From the GEL program website: In GEL Year One (GEL1), students are exposed to the fundamentals of engineering leadership theory and they engage in carefully crafted group activities to develop, practice, and hone their leadership skills in an engineering context. During GEL1, students have the opportunity to practice both team membership and team leadership as they undertake exercises and simulations related to engineering industry contexts.

Outline

(Generated by DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B in LM Studio, I changed the prompts as I was doing it, also the LLM kept changing the output format so it might look weird)

1. Introduction to Engineering Practice and Leadership

Engineering practice is a dynamic interplay between technical expertise (object world) and social processes (social/process world), both equally vital for success. While engineering education traditionally emphasizes individual mastery of technical concepts, real-world applications require strong interpersonal skills like communication, collaboration, and leadership.

In modern engineering projects, engineers often collaborate with others due to the complexity of subsystems, necessitating distributed expertise. Effective communication is crucial in engineering practice, as it goes beyond conveying information; it involves shaping perceptions and fostering cooperation among team members.

Leadership plays a pivotal role in driving change within teams and organizations. It is defined as influencing a group towards achieving common goals. Leadership can be learned through process-based approaches, which involve behaviors that foster buy-in from team members.

This week’s lecture emphasized the importance of understanding both the technical and social dimensions of engineering practice, highlighting how these two worlds are interconnected and essential for success in professional settings.

2. Group Dynamics and Team Motivation

Groups progress through distinct stages as they form cohesive teams. The typical stages are:

1. Forming: Initial phase where members come together, establish group dynamics, and explore membership criteria.
2. Storming: Challenges arise due to differing opinions or unclear goals, potentially leading to instability if unresolved.
3. Norming: Members develop shared norms and understand the group’s culture, enhancing mutual understanding and behavior consistency.
4. Performing: Team members focus on tasks, achieving results efficiently without significant conflict.

Group dynamics involve both formal and informal structures:

• Formal Roles (group-building vs task roles) are essential for cohesive functioning.
• Dysfunctional Roles such as special interest pleaders or blockers can hinder progress.
• Common Roles include information seekers, opinion givers, and summarizers, each playing a vital function.

Group norms guide behaviors:

• Norms are informal rules agreed upon by the group, crucial for maintaining cohesion.
• Climate refers to the group’s mood and atmosphere; understanding this helps in effective leadership.

Motivation is influenced by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Traditional leadership methods may not foster creativity, so intrinsic motivation through challenges, freedom, and resources is key.

• Mission Statement: A concise definition of the team’s purpose and goals.
• Vision Statement: The aspirational outcome that the team aims to achieve in the future.

We did an exercise involving creating a mission statement for a coffee company, enhancing understanding among team members about their shared goals. It emphasizes the importance of clear communication and shared values.

3. Leadership Styles and Emotional Intelligence

This week focuses on understanding how different leadership styles affect outcomes based on individual, team, and situational factors.

Leadership Styles:

• Transactional Leadership: Uses extrinsic motivators (rewards/punishments) for fast results but is seen as toxic in most contexts.
• Transformational Leadership: Relies on intrinsic motivators like vision and desire, proving highly effective despite lacking efficiency.

Other styles include:

• Coercive Style: Dictatorial approach, useful only in emergencies.
• Authoritative Style: Clear vision and direction, often the most effective.
• Affiliative Style: Focused on team harmony but may lack structure.
• Democratic Style: Involves employees but can lead to indecision.
• Pace Setting Style: Sets high standards with possible micromanagement.
• Coaching Style: Encourages questioning and less effective when used alone.

Climate Factors:

• Climate elements like flexibility, responsibility, etc., influence workplace dynamics and profitability.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Role:

• EQ enhances leadership effectiveness by improving adaptability and decision-making through practice and coaching.

Leadership Capabilities:

1. Sensemaking: Develops by seeking diverse data sources and fostering collaboration.
2. Relating: Strengthened through active listening, advocacy, and connection-building.
3. Visioning: Created with exciting ideas, ideological goals, and clear communication to inspire action.
4. Inventing: Improved through continuous innovation and adaptability in processes.

Change Signature:

• A unique leader fingerprint developed over time through experience, indicating a person’s leadership style and capabilities.

Understanding these elements helps leaders choose effective strategies tailored to their environment and team dynamics.

4. Ethics and Ill-Structured Problems

This week focused on understanding ethics, moral dilemmas, and decision-making frameworks in engineering contexts. Key concepts include:

1. Ethics: The philosophical study of morality, focusing on right and wrong without relying solely on legality or finding the “right answer.” It involves holding public statements in an objective and truthful manner (National Society of Professional Engineers’ guidelines).

