Richard “Rick” Burt, Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) director at Marshall Space Flight Center, has what he calls the “Fundamental Four”:

• Do the right things
• Do them right
• Do them now
• Own them

These four things are what he considers the key attributes to success and the necessary steps for overcoming any challenge. He promotes them to his employees as well as his management team to enhance their interactions with programs and projects and others outside SMA.

“If we can follow those guidelines, no matter what the challenges are before us, that gives us a blueprint for success,” he explained.

The Fundamental Four will serve Burt well as he works towards his goals as SMA director at Marshall. In the short-term, he’d like to focus on training and expanding employees’ horizons.

“I want to make sure all of our employees are adequately trained and given the opportunity to broaden their careers through employee development,” said Burt. “Not only through technical and mandatory type courses, but also [through] elective courses that will help build their strengths in areas such as communication and leadership.”

His vision is to develop a more innovate and technical team capable of finding smarter ways of doing business to become more efficient in executing responsibilities.

Burt’s long-term goals are really just an extension of what he’d like to achieve in the near future: He’d like to put in place opportunities for younger employees to learn the tools, knowledge and experience necessary to become the leaders of tomorrow. He points out that demographically, NASA is “heavily loaded” with people close to retirement, making the need to prepare the next generation of leaders an imminent one.

“[They are] who will take the SMA organization into the longer-term support and innovative thinking that is going to be necessary for some of the ambitious plans we have ahead of us for the agency and for the nation,” he said.

Building the next NASA workforce isn’t without its challenges; in fact, Burt describes them as twofold: recruitment and ownership.

Burt explains that the ability to recruit and retain appropriately skilled personnel to fill the future openings will be essential to NASA’s success and that it can be difficult to keep new employees engaged, challenged and feeling a sense of reward in their work.

As for ownership, he wants to ensure that as new employees are brought on board, they step up and speak up, owning their ideas rather than simply following what has always been done.

“[I want] for us to be able to bring to bear more innovative thinking, more creativity and more contributions from the ideas of our people,” he said. “We want to downplay any sense of people feeling like they need to check their brains at the door and let someone else decide for them what are the right things that they need to do. We want to promote their ability to think, contribute, speak up, engage and help us make better risk-informed decisions for the future.”

Burt sums it up by saying the goal is to get everyone to take ownership and be accountable.

“All I need to do to overcome those challenges is to affirm commitment from the team that they truly are engaged and have embraced what I promote and consider the fundamental four,” Burt said. “We’re making great strides in doing that. Our younger employees and the employees yet to come will make a great difference in the future if they can build off those fundamentals.”

SMA as a Technical Resource

While many of Burt’s efforts are focused on training and the future, he also wants to evolve how SMA is seen by programs and projects. Specifically, he hopes for SMA to be better recognized as a technical resource available to the agency.

“As one of the Technical Authorities, per the NASA governance model, I don’t think SMA organizations in general have been recognized as technical organizations,” Burt explained. “In fact, 88 percent of the team that I work with in SMA, including our civil servants and our support contractors, have engineering or technical degrees. So I’d like to emphasize that with the program authority, the health and medical authority, as well as the engineering Technical Authority, to show we have a strong technical presence and [are a] technical resource in all areas of engineering.”

Although he’s looking to evolve the perception of the SMA Technical Authority, he ultimately sees upholding this piece of the governance model as a top priority. When asked to explain his main responsibilities, he responded:

“To make sure we have the necessary means to assure our role as one of the Technical Authorities is fulfilled with integrity, trust, respect and teamwork.”