Leadership in Engineering Meetings

Observing our students during the project assignments, we found that that leadership in integrated engineering meetings is emerging. At different times in the meetings different people take leadership roles according to the style of leadership that is required at the specific time of the meeting. Who is in lead heavily depends on the meeting dynamics and can hardly be predicted. For managing these meetings these findings mean that efforts to structure these meetings or to assign dedicated project managers to lead these meetings could be counter-effective. Moderators might still be important, but they need to step back and rather foster others to move into leadership roles, something that might come rather non-intuitive. We are working on a paper to publish these results, I will keep you posted!