A Method for Assessing Engineering Leadership Content in the Engineering Curriculum: A First Look at Civil Engineering Project Management Courses

The National Academy of Engineering, industry, educators, and professional engineering societies communicate the need for the 21 century engineer to understand the principles of leadership and to be prepared to lead in a variety of venues, including government. While many engineering schools support this proposition, many also lack an explicit functional mechanism by which to achieve it. Some schools may seek implicitly to foster leadership development in students through co-curricular group activities. Some existing engineering course curricula may contain implicit and explicit leadership components. There is interest within the engineering leadership academic community to identify opportunities within the engineering curriculum for the integration of leadership learning. A first step towards this identification is the benchmarking of existing leadership content. We propose a standardized method for identifying the presence of engineering leadership content in curricula and suggest that the search for existing leadership content in the system of engineering courses should begin with exploration of a course that is likely to support this content: project management. While leadership may exist in various other facets of engineering curricula, the American Society of Civil Engineers proposes that the civil engineering curriculum should prepare students for leadership, and civil engineering project management courses serve as a likely location to gauge the presence and prevalence of such preparatory leadership content. For the purposes of this paper, management and leadership are considered distinct yet related domains, and entry-level civil engineering project management served as a litmus test for identifying leadership elements within existing engineering curricula. It was found that a standardized method of identifying implicit engineering leadership content within civil engineering project management curriculum yielded consistent results among three independent analysts (this paper’s authors). Moreover, at the ten universities graduating the largest number of civil engineering undergraduates, two (of eight) engineering leadership criterion emerged as the most widely integrated within the current curriculum: “The Ability to Conceive and Design within Realistic Constraints,” and “Understand Economic, Environmental, Global and Societal Contexts and Impacts.” One criterion emerged as entirely absent from the ten universities: “Reflection and Lifelong Learning.” Introduction and Background Much has been written on the distinctions between management and leadership. Bass (1990) separates management from leadership in the following way: leaders facilitate interpersonal interactions and positive working relations and generate excitement at work; managers investigate, evaluate, supervise and control; leaders send out clear signals framing their purpose and mission and behave as themselves; managers are silent or ambiguous about their purpose and are more likely to see themselves as playing a part in a drama. Similarly, Toor and Ofori (2008) separate management and leadership in engineering into two entirely different functions, and therefore define engineering managers and leaders as two distinct people; however, they acknowledge the usefulness of management skills in leadership and leadership skills in management. There are familial similarities between facets of management and leadership that argue perhaps for a continuum approach to their distinction. Within the domain of management, some observe a spectrum that distinguishes between successful managers at one end and effective managers at the other: successful managers receive quick promotions, while effective managers care for people, cultivate loyalty, and achieve high team performance. The behaviors associated with effective management sound a great deal like the behaviors Bass (1990) associated with leadership. Further supporting this continuum concept, the total work of engineering management is seen by some to be comprised of (1) technical work, (2) conceptual work, (3) human work (i.e. leadership); within this framework, engineering leadership exists as an important behavioral component of engineering management. It is not unreasonable then to allow management and leadership to be viewed as separate but partially related domains; this perspective allows mutual exclusivity at the respective unrelated domain extremes while accounting for the complementary nature of the skills and behaviors inherent in each at the common extremes. If one accepts this conceptual model, then an academic door opens that allows for and perhaps requires developing leadership skills within project management courses. Conversely, this approach also suggests a value for introducing certain project management tools and skills within leadership curricula. Notwithstanding the continued lively discussion on the topic, this continuum abstraction is an important foundation upon which this paper is premised: although leadership and management are two different systems, leadership and management are related; leadership and management are not entirely mutually exclusive and instead exist on a continuum; opportunities exist to find leadership in management curriculum just as opportunities exist to find management in leadership curriculum; opportunities exist to effectively incorporate elements of leadership into management curriculum just as opportunities exists to effectively incorporate elements of management into a leadership curriculum. There is interest within the engineering leadership academic community to identify opportunities within the engineering curriculum for the integration of leadership learning. A first step towards this identification is the benchmarking of existing leadership content to identify promising entry and expansion points. To facilitate this benchmarking, this paper proposes a standardized framework. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Engineer of 2025 challenged academia to provide “a more robust educational path for civil engineers that prepares them for leadership and provides the multifaceted non-technical skills to serve on projects affecting the public good”. The ASCE Body of Knowledge (BOK) explicitly identifies leadership as an outcome (number 20 in ASCE, BOK2) necessary for entry into the professional practice of civil engineering. At the undergraduate level, the ASCE BOK expects students to achieve leadership knowledge (define leadership), comprehension (explain leadership) and application (apply leadership). In 2008, Program Criteria for Civil and Similarly Named Engineering Programs were proposed by ASCE and accepted by ABET as accreditation requirements. These (civil engineering) programs are expected to provide a level of leadership comprehension for students such that students are able to explain the role, responsibilities, and attitude of a leader and the essential elements of leadership principles; this comprehension can be developed within existing courses, projects, or other forms of learning experiences. As the search for life in our solar system has begun with an exploration of the planet judged most likely to support life, Mars, we propose a similar approach for the search for leadership content in the system of engineering courses. As such, we present an initial exploration of a discipline and course most likely to support this content: civil engineering project management. Our justification for this investigation is that while management and leadership are not equivalent, one is more likely to find elements of leadership present in a project management class than to find those elements in, for example, a thermodynamics class. Furthermore, assessing a facet of the curriculum that is likely to contain the sought-after evidence provides a viable opportunity to initially test this study’s methodology for identifying engineering leadership content. For the purposes of this paper, introductory civil engineering project management served as a litmus test for identifying leadership elements within existing engineering curricula. The introductory civil engineering project management curriculum was expected to be more ubiquitous and accessible to undergraduate engineering students than explicit leadership classes, and the subject more broadly embraced by the academic status quo: a 2005 study of over 40% of the US civil engineering programs (i.e. 90 programs studied out of 213 total) identified that while 37.8% of programs studied required a course in project management, only three of these programs (i.e. 3.33%) required a discrete course in either team building or leadership. Although a semantic distinction exists within course titles, we maintain that civil engineering project management course content can include leadership elements of team development and effective communication; it can even explore the economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability of a project design and its impact in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context. The paper offers a rubric for identifying the presence of leadership-related course content in an engineering class, tests this rubric, and reports the observed nature and extent of extant leadership within traditional introductory civil engineering project management courses at the largest US civil engineering programs. Introductory civil engineering project management course content was surveyed and the extent to which leadership-related content is currently incorporated within the curriculum identified. This paper represents a first step towards identifying and benchmarking the existence of elements of leadership within the engineering curriculum, and identification of opportunities for the integration of leadership within existing curriculum.