Engineering Leadership Characteristics for Professional Services Firms

By Dr. Ralph Baeza, PRINCIPAL, TLC ENGINEERING

Dr. Ralph Baeza, PE, LEED AP, is principal of TLC Engineering and a registered professional engineer with over 40 years of experience in all aspects of electrical engineering and project management. He can be reached at ralph.baeza@tlc-eng.com.

Professional services firms across North America are facing challenges in doing business in a fast-paced, global society with environments that require them to shape and coordinate the right culture that meets their strategic goals and creates sustainability with legacy.

To succeed in this environment, firms must become stronger at developing and retaining leaders and earning their commitment to a long and productive career in their organizations.

Consulting engineering firms are confronting an increased pressure for expansion of services and locations, delivery of more integrated services, investment in technology and significant increases in the costs of attracting, retaining and rewarding talent. As John Bennett and Mary Wayne Bush conclude in their study, Coaching in Organizations, these trends – along with an increasing use of technology, shortage of skilled workers, aging workforce and increasing generational diversity and multiculturalism –further demonstrate the need to develop and retain leaders.

In his seventh edition of Leadership: Theory and Practice, Peter Northouse defines leadership as “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.” This definition fosters leadership becoming available to everyone, since it occurs with interactive events between leaders and followers that affect them mutually.

Styles Of Effective Leadership

This article uses the process/behavior approach definition of leadership based on several components:

1) Leadership is a process.

2) Leadership involves influence.

3) Leadership occurs in groups.

4) Leadership involves common goals.

With this in mind, let’s review the authentic, servant and transformational leadership theories to define the concept of what a good consulting engineer leader is.

Authentic leaders exhibit “a behavior with self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing of ideas and relational transparency,” according to Northouse. Additionally, as B.J. Avolio and W.L. Gardner developed the current definition of the authentic leadership theory in 2005, authentic leaders collaborate with individuals in organizations to foster self-development.

Servant leaders have “an attitude of service by being authentic, vulnerable, accepting, present and useful,” Northouse writes. “Thus, (servant leaders) place the good of followers over their own self-interest and emphasize follower development.” The servant leadership concept, first developed by R.K. Greenleaf in 1977, puts serving the greater needs of others as the primary goal of leadership.

This approach is fostered by leaders who sense a natural desire to serve and make a conscious decision to lead by valuing and developing people, practicing authenticity, building community, providing leadership and sharing status and power for the common good of followers, the total organization and the communities it serves.

Transformational leaders engage with others and create a connection that raises the level of motivation in the leader and the follower alike. Author James Burns was the first to describe leadership as transforming and a quality that “recognizes and exploits an existing need or demand of potential followers.”

Transformational leadership is “a relation of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and leaders into moral agents,” Burns concluded. This theory is based on a movement that defines leadership as a process in which individuals engage to raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.

Changes and Challenges

Engineers are known to lead in ways that are related but different from the leadership practices found in other professional groups in accordance with their expertise. Thus, their leadership is understood to be influential, which in the case of engineers, is based on experientially gained technical insights and building bridges across organizational units operationalizing their innovative ideas.

Three writers published a 2015 paper in Leadership that identified three engineering leadership orientations: technical proficiency, collaborative organization and organizational innovation.

Staff turnover remains an issue for knowledgebased organizations, making it important to create recruiting and retention strategies that target talent. Equally important is the proper management of talented people, with the delegation of complex jobs and assignments to individuals with the capacity of handling them, to become a high-performance organization.

Leadership Characteristics, Development and Retention

Firm leaders are responsible for building and shaping organizations that meet their stakeholders’ expectations while facing today’s new challenges. These leaders are the decision makers that establish the purpose and direction an organization will follow.

Leaders must address issues such as how to adapt in a changing business and social environment, coping with increasing size and complexity, managing internal conflict, and shaping and coordinating the right organizational culture that meets organizational goals.

