Leadership Skills for Engineers: What They Are and Why You Need Them

At some time or another in a typical engineering career, opportunities for leading a project team and advancing one's career are bound to appear. Your ability to take advantage of such opportunities will depend largely on how well you have demonstrated leadership skills in the past as an engineer.

You Are Being Watched.

Remember that regardless of the position you are working in, modern organizations are continuously assessing you as an employee and trying to find ways in which your professional capabilities may be more profitably utilized. If you think that visibly demonstrating your leadership skills is not required in an engineering job, you are sending a message to your organization to exclude you from its list of potential team leaders. And if you think that building up your leadership skills is not important, chances are you won't be able to handle the responsibility if you are placed in a leadership role. This is why knowing and understanding why organizations consider certain attributes to be leadership traits is essential to your career as an engineer.



Leadership Skills vs. Managerial Skills

Leadership skills are critical managerial skills. Although the industry has come to understand the difference between managers and leaders, managerial training is rarely devoid of some discussion of leadership. Some might say that the biggest difference between a manager and a leader is that a leader can initiate and sustain change, while a manager can turn that change into an accepted practice.

Engineers Really Need Leadership Skills.

For engineers, developing leadership skills is more important than developing managerial skills because most engineers already possess personality profiles that include the qualities managers need. For engineers, learning managerial skills is usually not very difficult. However, leadership skill development is often another story. This was illustrated by Peter Taylor, CE of Engineers Australia, in his keynote address, "Engineers—Leaders, Managers, or Both," at the 2006 Engineering Leadership Conference in Australia.

Leadership Skills and Personal Characteristics

The more an engineer demonstrates the following characteristics on the job, the better his or her chances are of being selected by his or her organization for promotion: 

1. the ability to provide direction despite uncertain conditions
2. an intense desire to succeed
3. the perseverance necessary to succeed
4. the creativity necessary to ensure success
5. the ability to ignite the imaginations of others
6. the ability to communicate complex ideas in a simple manner
7. an assertive nature
8. the ability to take initiative
9. perfectionism
10. a drive to give outstanding performance
11. the ability to deal with ideas at an abstract level and conceptualize without ready data
12. the ability to quickly learn new concepts outside of one's immediate functional area
13. the ability to identify the implications of new situations and problems
14. the ability to use innovative approaches and new technology
15. a risk-taking mentality
16. the ability to respond quickly to situations based on personal analysis and intuition without requiring definitive proof
17. confidence and conviction
18. emotional maturity
19. open-mindedness
20. interpersonal competence

To conclude, as Taylor says, "We engineers are unlikely to produce large numbers of born leaders, but we will produce many excellent managers. We can, however—because of our personal qualities and preferences—make the transition to be excellent leaders. But we will have to work at developing our weaker leadership traits and skills."

Building leadership skills will multiply any engineer's opportunities for career development and open the gates to success.

Reference

Thomas, Mark A. Gurus on Leadership. London: Thorogood, 2005.