7 Workshop 7 – Closing Workshop

WORKSHOP WRAP-UP                                                                                                                                     

• Exploring Personal Goals and Values
• Technological Stewardship
• Giving and Receiving Feedback
• Social Justice and EDI
• Followership
• Indigenous Ways of Knowing

WORKSHOP SUMMARY                                                                                                                                    

Exploring Personal Goals and Values

Our personal values act as a compass for our decision-making process. Our core beliefs are the underlying factors that determine our personal values. Our values don’t always align with our core beliefs, and while our core beliefs tend to be rigid, they can change if given the right attention. A good first step for making these types of changes is to evaluate your priorities, and then make actionable statements that you can follow in the form of principles. By identifying the areas you most want to change, and following through on the cause-and-effect type principles, change becomes easier to achieve.

Technological Stewardship

Technology is simply the means by which we humans adapt the things around us to better suit our needs. The Tech STEW principles are a set of guidelines to maximize the benefit of these technologies being invented and maintained. By applying these principles to your daily life, as well as in industry, we can continue to grow as upstanding engineers.

• Seek Purpose
• Take Responsibility
• Expand Inclusion
• Widen Approaches

Giving and Receiving Feedback

Feedback is always important when it comes to improvement. When receiving feedback, be aware of different types of triggers in order to best analyze and sort through the feedback being given. When giving feedback, be sure to use an appropriate feedback model in a timely, realistic, and kind manner. By keeping these things in mind, we can improve as individuals, and help to improve those around us.

Social Justice and EDI

Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity are very important topics in the field of Engineering. By avoiding stereotypes and microaggressions, and implementing EDI principles, we can do our part in promoting safe and inclusive spaces in any community. This can help with issues of Social Justice, as decreased discrimination and more inclusive environments will help with the equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and privilages.

Followership

Being a good leader relies on having good followers. By being aware of what makes it takes to be a good follower, you can always be ready to support those who are best suited to lead, while also improving on your leadership skills by having better knowledge of those you are leading. Utilizing tools such as the C4 model can help you to decide when to lead, and when to follow, to best achieve a Generative Partnership between you and your team members, thereby achieving the maximum amount of productivity and success.

Indigenous Ways of Knowing

In fields like engineering, it is important to listen to those around us. This can be especially true for minority groups, as they tend to be disproportionally affected by our actions. Going a step further, groups such as the Indigenous Peoples of Canada have a lot we can learn from to solve many complex issues we have today. Through acknowledging and utilizing their views on the Relationship with the Land, Relationship with the Community, and Creation, we can complement our Western views to come up with solutions we might not have considered in the past. Through broadening our perspectives in this fashion, we can hopefully make some progress towards solving problems such as the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges.

ACTIVITY: WORKSHOP DISCUSSION                                                                                                               

As this is the concluding workshop for this round of GEL workshops, we would like to invite participants to openly reflect on the previous workshops through the lens of the Leadership domains. As a group, discuss the key takeaways from each workshop as it relates to the leadership domain it occurs in. Feel free to explore the relationship between the leadership domains, and any overlap that may occur in each topic, or throughout the domains themselves.

CLOSING REMARKS