2. Ethical Frameworks: Four approaches to decision-making were explored:
   • Consequence-based: Maximize winners while minimizing losers.
   • Duty-based: Would someone oppose the action on you? Treat others as you would want to be treated.
   • Virtue-based: Would a virtuous person engage in this action? Would I be proud if others saw me do this?
   • Justice-based: Is it fair to those who decided not to do what you did?

3. Ill-Structured Problems: These are complex and often require synthetic reasoning, as they involve conflicting demands and multiple viewpoints. Ill-structured problems differ from well-structured ones (with clear answers) in that their solutions can be ambiguous or lead to reformulation of the problem itself.

4. Moral Dilemmas: These arise when making decisions with ethical implications. They often require balancing personal values, professional standards, and external pressures. For example, a senior leader may use pacesetting due to stressors but balance it by ensuring fairness in decision-making processes.

5. Ethical Leadership: Leaders must consider their own values and integrity when making decisions. An example was given of an “ethical engineer” who prioritizes both performance and moral standards.

6. Testing Decisions: When faced with tough decisions, evaluate outcomes (consequences), process (duty-based reasoning), character (alignment with personal values), and justice (fairness to others). For instance, a company deciding whether to fix defective products might consider reputation over time while ensuring customer satisfaction.

Ethical Decision-Making Example: A lab scenario where choosing honesty in a transaction (e.g., providing a thermal camera) despite potential short-term benefits demonstrates ethical integrity and long-term stability for the organization.

5. Negotiating + Compromising

Negotiating + Compromising

This week explores how negotiations work and the role of compromise in engineering settings. The anchoring effect is introduced—a cognitive bias where the first piece of information significantly influences decisions, often skewing offers in one direction. For instance, an initial high price from a seller can prompt buyers to lower their offers based on that anchor.

Techniques like meta-anchoring are discussed as ways to influence expectations subtly without using numbers. In engineering negotiations, this is crucial due to the time and resources invested in preparation, which shouldn’t be mistaken for sunk costs.

BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement)

Understanding BATNA is vital. It represents the fallback option if negotiations fail. Knowing each party’s BATNA helps shape negotiations effectively. However, often only one side knows their BATNA, making negotiations more complex.

ZOPA (Zone of Possible Agreement)

ZOPA is the range where both parties can reach an agreement. Without overlapping, a deal isn’t possible. For example, in an intellectual property negotiation, understanding each party’s BATNA ensures mutually beneficial outcomes.

Key Takeaways from Lab

Engaging in consensus-building was challenging when each side prioritized their interests. Anchoring significantly influenced negotiations, as initial numbers set the tone for subsequent offers. Power dynamics in negotiations also mattered; having more influence helped teams achieve their goals, while upfront demands can backfire if others feel pressured.

Example: PCB Contract Negotiation

Anchoring at $25 per board and other factors altered final prices, highlighting anchoring’s power. Engineers must be cautious with numbers to avoid biases affecting decisions.

Understanding BATNA and ZOPA is essential for effective negotiations in engineering contexts. Always consider fallbacks and how initial anchors can shape outcomes.

6. Persuasion and Advocacy

The lecture focused on the art of persuasion as a form of learning and negotiation. Key points included:

1. Persuasion as a Learning Process: Persuasion is not about forcing an opinion but helping others understand your perspective through shared understanding.

2. Four Steps for Effective Persuasion:
   • Establish Credibility: Build trust by demonstrating expertise and relationships.
   • Frame for Common Ground: Emphasize benefits that both parties share to find agreement.
   • Provide Evidence: Use stories, examples, and data to make arguments compelling.
   • Connect Emotionally: Appeal to emotions to strengthen your message.
3. Challenges in Negotiation:
   • Avoid one-sided communication; teams should consider their personal interests when negotiating.
   • Recognize that unfair offers (“ shafting “) can lead to negative outcomes, as seen in the lab activity where “nice” teams were at a disadvantage.
4. Lab Activity Takeaways: Teams learned about resource distribution and competitive negotiation dynamics, highlighting the importance of considering both shared goals and personal interests during negotiations.

This week’s focus was on mastering persuasive techniques to enhance communication and negotiation skills effectively.

7. Workplace Dynamics

This week’s lecture focused on key aspects of professional development and workplace dynamics. The discussion highlighted the importance of effective feedback mechanisms between engineers and managers to ensure timely and constructive input. It was emphasized that while good managers provide valuable guidance, poor ones may neglect or micromanage employees.

One-on-one meetings were identified as crucial for building trust and communication within teams. These meetings should be status-neutral to allow open discussion about challenges, progress, and areas for improvement. Feedback delivery was stressed to be both timely and public, with managers encouraged to assign stretch projects that align with their expectations without overshadowing the engineer’s contributions.

