The National Academy of Engineering and Engineers Canada have been advocating for engineers to assume greater leadership responsibilities in their workplaces and in society [1, 2], but little is known about how engineers orient themselves toward leadership. A growing body of literature on engineering leadership includes: 1) calls for leadership and professional skill development in faculties of engineering [1-15]; 2) engineering leadership program descriptions written by institutional insiders [16-30]; and 3) applications of traditional leadership theory to engineers' work [31-40]. While this literature presents us with important insights about the rationale for including leadership education in engineering programs, descriptions of the content and pedagogy used by instructors and faculty members beginning to implement these programs, and assessments of engineers' work in relation to managerial leadership theories, very few researchers have stepped back to conceptualize engineering leadership from the perspective of professional engineers. In phase one of our study we attempted to fill this gap by exploring how engineers working in industry thought about leadership, how they characterized leadership exemplars in their profession and how they oriented themselves to professionally relevant conceptions of leadership [41, 42]. After learning that the engineers in our sample overwhelmingly resisted the idea of leadership, we returned to the literature in search of engineering leadership theory, but could only find empirical studies evaluating engineers against leadership frameworks borrowed from the management and psychology literature [6, 31-33, 37-40, 43-46]. Our concern that standards borrowed from other disciplines were among the causes of engineers' resistance to the idea of leadership led us to develop a theory of leadership grounded [47] in the experiences of 45 engineers employed by four Canadian engineering intensive organizations. Through an iterative analytic process, we identified three professionally relevant leadership orientations - Technical Mastery (the "go to" engineer for technical questions), Collaborative Optimization (engineers who build high performing teams) and Organizational Innovation (engineers whose creative ideas drive the company) [41, 42]. Since our preliminary theory was based on the experiences of a small sample of engineers, we developed a survey to test the wider professional resonance of the orientations.
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