ILead puts U of T Engineering at the Forefront of Leadership Education

With the know-how provided by ILead, students will become engineers who lead and effect positive change. Established in July 2010, the Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) is the first of its kind for engineering in Canada. Offering curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular leadership education and development in a three-fold manifest of teaching, research and outreach, students will be fully equipped to lead, take action and contribute to our world.

ILead features Faculty-wide elective courses.  As well, the Institute is committed to research and scholarly work on leadership pedagogy and will also engage with other like-minded institutions around the world.

“We aim to make a difference for students. As engineers, we need to mobilize ourselves more effectively and be leaders of change,” said ILead Director, Professor Doug Reeve (ChemE).

Along with Professor Reeve (ChemE), Professor Greg Evans (ChemE), Associate Director and Annie Simpson, Assistant Director, Leadership Development, make up the leadership team behind ILead and LOT programs.



The ILead program for leadership development involves four levels of learning: self, relational, organizational and societal leadership.

The self-knowledge level teaches students to identify their values, strengths and weaknesses, as well as talents and passions. They learn to nurture their emotional intelligence and make decisions that align with their personal values.

The relational leadership level is where students grow as collaborators and team members, and learn effective communication, conflict resolution and team dynamics.

The organizational leadership level prepares students with skills to create organizational vision, set direction, embrace ambiguity, reconcile organizational aspirations and constraints and empower others.

Societal leadership, the final level, explores participation in the community, social responsibility and the ability to engage others and act as a catalyst for change.

Understanding that it takes a number of different strategies to fully facilitate these four levels, ILead provides experiences inside and outside the classroom to engage students on a number of fronts: intellectually, socially, psychologically and emotionally with the use of experiential workshops, design laboratories, team projects, field excursions, mentoring, coaching, guided reflection, service learning, discussion tutorials and visioning exercises.


ILead owes much of its existence to the advances and successes of the LOT program and co-leaders Professor Reeve and Professor Evans. Established in 2002 in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry by Professor Reeve, LOT has since grown to a Faculty-wide entity, reaching thousands of Engineering students. Co-curricular and extra-curricular leadership development activities will continue to be led by LOT, operating under the umbrella of the Institute.

The formation of ILead puts U of T Engineering in the same league as other exceedingly progressive engineering schools such as MIT, Penn State, Tufts and other prestigious institutions, joining a movement that empowers engineers to have greater positive impact in the world.

For more information on ILead, please visit: www.lot.engineering.utoronto.ca/ilead.htm

To read about the initial ILead launch, visit: www.news.utoronto.ca/engineering/shaping-the-engineers-of-tomorrow.html