The lecture also addressed career growth opportunities for engineers, such as promotions and compensation tied to one-on-ones with managers. It was advised to take proactive steps towards career advancement in an uncertain job market, leveraging research skills, identifying personal contributions, and building professional networks through events like lunch invocations or connecting with superiors.

Challenges included rebuilding credibility after mistakes. The lecture suggested strategies such as apologizing, setting clear expectations, balancing under- and over-promising, focusing on quick wins, and reassessing one’s role within the company to regain trust.

Building credibility involved both expertise (valuable knowledge) and relational aspects (volunteering and reliability). Pitfalls included overstating past successes or misaligning communication with others’ areas of expertise. Good organizations foster systems to maintain goodwill, supporting proactive advocacy for differing perspectives within the workplace. The lab activity underscored the importance of assertiveness in advocating for diverse viewpoints while practicing decision-making under uncertainty.

8. Inquiring & Dialouging

• Wrap-up: Comparisons are powerful but emotionally charged in real-time is hard. Avoiding step-ups becoming norms requires addressing issues respectfully or with a manager. Use anchoring through time limits and don’t ask too much by exploring what’s stopping the idea.

• Inquiring & Dialoguing: Two-way communication needed to notice when not listening fully. Active listening: focus attention, finish sentences, listen for feelings. Presence: be conscious of body language, prioritize attention, avoid distractions. Constructive responses: match mood/feelings, respond rather than lead, avoid inserting experiences.

• Micro-skits: Highlights dysfunctional leaps to abstraction causing misunderstandings. Importance of tactful delivery despite discomfort when raising issues.

• Your Team: Keeping members requires understanding their motivations and keeping them informed; losing them can happen if assumptions are wrong or reasons aren’t clear.

9. Structured Communications

Introduction

Collaboration is central to engineering success, comprising over 80% of work performed by engineers. It involves teamwork across various technical and personal aspects of life.

Collaboration in Engineering

Engineers collaborate daily on projects, from educating clients to predicting product performance. Technical skills are distributed unevenly, highlighting the importance of effective communication. Communication is key for collaboration but can be challenging due to differing understandings over time.

Challenges in Collaboration

Collaboration faces challenges like unpredictable team dynamics and misinterpretations leading to failures. Some engineers rely heavily on solitary work, while others find effective communication difficult.

Effective Communication Methods

Effective technical communication requires careful planning, including walk-throughs for bug detection. It’s essential to consider the audience when drafting documents to ensure clarity and relevance.

Structured vs. Interpersonal Communications

Structured communication needs precision without feedback loops, exemplified by step-by-step instructions. In contrast, interpersonal communication is immediate but can vary widely in tone and approach due to differences in understanding and context.

Lab Feedback

Lab sessions faced challenges with communication breakdowns and differing understandings among team members. Feedback highlighted the need for improved active listening and body language during discussions.

Takeaways

Key takeaways include preparing for conversations, being emotionally aware, prioritizing clear communication skills, handling criticism gracefully, and understanding that thoroughness without conciseness can sometimes be challenging in meetings.

10. Identifying Problems and Their Causes

Course Overview

This week focuses on identifying issues, problems, or paradoxes using analytical tools. The course introduces methods like the Fishbone Diagram, “5 Why’s” Technique, Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and Why-Because Analysis (WBA). These tools help break down complex situations into manageable parts to identify root causes.

Tools & Methods

1. Fishbone Diagram Method

• A visual tool that organizes potential causes of an issue into categories like materials, methods, machines, etc., resembling a fish skeleton.
• Helps identify interconnections between problems and their underlying causes.
• Example: Root cause analysis in manufacturing defect identification.

2. 5 Why’s Technique

• A problem-solving method that repeatedly asks “Why” to dig deeper into the root cause of an issue.
• Often used for quick brainstorming sessions with a team, but can be criticized for not always reaching systemic causes.
• Limitation: May stop short of fundamental issues if answers are incomplete or biased.

3. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)

• A deductive tool that starts from an undesired outcome and traces all possible causes to identify system failures.
• Example: Analyzing the cause of a train derailment by mapping out contributing factors like track maintenance, weather conditions, etc.
• Benefits: Provides clear data on system reliability and effectiveness.

4. Why-Because Analysis (WBA)

• A structured method for analyzing root causes using nodes as factors and edges as potential relationships.
• Example: Investigating a car accident by tracing the cause back through contributing factors like road conditions, vehicle maintenance, etc.
• Formal tests like the Counterfactual Test (CT) and Causal Sufficiency Test (CST) ensure validity in identifying causal links.

Case Study Reflection

Case study on A340 test failure due to wheel explosions:

• Relevant tools: Fishbone Diagrams for cause mapping, “5 Why’s” for root cause identification, Fault Tree Analysis for system-level failures, and Why-Because Analysis for tracing systemic issues.
• Multiple potential causes were identified through these methods, leading to a comprehensive understanding of the problem.

