The Leader-Engineer- Capabilities, Competencies, and Attributes

Abstract

There is an urgent need for engineers to participate more fully in debate and decision-making to address the many challenges, local, national and global, that society faces. Engineering education provides graduates with technical competence but there are relatively few engineering programs that directly address development of leadership capability. At the University of Toronto, we have been developing leadership education since 2002 and presently offer wide-ranging curricular and co-curricular programming through Engineering Leaders of Tomorrow (LOT). Leadership can be defined as “a relational and ethical process of people together attempting to accomplish positive change”. Adding leadership capability to an engineer creates a powerful combined capability. A leader-engineer has the capability to leverage and empower engineering competence with leadership competence.