Application Of Engineering Leadership To Improve Group's Performance

This case occurred during a practical lab session where my group and I were tasked with a graded lab report based on that session’s experiment. That week’s experimental procedure was knowledge-intensive and rigorous, requiring a good understanding of that week’s lecture content while involving many steps including some that had to be done simultaneously. To finish the experiment with enough time to analyze and evaluate our experimental results as required in our lab report, familiarity and understanding of the experimental procedure was essential, and this was usually spearheaded by the group leader of the week. That week, it was me. I only realized it during the lab session, and I had not studied that week’s lecture content or experimental procedure beforehand. Incidentally, no one else had done so, since the rest of my group weren’t tasked with being the group leader. Needless to say, we struggled to be on task throughout the entire lab session. After 4 hours of chaos and scrambling around the lab, we barely managed to finish the report in time for submission. The result of that, however, was the lowest scoring lab report of that semester.

How could the application of engineering leadership have improved my group's performance in our lab assignment?

In regard to engineering leadership, the qualities that would have helped to avoid the pandemonium experienced by my group include technical mastery, collaborative optimization and a strong embodiment of core values such as proactiveness and responsibility. Firstly, my group’s attitude towards our lab assignment was fundamentally wrong. Every week, we assumed no responsibility for the lab assignment except for the weeks that we were made to be leader and took no initiative to read through the necessary content before attending lab sessions. The MIT Engineering Leadership Program (2011) states that taking initiative and directing a course of action is one of the core attributes of an engineering leader, suggesting that the appointed leader should not be the only one who is actively involved in projects. This is further supported by the Rottman et al. model where it states that the nature of leadership is “dispositional rather than positional”, thereby making it easier for engineers to display leadership and hence, anyone in the group can and should portray leadership to an extent. Indeed, if my group mates and I had taken the initiative to be familiar with that week’s lab content and procedure, and shared the responsibility of delivering a well-written lab report, we would have been better prepared to tackle the assignment.

Secondly, possessing technical mastery could have helped our group to produce work of good quality. After reading through the annex, we realized that we didn’t know how to perform certain steps, or what certain terms referred to. This situation snowballed and cost us a lot of time which could have gone to churning out a better lab report. If we had a deeper understanding of the content, we would have known what to do after reading the procedure once. Furthermore, according to Rottman, Sacks and Reeves, possessing technical mastery entails the capability to effectively use engineering tools and to generate solutions to problems using relevant data and information.

The importance of such capabilities is supported by the MIT Engineering Leadership Program, where it states that engineer leaders should possess the skill to simplify problems by identifying important details and observing trends. Such skills would have helped us to analyze our data more critically and provide better evaluation of our experimental results.

Finally, the concept of collaborative optimization states that projects cannot be completed alone, even by professionals. Thus, it could be helpful to set goals for groups and motivate members to achieve these goals together. Collaborative optimization would help further if we can work effectively together by utilizing each other’s strengths to approach relevant problems. This suggests that to have collaborative optimization, some understanding of the task is required to best allocate tasks to group members to optimize their strengths. In this context, we failed to realize how detrimental it was to put all the responsibility of the lab assignment on the leader and to not share a common goal. We made no efforts to prepare for the assignment beforehand, no one understood the lab procedure thoroughly, and thus we were unable to delegate tasks to members who were best suited for them. Instead, whoever was available would work on the next required task. Hence, collaborative optimization could have helped us be better prepared for the assignment and tackle it more efficiently, ultimately helping us achieve a better score for the assignment.

From this case, it can be seen how a lack of engineering leadership can result in adverse circumstances. Furthermore, it shows that engineering leadership can and should be portrayed even in simple scenarios such as group assignments. Thus, as aspiring engineers, we should take every opportunity we have to sharpen our skills in engineering leadership so as to become effective team players and leaders in the future, especially in the realms of technical mastery, collaborative optimization and taking initiative.