The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university that is often ranked among the best universities in the world by major college and university rankings. In recent decades, universities worldwide, including UCLA, have acknowledged that technical skills alone are insufficient for project success and recognised the importance of understanding and developing leadership skills in engineering and other technical fields.
The Challenge
Without a solid understanding of how to be an effective leader, project managers and team leaders struggle to successfully lead their people and teams, commonly resulting in missed project deadlines, failures, inefficiencies, declining team morale and reduced wellbeing and effectiveness that can manifest beyond the workplace. To tackle this issue, UCLA Extension supported a leadership subject as part of the project management certification where Dr Sakhaee was engaged. Aware of his holistic approach to leadership subjects, they sought his assistance to ensure the leadership subject would address the gap with their students in going beyond their technical skills alone to enhance their effectiveness as leaders.
Dr Sakhaee conducted a needs analysis to discover the primary challenges students – predominantly project managers and team leaders – faced. He learned that most of their challenges centred around three primary domains of leading self, leading others and leading change. Leading self includes dealing with high levels of work-related stress, anxiety, reduced confidence, difficulty sustaining motivation and enthusiasm, and managing various emotions, including frustration, impatience, disappointment, anger and overwhelm. Leading others includes handling difficult conversations, motivating teams and managing conflict. Leading change includes ensuring effective onboarding of others and implementing change that sticks. He discovered that for most students, these issues affected them professionally and personally. Students also reported needing help to effectively lead and engage their teams and said they struggled to achieve work-life balance given the heavy demands of their role. While a common approach in our culture is to take a holiday to restore wellbeing, Dr Sakhaee maintains that a break from work does not deal with the root of the problem, which is how we respond to workplace stress and anxiety in the first place.
The Solution
Dr Sakhaee developed an interactive online course called Leadership and the Human Element in Project Management to support project managers and engineers to go beyond technical skills and enhance their effectiveness in leading people and teams. The 12-week program included video interviews with world-leading experts in leadership and social sciences, collaborative activities and discussions designed to cultivate self-awareness and reshape participants’ perceptions of the human element within their work environment.
The course was designed to delve deeper into cultivating effective leadership that engages and motivates others while ensuring a high level of sustained effectiveness and wellbeing. Dr Sakhaee sought to engage students with each other through discussion forums, and the assignments were designed to reflect on leaders that inspired students and aid in developing a leadership development plan for their own futures. The course also addressed how to manage high stress and anxiety levels by introducing mindfulness as part of self-leadership.
Dr Sakhaee says, “Many people are constantly trying to avoid stress. However, ironically, the more we try to avoid basic human experiences like stress, the more we are likely to experience it or magnify its impact. Instead, we can develop a healthy relationship with stress and create space for our negative emotions and thoughts, greeting them with kindness, openness and compassion.” For this purpose, Dr Sakhaee introduced self-regulation and mindfulness techniques in his course that would allow individuals and teams to cultivate space around their anxiety and stress and, as a result, increase their wellbeing and effectiveness simultaneously.
The Outcome
Over 300 students completed the 12-week course over eight years, with several graduates later receiving promotions and becoming leaders in their fields. In quarterly course evaluation surveys, Dr Sakhaee's program earned the highest rating from students in all categories. Students also expressed that they found the leadership course superior to others they had attended in the past.
Feedback and reflections indicated that Dr Sakhaee’s course helped to cultivate leadership skills through powerful practices such as mindfulness and empathy. Many also said it restored their confidence, reduced anxiety and overwhelm, and gave them a renewed perspective on tackling challenges in their professional environment.
One course graduate and project manager said, “By being introduced to principles like emotional intelligence, I have been able to steer my team in a more positive and productive direction. This course has also taught me how to deal with all of the personal issues that cause a lot of anxiety for me as a project manager and has given me the tools that I need now and for the future in order to be successful.”
Several graduates also spoke of the course's positive impact on their personal lives. One graduate said, “I have been able to implement quite a few of the things in my interactions with my twins and my husband. For example, thanks to what we learned about motivation and negotiations, I am a more patient but effective parent, and I believe the changes in my parenting tactics have also been the reason for my kids decreased number of tantrums.”
Overall, students found the course highly impactful, with some adding that it changed their perspective on what it means to be an effective leader. “Life-changing is the only way I can describe this course,” said one graduate. “I never thought this course would reshape my worldview and fundamentally change the way I perceived business and business people…I thought to be a manager, you had to sacrifice your core values. Now I see that it is quite the opposite.”
Today Ehssan runs leadership programs in technical corporate environments, including using awareness-based systems thinking and ontological approaches to leadership. To learn how Dr Sakhaee could support your technical leadership professionals to be more effective and fulfilled professionally and personally and, therefore, deliver better project outcomes, you can contact him here.