Takeaways

• Start with the Fishbone Diagram for initial analysis due to its complexity.
• Switch to “5 Why’s” when you have specific information or when the issue is well-defined.

11. Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging

Diversity can drive innovation by bringing different perspectives to the table. This lecture explored how diverse teams often perform better than homogeneous ones due to their varied ideas and experiences (Rahaman, 2023).

Key takeaways include:

• Diversity’s Role: Diverse groups solve problems faster, innovate more effectively, and make better decisions because they consider multiple viewpoints.
• Workplace Belonging: Understanding the concept of workplace belonging is crucial for creating inclusive environments. It involves feeling connected to a workplace community and valued by colleagues (Rahaman, 2023).

Strategies to enhance diversity-driven outcomes include:

1. Encouraging open communication about different perspectives within teams.
2. Providing opportunities for team members with diverse backgrounds to collaborate effectively.

Regarding belonging, the lecture emphasized:

• The Importance of Belonging: Feeling a sense of community and inclusion can boost job satisfaction, performance, and retention (Rahaman, 2023).
• Interventions to Foster Belonging:
  • Encouraging team members to share their experiences or coping strategies.
  • Promoting mentorship opportunities for those feeling excluded.
  • Creating a safe space for open dialogue about workplace dynamics.

Additionally, the lecture touched on addressing biases that can hinder belonging and inclusion:

• Similarity Biases: People often perceive themselves as more similar to others in their group than those outside of it (Rahaman, 2023).
• Mitigation Strategies:
  • Promoting self-affirmation to reduce negative perceptions of dissimilar groups.
  • Encouraging distance biases by acknowledging the value of diverse perspectives and experiences.

Overall, fostering a workplace culture that values diversity and inclusion requires intentional effort to address biases and create opportunities for belonging.

12. Creativity and Flow

Creativity is deeply rooted in intrinsic motivation—doing something because it’s inherently enjoyable or rewarding. A study with children demonstrated that extrinsic rewards (e.g., judges’ evaluations) reduced creativity compared to tasks offered as raffles, highlighting how lack of autonomy can stifle creativity.

The social environment significantly influences creativity through factors like:

• Autonomy: Allowing freedom in decision-making.
• Challenging Work: Providing meaningful goals.
• Resources: Access to necessary tools and information.
• Supportive Teams: Diverse skills and open communication.
• Supervisor Support: Modeling effective problem-solving.

Obstacles to creativity include:

• Workload Pressure: Excessive demands without clear purpose.
• Status Quo Bias: Resistance to change due to existing norms.

Flow theory emphasizes engaging activities that are self-motivated, offering immediate feedback. It suggests challenges stretch skills, leading to peak performance when goals align with personal interests and capabilities. However, flow can be disrupted by external factors or overstimulation.

The lecture outlined conditions for intrinsic motivation: challenging work, freedom, resources, and a supportive environment. Managing creativity involves accommodating skill development while avoiding discouraging factors like excessive time constraints or status quo issues.

An exercise highlighted demotivation due to unclear expectations and perfectionism, underscoring the need for flexible deadlines and purposeful tasks in assignments. The course aimed to foster creativity through conditions that support intrinsic motivation and accommodate skill growth.

Flow experiences are subjective, based on challenges aligned with skills rather than objective difficulty. Distractions can disrupt this flow, affecting engagement.

Understanding team dynamics is crucial for overcoming creativity hindrances like design fixation or over-reliance on past solutions. Managers framing problems based on personal interests might inadvertently limit creativity by imposing biases without context.

13. Lab Takeaways

Key Takeaways:

• Tasks and Collaboration: The labs emphasized splitting tasks effectively (e.g., grouping by strengths) and maintaining focus on the overall goal while coordinating with peers.
• Communication Issues: Initially struggling with structuring communication, realizing that a clear coordinate system could improve efficiency was a key takeaway.
• Leadership and Advocacy: Efforts to lead without taking over were highlighted, along with advocating for decisions and communicating ideas clearly.
• Decision-Making: Recognizing the difficulty in making decisions under uncertainty and the importance of prioritizing tasks and resources.

Actionable Steps:

1. Reserve 15% of lab time for planning to ensure understanding and reduce downtime.
2. Prioritize tasks based on strengths, focusing on high-value activities.
3. Encourage peer communication by setting a timer to track progress.
4. Set personal goals to lead confidently when uncertain or asked to take charge.

Peer Review Insights:

• Increasing participation during meetings and discussions can enhance teamwork and decision-making confidence.
• Branching out while staying informed about the team’s direction is encouraged for creative solutions.
• Practicing decision-making in low-stakes environments, like labs, helps build resilience and adaptability.

Last updated: 29 January 2025

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