Engineering Leadership: Transitioning from “Soft Skill” to Hard Data

Abstract

This paper explores the growing use of data to guide leadership decisions and direction and the implications for engineering leadership development. While engineers (and others) have conventionally considered leadership as an imprecise "soft skill," a review of relevant leadership literature reveals that myriad sources of (hard) data are already in use to inform functions of leadership. The trend to do so is increasing dramatically. Accordingly, it is appropriate to reconsider how best to prepare engineers to exercise leadership in organizations as they evolve into the future. Indeed, organizations increasingly need engineers to practice effective leadership, a workplace trend that is now embodied in ABET criteria for competencies among engineering graduates. An important benefit of exploring data-informed, data-influenced, and data-driven leadership is to mitigate the common reluctance of engineers to embrace leadership opportunities. Specifically, this paper is oriented to the development of a module on leadership activities associated with workforce analytics for an existing undergraduate course in engineering leadership. The module will complement the existing course in two primary ways: 1) taking advantage of the course theme that there is much in common between the engineering and leadership skill sets, and 2) a significant laboratory project on present and future data innovations. The paper reports on an extensive literature review that leads to adaptation to an engineering audience and the subsequent design of the course module. The design of the module is based on a flipped classroom approach in which students engage in preparation on their own and then apply concepts they have learned in group-based and all-class discussion activities that draw upon critical questions of applying these concepts. In so doing, we intend to help students think and behave as prototypical engineering leadership practitioners.