Engineering Leadership: Transitioning from "Soft Skill" to Hard Data
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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-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 data-driven leadership for an existing undergraduate course in engineering leadership. The to-be-developed 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.
