Pieter Van Ry
It’s no exaggeration to say that the High Performance Leadership (HPL) program in the Daniels College of Business Department of Executive Education changed Pieter Van Ry’s life.
“They brand it as a mini-MBA, and it had such a profound impact on me,” said Van Ry, who now teaches in the ExecEd Public Safety Leadership Development (PSLD) program. “There are so many different aspects to it. It’s all about how leading organizations today and in the future is different than it was in the 1980s and ’90s. That forward-looking leadership model really resonated with me.”
Taking the lessons with him
After Van Ry finished the 10-day program in 2010, he stayed in touch with his faculty members, later working with them to create a custom leadership development program for the City of Aurora, where he then worked.
“As I moved from organization to organization during my career, I would continue to send people to High Performance Leadership, because it had such a positive impact on me,” said Van Ry, who also completed the Daniels Executive MBA program in 2019. “I stayed in contact with the faculty and continued to send people to HPL and did some other small one-off trainings here and there. Eventually, Kerry (Plemmons, a faculty lead in ExecEd) reached out to me and said, ‘We have these two public-sector programs, and you’re in the public sector—would you want to come in and teach?’”
Van Ry now serves as an adjunct faculty member, teaching leadership skills to police officers and firefighters in the PSLD program; he also presides over leadership courses for Colorado Parks and Wildlife employees at Daniels.
“I love it,” he says of the work. “I have the ability to stay in touch with the practice of leadership, and it’s so rewarding to see a person’s evolution and journey over the course of the monthlong program—from how they come in at the beginning to how they are when they leave—and the impact the program has had on them and what they are able to take back.”
Leadership times two
The Daniels leadership lessons continue to resonate for Van Ry, who today oversees two separate teams in his dual role as director of South Platte Renew (SPR), Colorado’s third-largest wastewater treatment facility, and as director of the City of Englewood’s drinking water utility.
“I came in leading one organization (SPR), and now I lead two organizations that administratively flow up through the same city, but are different because they have different ownership models,” he said. “I have six deputy directors with seven main divisions—four on one side, three on the other—and I get to lead both teams.”
Van Ry stresses innovation in both positions, spearheading initiatives beyond just treating water to convert South Platte Renew’s solid waste into fertilizer for nearby farmers and to capture and clean the methane gas from wastewater to sell it to Xcel Energy as pipeline-grade natural gas.
“We recently came back from a national conference where we rolled out another new initiative,” he said. “It all started when I was sitting in an Executive MBA class in 2019, and we were talking about blue ocean strategy, which stresses, ‘Don’t compete in the existing market; create a new market.’ I remember thinking, ‘I work at a public sector wastewater plant. How do we create a new market?’
“Over the course of five years of working with my team at SPR and connecting back with some of the professors I worked with in the Executive MBA program, we created the Pilot and Research Center at South Platte Renew,” he continued. “Most organizations have a small separate research group; our approach is that we’ve made it an integrated aspect of who we are. Everyone is a part of it. We’ve also invested in infrastructure specifically designed to make it easier to connect into our systems; that way, innovation can happen faster.”
Inspire and serve
Van Ry credits the Daniels leadership principles for preparing him to lead two organizations so successfully. Today, he describes himself as a servant-leader, working to set his employees up for similar success.
“I’m here to serve the people I’m leading. My job is to make their work experience and their work environment, the best it can possibly be,” he said. “On top of that, as a public servant, something that has always resonated for me at Daniels is this idea from Bill Daniels of a business school focused on ‘benefitting the public good.’
“I want to translate the concepts I’ve learned at Daniels to create a level of excellence, high standards, and drive that is not necessarily always something you’d associate with a governmental entity,” he continued. “Developing that culture—which I think we’ve done quite well—couldn’t have happened so successfully without the knowledge that I first gained from HPL, then through several custom programs, and then ultimately through the Executive MBA.”