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Engineering Online

EGR 501 Engineering Leadership and Strategic Change

3 Credit Hours

In any business environment, an understanding of leadership and change management is essential to career success. This course provides practitioners in technical fields the knowledge to lead, align and transform individuals and teams, to achieve organizational performance excellence. The class includes both individual and collaborative (team) learning and assessments.

Prerequisite

An undergraduate or advanced degree in a scientific, technical, engineering or mathematics-related program of study.

Course Objectives

This course is designed to prepare students to lead and direct high performing groups in STEM-related fields.  Students will develop their leadership competencies by leveraging foundational frameworks for leadership and strategic change as they are applied to projects and programs in an engineering or scientific work environment.

Course Outcomes

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

  1. Identify and distinguish between different leadership typologies
  2. Apply the requisite skills to become effective leaders and agents of change in engineering organizations
  3. Distinguish between the technical and adaptive challenges of engineering leadership
  4. Describe the conceptual frameworks for effective organizational change
  5. Apply the principles of system thinking to engineering organizations
  6. Analyze real-world leadership challenges in engineering organizations (business cases)
  7. Create effective virtual and global engineering teams

Course Expectations

This course is designed to provide you the knowledge and capabilities to develop and apply leadership concepts in your STEM-based organization.  The class facilitates learning through readings, reflections and discussions as well as individual and team-based assessments.  Students are expected to complete assignments in a timely fashion in order to contribute to the collaborative classroom engagement paradigm.  Your active participation is unequivocally important as success in the course can be directly attributed to the time and effort spent engaging in meaningful dialog and thoughtful reflection around the assignments as applicable to your prevailing work environment.

Course Requirements

Individual Written Assignments/Book Chapter Reviews20%
Journal Papers Reviews/Reports20%
Reflections/Reading Assignments & Summaries20%
Case Studies30%
Simulations10%

Textbook

  1. Leading Change (2012) – John P. Kotter, Harvard Business School Press, ISBN 978-1-4221-8643-5. $17 from Amazon.com
  2. Essentials of Engineering Leadership and Innovation (2017) – Pamela McCauley, Routledge, ISBN 978-1-4398-2011-7. $70 from Amazon.com (rent for $17).
  3. StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007) – Tom Rath, Gallup, ISBN 978-1595620156. $17.30 from Amazon.com (MUST BE PURCHASED NEW WITH CODE FOR ONLINE ASSESSMENT).

Computer and Software Requirements

Software: See above note about StrengthsFinder(c) assessment

Updated 10/09/2020