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Andrew Entriken
Professor Orient
ENGR 408/493
27 April 2015
Final Reflection Paper
Engineering 408 and 493 gave me a chance to expand my leadership skills and taught me
a ton of leadership lessons that I hadnt even thought of before. For example, it had never even
crossed my mind that it would be a challenge to lead multi-generational teams in the workplace
since I had never had bad experiences with older co-workers during my summer jobs. By
learning about how to lead in this situation and various other unique situations, I was able to
progress as a leader and learn about myself and my leadership styles, tendencies, strengths, and
weaknesses. Specifically, I learned more about tough decision making, my leadership styles and
values, bridging the generational gap, and my weakness with confrontation, which I plan to
improve by the time I graduate from Penn State.
Decision making was one of the more interesting lessons taught this semester,
specifically the lecture on right vs. right decisions. The most interesting part of it was that in
some situations, there is no black and white right decision and that either choice you make could
be the right one. For example, there could be a situation where a friend asks you to help get him
out of trouble with your workplace superiors and youre stuck between telling the truth or being
loyal to your friend. If you tell on your friend, management will be happy you reported him, but
then you lose your friends trust. If you keep his issue a secret, then youll still be friends, but run
the risk of having your job affected if management finds out you helped in the cover-up.

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Professor Orient made the statement that sometimes you just need to make the decision that will
allow you to sleep at night and I couldnt agree more since there are not always clear-cut answers
in these cases. Having knowledge about right vs. right decisions has made me more cognizant
about the choices I make as a leader and has opened my eyes to how difficult it is to lead in the
workplace.
I also learned a decent amount about myself as a leader this semester. This ranged from
subjects like my leadership style to what my values are, both of which are things I was kind of
aware about before ENGR 408/493 but had never thought about in depth. I found out that my
leadership style tends to be a laissez faire style where I let my group members have a lot of
freedom with their work, but when it comes down to crunch time I adopt a more coaching type
of leadership where I try to focus everyone on a single goal and drive them to complete it. It is
very similar to how my baseball coach in high school approached our teams. He was a very
relaxed leader and typically wasnt too strict during practice, but when our team started
struggling he made sure that we knew we were in trouble and started having more rigid practice
structures until we got our act together. He was a highly successful coach throughout his 27 year
coaching career and he is a person that I have the utmost respect for, which is why I lean towards
his leading style while dealing with my own teams. Respect was actually the value that I found I
identified most closely with this semester as well, which wasnt a huge surprise to me because I
dont always work well with people who dont show basic courtesies or respect for other group
members and their superiors. Respecting my superiors and others around me has gotten me
where I am today and taking ENGR 408/493 has made me realize that I want to work for a
company that demonstrates similar values when I graduate college. Fully identifying my
leadership style and values helped me understand how I can get the most out of the people Ill be

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leading in the future and what type of people and companies I want to ideally work with since
certain people respond better than others to my values and leadership.
Leading in a multi-generational workforce was one of the topics that changed the way I
think about leading in the workplace. Between the lecture we had on the topic and the guest
speaker that spoke about it as well, it became very clear to me that this topic is one that is ever
present right now and will continue to be vital to maintaining a productive environment in
companies. It made me realize that I cant just lead with the values of my own generation in
mind, but that I have to think about how older generations will respond to my style of leadership.
I personally think that this wont be too much of a challenge for me because I am a very
respectful and organized person, which fits well with older generations who are used to valuing
workplace hierarchies and like rigid schedules for meetings and group projects. While I think Id
be able to adjust to this situation easily, it is still a very relevant issue at many companies today
which made it an interesting topic to learn about.
Engineering 408/493 was also able to make it obvious what my weaknesses as a leader
are and what I need to do to improve on them. Specifically, I struggle with confrontation with
group members who arent doing their work. Up until this point, Ive been able to pick up the
slack for my other group members who werent doing everything they needed to for the team,
which wasnt a huge deal since the projects I was working on were small in magnitude and didnt
require a ton of time to complete. In recent semester, however, projects started consuming a ton
of my time and when a group member slacked off, I wasnt always able to pick up their share of
the work since I was already consumed with all the work I was assigned for the project, plus all
of the work for all my other courses Im taking. Rather than confront the person who was
slacking, I worked with my other teammates to split their workload on a few occasions, which

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made life tougher for us but allowed us to finish the work nonetheless. What I should have done
what confront the person who was slacking or reported the issue to the professor, but I didnt
want to look like a bad person for exposing that teammate, so I did neither. Moving forward, Id
like to work on this weakness by asserting myself more within the team and managing these
issues by being upfront with all my group members and speaking my mind more often when it
comes to splitting the workload and making sure everyone does their fair share. It will definitely
be a tough thing for me to learn to do, but I understand that it is necessary and must be done to
ensure that my group members dont walk all over me when I get out into the workplace. There
is definitely a place for empathy in teams, but people who blatantly dont do their work and leave
the rest of the team out to dry dont necessarily deserve empathy and need to be held responsible
for their actions.
This semester was a huge growing period for me as a leader based on the experiences and
lessons I had in Engineering 408 and 493. These courses taught me how to recognize certain
issues in team projects and how to effectively respond to them in the best way possible. They
also helped me reflect on what type of leader I am and how I can improve as a leader in order to
ensure Im successful in my future endeavors. Im very glad that I decided to take this course and
Ive already been able to apply some of the lessons Ive learned to projects outside of these two
courses, making all the work I put into these courses well worth the time I spent working on all
the papers and projects this semester.