Training Tomorrow’s Leaders
Think about shared goals and the skills—technical and professional—required to achieve them.
By Debbie Chachra
It was a dark and stormy night, and I was driving home from work. I turned a corner to find the road blocked, with cars in both lanes stalled out in a giant puddle. I got out of my car, in the pounding rain and ankle-deep water, and knocked on the driver’s window of the vehicle in front of me to ask for help pushing the cars to the curb. The driver was on the phone for help; he couldn’t immediately move his car because its shifter was locked and wouldn’t go into neutral. I knocked on the window of the other stalled car with the same request. By this time, another car had come up behind us, and I went and asked for their help too. Everyone said yes, and together we pushed one car to the curb, clearing a travel lane. Those of us with still-functioning cars squelched back to our vehicles and went our separate ways.
I think about that night when I hear people talk about “leadership.” The term is often conceptualized as a set of characteristics that one develops to become a leader—that leadership is vested in an individual. On that rainy night, I found myself acting as a leader. But the willingness of other drivers to join in a fairly unpleasant task wasn’t about me—someone they had just met—but our shared predicament.
Engineers often distrust the Northouse textbook definition: “Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of people to achieve a common goal.” I personally find this model of leadership to be borderline sociopathic, since it suggests manipulation of others. But if we turn Northouse’s definition on its head and focus on the “common goal” part, a very different way to look at leadership emerges.
I suspect that anyone reading this could tell me who the CEO of Space-X or of Amazon is, but might be hard-pressed to name any administrator of NASA, past or present, even though the agency has been so effective that “moonshot” is now shorthand for wildly ambitious technical goals. We tell each other narratives about individuals, but not about larger systems, about the Great Men of History, but not about grassroots efforts.
These narratives of individuals shape ubiquitous but implicit models of leadership that are colored by gender and racial biases and favor command and confrontation over collaboration and communication. In 2018, particularly in the United States, we can make a compelling case that the commonly accepted model of leadership, overtly on display in politics and corporations, is not only limited in its effectiveness but contrary to the public good.
So where does that leave us with our engineering students? When we say we want our students to be “leaders,” what does that mean? If we start with “common goals,” we immediately think about values: Any goal expresses, implicitly or explicitly, a set of values, and alignment with a goal often reflects an alignment in values. Aligning around “have a positive impact on the world” as a value means thinking about the larger context of the proposed goal. Shared goals are most effectively achieved when all members of the group contribute (and are therefore aware of implicit and other biases), and when there is collaboration, coordination, and communication within the group. All the professional skills that are often derided as “soft skills” collectively describe something familiar: The manifestation of leadership for undergraduate engineering students is teamwork.
For our ad hoc car-pushing team on that wet night, the goal was clear and obviously achievable. I knew that, even if only one or two people helped, we’d be able to move a car. This kind of clarity is rarely available for engineering work; technical abilities figure importantly in engineering leadership. The question is not just “Is this a worthy goal?” but “Is this goal achievable?” and “Does this team have the ability to achieve it?”
Finally, of course, there is the undeniable fact that I did come up with a plan, however simple, and had the agency, self-efficacy, and motivation to act upon it. That brings us to a final type of learning experience: giving our students the opportunity to develop, test, and iterate ideas that involve working with other people.
Our students are not going to be engineering leaders on the day they graduate, and it’s unrealistic or even hubristic to imagine they might be. But we can give them the opportunity to practice developmentally and pedagogically appropriate skills—not just their technical work but teamwork and all its associated skills, awareness of the context of their engineering work, and the ability to come up with, develop, and iterate on their own ideas. Together, we can lay the groundwork to create not just better engineering leaders but a better model of leadership in the engineering community.
Debbie Chachra is a professor of engineering at Olin College.