Teamwork and Leadership
Building the Team to Educate the Whole Engineer: A Playbook for Systemic Faculty Reform
The value of higher education is facing intense scrutiny over rising costs, misaligned job readiness, and rigid operational models. Engineering education is not exempt—for decades, national reports have called for sweeping cultural and structural reforms.
To educate a completely different kind of engineer, we must first build a completely different kind of team. True transformation is possible, but it requires aligning your recruitment, selection, development, and retention strategies with a holistic, student-centered mission.
The Three Core Pillars of Transforming Academic Teams
Traditional faculty hiring models often replicate the status quo, resulting in siloed departments that struggle to support a changing student demographic. This blueprint is guided by three foundational principles:
A New Paradigm Requires a New Team: You cannot build a modern, adaptable, and interdisciplinary curriculum using traditional, siloed hiring methodologies.
Student Diversity Mirrors Faculty Diversity: To successfully recruit and support a diverse student body, institutions must build a faculty and staff team that authentically reflects that representation.
Educating the Whole Engineer Demands Moving Beyond Engineering: True engineering innovation happens at the intersection of technical excellence, human character, and societal context.
The Playbook: Four Strategic Categories for Change
Transforming an academic unit requires an intentional, multi-layered approach to human infrastructure. These four strategic pillars serve as an operational framework for both new and established departments.
1. Team Recruitment Strategies
Non-Traditional Position Descriptions: Crafting job postings that explicitly value interdisciplinary backgrounds, educational research, and diverse professional experiences over rigid sub-specialty requirements.
Broadening the Pipeline: Actively inviting candidates from non-traditional academic paths, practicing industry veterans, and basic science researchers to apply.
2. Research-Grounded Team Selection
Bias Mitigation: Deploying diverse search committees and utilizing structured, consistent review processes to minimize the biases inherent in traditional academic hiring.
Holistic Criteria: Evaluating candidates based on their alignment with student-centered pedagogies, collaborative potential, and commitment to inclusivity.
Reimagined Interviews: Utilizing non-traditional, on-site interview structures that emphasize collaborative potential and teaching demonstrations over high-pressure, isolating seminars.
3. Team Development & Collaboration
Agile Project Management: Training faculty and staff in modern, agile workplace methodologies to dismantle traditional academic silos and promote cross-functional teamwork.
Pedagogical Training: Investing heavily in continuous faculty development focused on student-centered learning, inclusive classroom environments, and active learning strategies.
4. Team Reward Structures
Incentive Alignment: Rewarding collaboration, teaching innovation, and mentorship alongside research output.
Vision-Driven Promotion: Ensuring institutional evaluation frameworks actively align with and support the department's core vision of educating the entire student.
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Reimagining Engineering Education: The Wake Forest Story
On July 1, 2017, founding chair Dr. Olga Pierrakos and three faculty members stood inside a renovated tobacco warehouse in Winston-Salem’s innovation district. With only six weeks until their first 55 students arrived, they had no fixed curriculum, no website, no lab equipment, and no operating budget.
Their mission? To build an accredited engineering program from scratch—like building an airplane while it’s flying.
By breaking the mold of rigid, century-old academic models and adopting an Agile startup mindset, Wake Forest Engineering built one of the most innovative, inclusive, and student-centric programs in the nation.
Disrupting the Blueprint: Educating the Whole Engineer
Traditional undergraduate engineering programs focus strictly on technical silos, often fixing 90% to 100% of their curriculum. WFU Engineering flipped the script by authentically pairing a premier liberal arts education with the university's core commitment of Pro Humanitate (For Humanity).
40% Customizable Experience: Unlike traditional rigid paths, 40% of our curriculum consists of customizable courses, allowing students to seamlessly study abroad, pursue undergraduate research, and pivot to emerging interests.
Student-Driven Specializations: When our third-year students asked for specialized resumes, our cross-disciplinary faculty mobilized immediately to offer five engineering concentrations, which are now pursued by over 65% of our undergraduates.
Just-in-Time Learning: We swapped standard lecturing for student-centered pedagogies—integrating project-based, problem-based, and mastery-based learning that evolves with real-time student feedback.
Educating the Whole Engineer: Shifting Teamwork from a Skill to a Virtue
Teamwork is a cornerstone of modern engineering education. Almost every undergraduate program requires group projects to prepare students for the corporate world. However, teamwork is traditionally taught merely as a practical "soft skill"—a functional tool to get a project done, rarely connected to moral purpose, ethical ends, or broader character development.
To truly educate the Whole Engineer, we need to rethink this approach. Our research suggests that teamwork is far more than a checklist of project management tasks; it is better approached as a virtue—an internal disposition that empowers individuals to support the genuine flourishing of their peers and collectively work toward a greater public good.
The Framework: 7 Strategies for Virtuous Teamwork
To test this philosophy, our research team developed a targeted educational module and deployed it within a project-based, first-year engineering course. The curriculum featured two consecutive six-week engineering projects, with our character intervention bridging the gap right between them.
Drawing from established frameworks in character development (Lamb et al., 2021), we structured the module around seven empirically grounded strategies to cultivate teamwork as an intentional virtue:
Habituation Through Practice: Intentionally repeating positive team behaviors.
Reflection on Personal Experience: Pausing to look critically at individual contributions.
Engagement with Virtuous Exemplars: Studying outstanding models of historical or professional collaboration.
Dialogue to Increase Virtue Literacy: Giving students the precise vocabulary to discuss moral character.
Awareness of Situational Variables: Recognizing external pressures, stresses, or biases that test team dynamics.
Moral Reminders: Keeping ethical obligations top-of-mind during technical sprints.
Friendships of Mutual Accountability: Building supportive peer relationships that challenge each other to grow.
From Intentional Focus to Measurable Growth
At the start of the intervention, 360-degree peer and self-assessments revealed that first-year students naturally leaned on baseline traits like being "responsible," "collaborative," "nice," and a "good listener."
For the second major engineering project, students were challenged to step outside their comfort zones. Each student committed to intentionally developing two advanced teamwork attributes they had not yet mastered. The top choices included:
Creativity
Understanding teammates’ different skills
Being an effective facilitator
Practicing patience
The Results: Following the project, the vast majority of students were actively perceived by their peers to have successfully embodied at least one of their target attributes.
The Interconnected Web of Character
Perhaps the most significant finding of this study is that teamwork does not exist in a vacuum. Through thematic analysis of student reflections, we discovered that enacting true, virtuous teamwork naturally triggers and requires a complex web of supporting character virtues:
The Virtues Behind the Team
Courage: Required to give transparent feedback to peers and to vulnerably receive it.
Honesty: Necessary to supply authentic data and confront situational biases or uneven workloads.
Empathy: The foundational capacity to see a technical problem or timeline constraint from a teammate's point of view.
Humility: The internal posture required to accept critiques, admit mistakes, and actively learn from others.
Practical Wisdom: The ultimate regulatory virtue used to determine exactly how to act, balance conflicting ideas, and improve in future projects.
By framing collaboration through a virtue ethics lens, engineering educators can transform routine group work into a powerful, self-sustaining incubator for holistic leadership and character growth.
