A responsibility to promote leadership: Engineering entrepreneurs speak back to resistance

Phase one of our Engineering Leadership Project (ELP) revealed engineers’ widespread resistance to the idea of leadership. To test this claim, we conducted a focus group with engineers who self-identified as leaders—experienced entrepreneurs. Our qualitative analysis of the resulting transcript resulted in eight themes, one of which we elucidate in this paper— “leadership education is the responsibility of engineering educators”. Our paper examines this theme and identifies four recommendations for engineering educators.This study was conducted with support from the Dean's Strategic Fund (Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto) and a consortium of partner companies (Hatch, Vale, ERCO Worldwide and Google Canada)