This article is part of a series on engineering leadership at U of T. Over the past couple months, the ILead team interviewed emerging leaders and students in formal leadership roles to get their insights into leadership and experiences with ILead. Check back throughout the summer for more student profiles. #UofTEngineeringLeadership
Artem Radzikhovskyy (ECE 1T5+PEY) is a recent graduate of Computer Engineering interested in software and networking. After his 3rd year of engineering, Artem worked at Motorola (which became Zebra) as a PEY student doing software engineering. That experience solidified for Artem the importance of talking to management and of understanding leadership more broadly. While he felt comfortable presenting his ideas to his colleagues and supervisors, he wanted to formalize that knowledge and sharpen his skills.
This led him to discover one of ILead’s courses, The Power of Story (APS445H), which piqued his interest in sharpening his storytelling and helped meet his requirements for his Humanities and Social Sciences electives. The course taught him about how influential stories are and how to develop the structure, intention, and timing of a story for maximum impact. The course also offered an open learning environment that immediately created space for people to share deep personal stories with strangers and because of this he learned a lot about himself in the process.
From there, Artem went on to take ILead courses: Cognitive and Psychological Foundations of Effective Leadership (APS442H) where he learned about self-reflection and the power of feedback; and Leadership in Project Management (APS446H), where he learned the language of corporate culture and how to ask tough questions in the workplace.
Taken together, these three courses helped Artem to be more confident, try new things, and have deeper conversations with people. He noticed how many of his friends were actually willing to talk about complex challenges in their lives whereas previously he assumed people would be uncomfortable telling these more difficult stories. These experiences have led Artem to informally mentor first year students: debunking myths, giving tips and simply listening to them with open ears.
Artem sees leadership as a two-sided conversation rather than a one-way stream of orders, and wants to work towards being a better leader over the course of his career. He believes that if all engineers developed their leadership capacity, they would communicate and understand each other better, have less conflict, and be more creative, efficient and effective in their work. He sees this ultimately having a large benefit to society but also to the companies who employ engineers.
-Mike Klassen