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The Leadership Development Program (LDP) at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU) is a two-year undergraduate experiential leadership development program. Since inception 15 years ago, the LDP has a 100 percent post-graduation placement rate. Included in this statistic are the graduates that elect to continue their graduate studies. The Pathways to STEM Leadership (PSL), an NSF S-STEM project at SIU, provides scholarships to support STEM majors' success in the LPD. Now in its sixth year, the PSL project examines the impact early S-STEM leadership training produces on transformational technical leadership in its graduates. The LDP uses an instructional approach framed upon Social Interdependence Theory to foster member interdependence and cooperative learning. This approach has demonstrated significant improvement of student leadership and helped to affirm a highly successful graduation rate. Research has expanded to study the impact of the LDP on graduates pursuing advanced STEM degrees. Preliminary findings suggest that LDP graduates applied leadership training while pursuing a graduate degree and sought out additional leadership roles, community service, or professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficacy of leadership training on undergraduate engineering and technology students before and during the COVID-19 pandemic was examined. A leadership development program (LDP) at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) emphasized active involvement and interpersonal relationship among participants to build a community of STEM leaders. The LDP recruited academically talented and economically disadvantaged STEM majors from partner community colleges and trained them as leaders. The directors framed the LPD within Social Interdependence Theory to promote and enable students to cooperatively learn to lead themselves, build leadership skills, and participate in leadership teams. The COVID-19 pandemic imposed extra challenges on implementing this model when teaching and learning switched to an online modality. Program organizers followed the program tenets and "Challenged the Process" to find innovative ways to maintain connections among and with students. Working together, students learned to apply their leadership training by organizing and completing service projects. Additionally, students practiced leadership skills within registered student organizations. Through dedication by students and coaches, the program exceeded expectations through the pandemic. The LDP continued with 100% graduation and 100% retention rates. Students in the LDP continued to show large, statistically significant gains in Leadership Self-efficacy, Motivation to Lead, and Grit compared to peers. This model of leadership development conceptually framed within the Social Interdependence Theory was effective. The LDP at SIUC is an exemplary program and could be a model for engineering leadership programs to follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities with technical leadership development programs are challenged with demonstrating the effectiveness of these training programs with measurable results. This is an especially daunting task given the fact that we are trying to inspire undergraduate students who already feel over-burdened by a rigorous major and little to no work experience to know the value that leadership skills can bring to their career. The solution is to apply the Hoshin Kanri X-matrix to the leadership development program so the students can understand how their individual leadership efforts in their own student organizations benefit the entire leadership training program and teach them how to use this valuable engineering tool as a future technical leader. Participants in Southern Illinois University Carbondale's (SIUC's) Leadership Development Program (LDP) are community college transfer students that are seeking a Bachelors of Science degree in an engineering or technology discipline. They have expressed an interest in developing technical leadership skills and were selected for the scholarship and training program through a competitive process that examined their leadership achievements prior to being selected. There have been a total of 32 students participate in the program since fall 2010, with 12 in the current group. There has been a total of 42 participants since the start of the program in 2007 (i.e., the program was conceived in 2006, and the first cohort began in 2007). The students represent a cross-section of two technology and five engineering majors. Participants choose a student organization in the College of Engineering (e.g., Society of Women in Engineering) in which they would like to lead. A student then has their peers assess their leadership effectiveness through the results of the organization's projects. This information is then recorded in the LDP's X-matrix. The LDP has used the X-matrix over the past three years and the results illustrate a progressive improvement in the overall efficacy of the program each year. The quantitative results demonstrate that students are improving their engineering leadership skills as the program continues to mature. The implications of integrating the X-matrix into a technical leadership development program are many; (1) it becomes a motivational tool that helps participants relate their efforts to become a leader and its impact on their chosen student organization, (2) it develops their understanding of their responsibility to the larger organization, (3) it develops their leadership communication abilities and (4) it develops their skill in using a valuable organizational management tool that can be applied throughout their professional career. Training future technical leaders to apply engineering management tools while in college should lead to greater success for student development, their projects, their college, the leadership program, their employers, and their countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]