Observations of the Application and Success of Leadership Development Tools with Undergraduate Engineering Education

This paper documents the purposeful design and results of the application of sets of leadership development tools to a unique cohort-based undergraduate upper division program. The program is not targeting high-GPA, honors track, or other special categories. It has been designed with the goal of transforming typical engineering transfer students into graduates capable of rapidly assimilating into high performing professional environments. The program design was informed by an industry/community needs assessment as well as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) standards. Program design addresses leadership, professionalism, and communication skill with equal importance to the engineering skills. The sets of tools applied include leadership development tools such a personality assessment, a proprietary strength finder tool, and curriculum tools such as active learning strategies, learning communities and technical presentation experiences. Expectations for professionalism and leadership are set at an academic orientation, while personal professional development and group dynamics are introduced during a cohort workshop. Personality and StrengthsFinderTM results exist for approximately130 incoming juniors in both mechanical and electrical engineering. Only the mechanical engineering students have been observed through senior design class and graduation. Assigning senior design project groups, rather than allowing self-selection, is another tool used to develop leadership within the cohort learning community. Over the span of six senior design courses with a total of 50+ mechanical engineering majors, students have been exposed to leadership development through group dynamics activities and leadership strategies through the Gallop Organization’s Strengths-Based Leadership paradigm. Survey results from a leadership orientation for incoming juniors indicate strong self-efficacy in communication and leadership skills. Industry partners have reported very high satisfaction with both interns and alumni. One highlight of the program outcomes is a near 100% employment rate of students upon graduation and a 97%+ retention rate while matriculating. Program Background and Motivation The purpose of this paper is to document the baseline engineering leadership characteristics developed through unique baccalaureate degree completion programs for mechanical and electrical engineering. The programs are self-supporting, admitting a maximum of 25 junior-level transfer students with the appropriate pre-requisite coursework in each of the two majors each fall. Initiated in fall 2011, the programs reside 100 miles east of the main University campus and are administered through the University’s College of Continuing and Professional Education. Curriculum, student advisement, and vetting of faculty are conducted through the University’s College of Engineering. The University’s WASC accreditation has been extended to include the extension programs, and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) certification was achieved in both disciplines in fall 2015. The majority of courses are taught through direct contact by a mixture of University faculty and industrybased adjuncts. These two self-supporting degree completion programs are highly-structured and cohortbased with students taking all of their required classes together in sequence. Graduation is guaranteed in 5 semesters, if the student achieves grades of C or better in all coursework and maintains good standing with the University. Four cohorts, a total 65 individuals, have graduated from the programs and 54 students are currently enrolled in cohorts 5 and 6. The program plan was developed to include added value from pragmatic philosophical underpinnings and industrybased perspective that was informed by the local aerospace industry. 0 One of the value-added outcomes desired by the local employers supporting the programs is leadership and teamwork skills, , and ABET 2 accreditation criteria and engineering educational literature 1 also support the need for leadership skill student learning outcomes generally in engineering undergraduate programs. The pragmatic philosophical approach, or experimentalism, according to Creswell 3 , facilitates understanding of specific problems, opens possibilities, different world-views, different assumptions, and allows alternatives for data collection and analysis. The program supports the application of active learning strategies, bench marking of industry practices, and provides a variety of tools to develop the desired student outcomes. Leadership Development Design The economics of running a small targeted program and the desire to graduate students in a timely manner necessitated that the programs progress students in a defined sequence taking as many classes as possible with no options to dilute the class size. The need to progress the admitted students through the programs together created the opportunity to add value above commodity engineering skills through instilling communications skills and self-awareness. However, requiring the students to stay together in a small cohort, all in the same sections of classes every semester, has the potential to create additional stress on the students, necessitating instruction in communications skills, development of self-awareness, self-management, and learning community to combat that stress. In addition to an academic orientation, the programs provide a cohort workshop designed to initiate learning community, instill professionalism, and introduce learning skills to the students. The cohort workshop is presented through team instruction by the programs director, a professional engineer with 30 years’ experience as an engineering hiring manager who represents the professional work environment to the students, the mechanical engineering faculty, a PE with 20 years’ experience in industry, and a professor from the University’s organizational behavior program in the department of psychology who represents professionalism and knowledge in fields outside of engineering needed in professional practice. The workshop covers the topics of professionalism, ethics, cohort norms, self-awareness, and communication. Self-awareness is developed by applying two different assessment instruments selected based on their acceptance and effectiveness in industry practice in developing high-performance teams. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the StrengthsFinder 2.0 9 are administered to admitted students prior to the start of classes and the results collected and disseminated to the cohort during the cohort workshop. The results from these instruments are reinforced through continued use throughout the 5-semester program. One of the purposes of this paper is to collect and review the results of these instruments to investigate the student population to inform future research efforts. Therefore, the following results will summarize the general characteristics of the sample utilized in the evaluation of the success of the leadership development efforts by summarizing first the personality and strengths assessments, followed by the analysis of feedback from students regarding the usefulness of the activities and their individual perceptions of competence. The MBTI is ubiquitous in industry for its varied organizational benefits. This selfreported assessment tool is currently among the most popular and widely used personality instruments in a variety of industries, primarily for personnel development purposes. The MBTI can examine communication processes, functional roles of group members, group dynamics and leadership and authority patterns 4 . The MBTI assessment is designed to assess individual differences and basic preferences. Specifically, through a series of items it assesses where people focus their attention, how they prefer to make decisions, how they process information and whether they prefer to plan their decisions 5 . Individuals are placed into one of 16 personality categories, which are represented by a four-letter combination. These categories are derived from four main groups, each with opposing personality preferences: extraversion (E) or introversion (I), sensing (S) or intuition (N), thinking (T) or feeling (F) and judging (J) or perceiving (P) 5 . Regardless of the results of the assessment, the MBTI provides individuals with an opportunity to identify strengths and preferences within themselves and within others to work more effectively. The usefulness of the MBTI is in its ability to allow individuals to become more knowledgeable of their psychological preferences 6 . Gaining self-knowledge enables individuals to look at themselves in relation to others, to their work, and to their overall environment 7 . The Program’s pragmatic underpinnings support the application of any problem solution technique that can be proven effective. While the MBTI’s use is ubiquitous in industry and education, its application, dominance, and success for its devotees is controversial. Therefore, the program’s developers determined that application of more than one personality assessment was warranted. While Smalley animal personality test, Keirsey Temperaments, Emotional Intelligence, and Big Five personality tests have been suggested, there is a limit to the amount of self-assessment undergraduate engineering students are willing to undergo. So, only two significantly different assessments were desired. Because of its acceptance as a leadership tool in industry and the success the program developers has in creating the program administration as a “strengths-based organization”, the program chose to apply the Gallop organization’s StrengthsFinder. Similar to the MBTI, StrengthsFinder talent results can be used as a scaffold for identifying differences in preferences and behaviors, as a means of supporting teamwork, avoiding conflict and obviating stereotype threat. The St