A/E/C firms need to build a strong culture to energize and motivate employees, unify people around shared goals and a higher mission, and shape and guide behaviors from the organizations’ stakeholders to be aligned with the organization’s strategic priorities. These priorities, per Richard Daft in Organizational Theory and Design, are driven by values that include:

1. The whole is more important than the parts.

2. Equality and trust are of the highest importance.

3. Risk-taking change and implementation.

This further requires leaders to create a management system in the organization for empowerment and self-leadership by providing a balance among the stakeholders’ needs and organization well-being, Stein Amundsen and Øyvind L. Martinsen conclude in their 2015 paper in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies.

Authentic, servant and transformational leadership help an organization’s members to feel personally empowered, be fairly rewarded by their contributions and influenced to perform to the utmost of their capacity.

As an example, firms show their engineering leadership identity by contributing to society with technical skills, vision, insight and leadership capacity addressing crumbling infrastructure, building global communication networks and generating environmentally sustainable energy systems at the local, state, federal and global levels.

Fostering the correct, desirable leadership characteristics in the organization’s leaders will ensure the firm’s employees contribute to achieve the business goals and avoid organizational stagnation. The development and retention of leaders by fostering desirable leadership characteristics requires organizations to be designed by providing a balance among the stakeholders’ needs and organizational well-being.

Authentic, servant and transformational leadership help an organization’s members to feel personally empowered, be fairly rewarded by their contributions and influenced to perform to the utmost of their capacity.

A good engineer leader is someone who fosters a culture of sustainability with legacy that develops and retains organizational leaders, for the present and future of the organization, by practicing authentic, servant and transformational leadership behavior.

Business Practice

The findings indicate that leaders agree about the importance of maintaining a strong culture, with leaders having desirable leadership characteristics that foster relationships with all stakeholders on proper values that are communicated and institutionalized with behaviors that support them.

These leaders, Daft writes, can encourage adaptation and enhance performance, align actions and strategic priorities founded in energizing and motivating employees, unify people with shared goals and a higher mission and shape and guide behavior.

Strategic plans that include the necessary training for the leaders and emerging leaders are important in the approach to creating a culture that fosters sustainability for the development and retention of leaders in the organizations.

The strategic plans in firms should require not only a desirable leadership characteristics training program but implementation programs of accountability and mentorship for all employees in the organizations. Furthermore, these plans must include an understanding of the current business environment to develop the needed business methods to create the needed sustainability culture in PSFs.

Recommendations for Action

Desirable leadership characteristics impact the leadership in organizations in ways where the participants are managing the talented people properly, with the correct delegation of complex jobs and assignments to individuals, and the capacity of handling them to be high performance.

This requires that all employees engage in their culture process by participating in work, involving people in decisions concerning their work to create job satisfaction, shifting power in the organization among leadership, managers and employees, working in a team rather than a silo approach, and working to solve problems that are difficult and challenging.

Here are a few action items to consider:

- Corporate leaders, board of directors’ members, operations’ directors, and senior leaders in knowledge-based firms are encouraged to study and understand their organization leadership characteristics and create necessary strategies to implement changes where necessary.

- Evaluate existing coaching, emerging leaders, and mentoring programs to apply the concepts from this study to leverage leaders’ desirable characteristics and align them with organizational competencies for the leaders and emerging leaders in the organizations.

- Evaluate your existing recruiting and retention strategies, considering the findings in this study, to address staff turnover and target the talent needs that are relevant.

Firm leaders are encouraged to foster a culture with:

- Authentic leaders by practicing desirable characteristics that recognize the gifts and talents of others and call them through empowering actions.

- Servant leaders who care, have integrity and high ethics, and are interested in and capable of building long-term relationships with stakeholders.

- Transformational leaders who can communicate effectively and create a sense of ownership, inventiveness and a dynamic work environment among their followers with shared responsibility to attain organizational goals and the individuals’ aspirations and needs.

Humility and a team, not-siloed approach among the members of the organization play a significant role in the decision-making process when considering that leaders will exhibit selfknowledge, character, stability and capacity for improvement and teamwork.

I hope that practical implications – inspiring leaders in knowledge-based PSFs with this information – will address the problem of development and retention of leaders in these organizations for their sustainability and legacy. May we all be encouraged to navigate the current social, political, and economic environments successfully with high ethical and moral standards of character for the betterment of humanity.

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