Leadership is a theme that runs through my ITE experience. I suspect I am not unique. ITE has provided me many opportunities to practice, grow, and test my leadership. Beginning as a young professional, ITE provided me my first leadership opportunity when I was invited to serve as an officer of the fledgling Montana Chapter. From there, I kept volunteering and eventually served in leadership roles at all levels of ITE. Each experience helped me grow my aptitude to organize people and resources to get things accomplished. ITE has been a multiplier for my career, giving me far more opportunities to grow as a leader than I would have had in my day job alone.
No one leads alone. It requires a network of people who can lend their experience, expertise, and encouragement when your own is lacking. This is also where ITE can be a career multiplier. While my leadership journey happened organically, for some it takes a more guided approach. A few years ago, when ITE’s Transportation Consultants’ Council members were surveyed about their training and development needs, leadership development was one of the most frequent responses. A conversation started that eventually led to ITE creating its premier leadership development program, LeadershipITE. This program gives participants leadership skills and tools to apply, but more importantly accelerates the development of a powerful professional network. The results have been tremendous. LeadershipITE is a multiplier of the multiplier that is ITE.
ITE is blessed with many terrific leaders working in a complicated federation of districts, local sections, chapters, and student chapters to deliver information and to provide opportunities to network, learn, and collaborate at the grassroots level. These local parts are varied and diverse. Our hundreds, thousands even, of local ITE leaders—closest to our members and local transportation issues—are the ones best equipped to lead ITE activities and deliver ITE information, education, and networking.
However, diverse and local can also mean different. Different can be desirable if the ITE experience is customized to local needs and issues. But it can be very undesirable when those differences create disparate value and experiences such that parts of ITE are unrecognizable as part of the same organization. One of the challenges that we will begin to tackle this year is: How do we give our local leaders the autonomy they need to deliver timely and locally relevant services, tailored to their local constituents, but at the same time give them a framework of policies and tools that let them deliver an experience that is consistently ITE to all our members? ITE members should know they are getting the same value for their investment as other ITE members.
ITE also must provide a consistent experience in our members’ opportunities to participate, and that includes leadership at the highest levels. We have a diversity issue, and while it is an issue in our profession overall, ITE can do better to attract and retain a diverse membership. ITE can and should lead our profession and give all our members, from student to experienced professional, opportunities to contribute and to lead.
These challenges of consistency, diversity, and inclusion are addressed in ITE’s new strategic plan, outlined on page 32. This strategic plan demands that we continue to lead on technical issues. It guides us to seek partnerships that will bring even more valuable technical information to our members.
But it demands more than just technical leadership. It demands that we provide a consistently high quality and value-added ITE experience to all members. It demands that we attract and retain a diverse membership and provide an inclusive experience. It also demands that we lead in areas we haven’t historically, as advocates for policy that will lead to safer, healthier, and smarter communities. These are not small endeavors, but on these and many more I am confident that ITE is Leading the Way.
This is the President's Message from the January 2018 issue of ITE Journal.