well to get them on board.

Our standards department does observation flights, but we also have a quality assurance department that does what I call mentoring flights.

The people that work there are actually called mentors and they sit in the backseat of an activity and they observe the instructor and basically give pointers to them.

What to do differently and how to improve their teaching as well. That is mostly focused on their teaching side, but we have a lot of systems in place to support them as they’re coming through.

However, because most of them have come through the organization, they show up understanding about that culture, and if they don’t fall in line with it, they self-identify rather quickly.

Please share with us in the comments if you have some type of culture and/or core values that are shared among the members of your organization. If so, what are they?

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