The Introspective Engineer

• In Event: Dynamic Education: Becoming Forward Thinking About What We Teach

Short Description

While this university had many outstanding programs, it lacked one on leadership. MoTiv cooperated with the faculty of applied science to set up a short program on personal leadership for second year students to foster self-insight and motivation, resulting in enhanced personal leadership. Should and will this program be implemented at all departments?

Detailed Abstract

In short:
• Teaching personal leadership to (2nd year Bachelor students of applied physics at Delft University of Technology
• Dealing with the resistance of not social skills oriented students
• Collaboration of academic and external training organizations

Challenge
Students from Delft University of Technology compete in many ways successfully with (e.g.) MIT (Boston, US) and Tsinghua university (Beijing, China). The university has several excellent programs and Delft students form winning teams in international competitions. (e.g. nuonsolarteam.nl). But how do they develop leadership skills and personal leadership?
MoTiv cooperated with the faculty of Applied Science to set up a short program on personal leadership for second year students of applied physics with 2 challenges: fostering self insight and motivation, resulting in enhanced personal leadership.

Approach
MoTivMiles, a university and technology oriented Training and Coaching organization (founded by Chaplaincy) was asked by the Dean of the faculty of Applied Physics to develop, in cooperation with the faculty student-organization, a program to evoke in second year students leadership qualities, fostering them to think about their intrinsic motivations and talents.
To us leadership training has to be part of the professional formation of all engineers.
In our view students do not only need an introduction to the profession and to acquire deep technical and professional skills, knowledge and abilities, they also have to develop outlooks, perspectives, ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that make them excellent leaders in the complex and fast-changing world of tomorrow. But how do we stimulate these students to be self-critical, reflective and introspective personalities and become real leaders?
In these first forming years at university they have to (start to) develop their identity and integrity as an engineer and its intersection with other identities (American NSF- RFE program).
For our program this means that learning in a group is very important in (personal) leadership development by students, it cannot be learned individually. So all (150 -180) second year students had to participate. The weak have to learn from the strong (in several fields of learning) and vice versa.
But the group could not have more than 14 participants to be able to give attention to each person individually and the program could not be more than 4 hours, just to sow the seed and not to overload students whose main interest is technology and not introspection or leadership!
Leadership theory in this program can only be a tool. We used several theories, e.g. the framework of the Emotionally Intelligent Leadership method developed by Shankman, Allen and Miguel, (San Francisco 2015), defining emotionally intelligent leadership from 3 facets: consciousness of self, consciousness of others and consciousness of context. And: in good leadership training a relevant discussion is more important than the program…

Program
In 2 subsequent years the program was conducted in 11 groups each time by 2 trainers. Leadership skills were discussed the first course, but left out the second, because inner motivation and assessing many aspects of the context seemed more important.
The course consisted of 3 parts, each taking roughly a third of the available time:
• Motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic (Daniel Pink, Drive, 2010)
• Context (The 7 habits of highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey, 1989)
and time management (First things first, Stephen Covey, 1994), including developing better routines.(The Power of Habit, Charles Duhig, 2012)
• Success as a personal goal. What does success/a successful or fruitful life, or to start, study mean to you? Based on the different perceptions of success personal intentions were formulated and discussed.

Baseline measurement
A baseline measurement was necessary to measure improvement (by the students themselves).The first course we used the Belbin test (Meredith Belbin, teamroles) as an introduction to ‘consciousness of self’. It is relatively easy self inventory test and not very confronting. Because the test ‘only’ researches personal preferences for a role (like coordinator or implementer) and all 9 roles contribute to the whole of a team, this is a self-affirmative test and the roles are easy to understand en recognize. The test takes about 45 minutes and that is a lot of time.
The second course we used a card game in which the students were invited tot describe themselves in strengths and weaknesses. A more direct way of telling others about yourself, and more efficient. But also in some groups less impactful, because students could not find other words to describe themselves than the words given on the cards they chose.
On average physics students like to do tests, and we continue searching for tests revealing personal leadership possibilities in a clear and gentle way.

Leadership theory
Several different leadership theories were very shortly exposed (Youtube presentation) to make the students aware of the diversity in theory. Discussion was allowed for at least 30 minutes on preferences, pro’s and contra’s. This seemed to be a good way to address leadership theory for the very intelligent physics students.

Goals, results and feedback from the students (2 years)
The goals of the course:
1. To enhance a common awareness/consciousness of motivation, context and perception of the personal goals.
2. Develop together personal views on (self) leadership
3. Mutual stimulation of motivation
4. To find solutions for ineffective behavior
5. Stimulate students to be more effective in their daily tasks and have more insight in what is important in study and life.

Results and feedback from students
Though results are not really measurable the faculty evaluated the results by inventory.
The course was evaluated by 1/3 (N=50) of the population. Results were on average above expectation (compared to similar courses for engineering students), but open to improvement.
(to be presented at the conference)
Behind the scenes, when asked by faculty members, the students are more positive than in the digital evaluation. The student-organization is very positive and is recommending the course to their fellow organizations.

Recommendations
1. leadership education should be part of every engineering training
2. A good baseline measurement is very important.
3. leadership education has to be tailored differently for different professions

Participants

• Renske Oldenboom, Delft University of Technology

• Gunther Sturms, Delft University of Technology

• Bart de Klerk, Delft University of Technology

• Hans van Drongelen, MoTiv, Delft University of Technology