Training for leadership and team skills from Freshman year forward

Abstract

Leadership and small-group skills for engineers are not only important for interacting with the 3-5 people on a design team during their academic career, but for performing well on professional engineering teams, which often include customers, support personnel (who are not engineers), and other constituencies in the workplace. This issue is best captured with this quote from Mr. Bock of Google, "What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back⋯.".1 Our work with freshman engineering students is based on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI) and Klein Group Instrument" (KGI) assessments, training students to understand their own personality characteristics, and to refine them to become more effective leaders and team members. Our training aims to have students enhance their ability to offer new ideas or solutions to advance the work of their team and to productively address conflict while actively engaging team members and contributing to a constructive team climate. With the combination of MBTI and KGI, students will be trained to consciously recognize differences in personality styles, without labeling a characteristic as a strength or weakness. The results of these two instruments give students an individual 'portrait' of themselves, which is then used as a starting point for discussion, training, interaction with others, and conscious, insightful reflection. With the KGI, each student receives a personal profile comprised of numerous action items to develop group skills at his or her own pace. Our work in this freshman course provides the basic training on the utilization of information provided by these instruments, asks each student to pick two skills from their personal KGI profile, and has developed assignments to promote reflection on their implementation of KGI skills and personal behaviors.