Building Human Talent in Air Traffic Organizations

In the search for increases in capacity, efficiencies, collaboration, and safety, organizations tend to constrain their focus on areas of technical solutions, automation advancements, process improvement, and systems development. While this type of approach is not without its merit, it bypasses the fundamental and foundational fact that regardless of environment, attempts to improve organizations must first acknowledge that we still work in a human-centric domain. Air traffic management will always remain a "people" business and any approach to improve organizational effectiveness must devote significant attention to this critical common denominator. Change efforts (even those designed to improve the safety culture) within our unique operational field usually advance at a careful, yet evolutionary pace. This paper argues that some areas, especially those related to human talent enhancement in cognitive, social and emotional domains, can evolve slightly faster than others when purposefully targeting controllers, managers, and leaders throughout the organization.