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What Leadership Is About

December 15, 2007  |  from From the Top

Leadership is about capturing the imagination and enthusiasm of others and bringing out the best in them both individually and collectively. At one time, U.S. engineers held significant leadership positions and were highly respected by the general public. George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter, for example, were engineers who became U.S. presidents. These engineers who went on to assume the highest elected office in the United States consistently demonstrated to the public their commitment to the betterment of society while never losing sight of what engineering contributed to their development as leaders.

Almost all engineering education is technical; engineers are not taught how to lead, they are taught how to become engineers. Engineers must be taught to be leaders by mentoring supervisors or they must acquire leadership skills on their own initiative. While the engineering leader’s skill set embraces a number of competencies, there are three basic keys to leadership success that can be easily applied to the engineering profession: communication, confidence, and commitment.

Engineering leaders must understand that the team’s accomplishments are dependent upon the leader’s ability to motivate team members individually and collectively. Leaders must therefore share information so that each team member understands the goals and objectives of the team’s undertakings. A leader should never assume that team members are fully aware of his or her expectations. Expectations must be clearly communicated to each team member. It is also important to bear in mind that accessibility, collegiality, civility, and empathy on the part of a leader go a long way toward establishing and maintaining good team/employee morale.

Leadership requires more than effective communication. It requires confidence – the ability to know that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. The ability to never accept “no” for an answer, but rather look upon the naysayers and the apparent impossibilities as challenges and opportunities. A leader must possess the confidence in himself or herself that will ensure that work will be performed successfully and that team goals will be accomplished. It is imperative that any individual assuming an engineering leadership position fully understand the need to convey a level of confidence in all that he or she does to everyone around them. Confidence requires courage—the courage to set high personal and corporate standards, to maintain equilibrium in the face of major setbacks, to hold individuals accountable for their responsibilities in their performance of assigned tasks, to confront those who exhibit unacceptable behavior and to provide them with guidance for correcting such behavior, to resist the temptation to take work for the sake of taking work, to uphold one’s reputation and integrity and the reputation and integrity of one’s team and one’s firm, and to take risks with the understanding that great rewards may result but that so too may failure, and that failure is a great learning device.

Too many engineers come close to making new discoveries only to be thwarted by their frustration at the duration of the discovery process, giving up before their discovery is made. Success is realized largely by overcoming frustration, delays, setbacks, obstacles, or disappointments—in other words it is realized by means of commitment. A leader establishes goals, develops action plans for accomplishing those goals, and commits to the follow-through needed to accomplish the goals. Goal setting is the foundation of commitment. A failure to follow through on goals can lead to a lack of confidence in one’s self. In the event that others find this follow-through lacking, they too will begin to lose confidence in the leader. A loss in confidence is typically followed by a loss in trust, and once lost, trust is difficult to restore.

It is committed engineers who become successful leaders. If the engineering profession is to change the public’s perception that engineers are not capable of being leaders, then engineers must change themselves. Engineering leadership does not have to begin at a national level; it can be initiated at the individual level, the team level, and the firm level. As Margaret Mead once observed, “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.” (Part of a several week series taken from The 21st Century Engineer by ASCE Press, email: pubsful@asce.org)

Filed: Leadership