Committee on Leadership Education

The Committee on Leadership Education (CLE) is a new knowledge community, granted with incubator status for 2006–2007. Incubator status is a time for a newly forming knowledge community to document its history, organize current knowledge on leadership education, and begin to develop resources for all members. This also means opportunities exist for all members to participate, share how they started their leadership education, and assist in developing research.

Recent history of leadership education starts in "service to the nation," the seventh goal of Ernest Boyer and Lee Mitgang’s seminal 1996 report, Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice. In the report, the authors challenged the architecture profession to actively embrace civic engagement as crucial to the future of the profession and the country as a whole. “Perhaps never before in history have the skills, the broad vision and the ideals of the architecture profession been more urgently needed,” wrote Boyer and Mitgang. The inaugural AIA Leadership Institute that convened in Washington, D.C., in March 1997 was a direct response to this challenge. Since then, successive classes of architects have graduated from several conferences known as the Leadership Institute.

At the AIA 2004 National Convention and Expo in Chicago, a group of Leadership Institute alumni met and committed to the decision to make leadership a core value for members. Over the next year,  the group worked diligently to apply for knowledge community status. At the close of 2005, the Committee for Leadership Education (CLE) was granted incubator status for 2006–2007. The CLE is committed to facilitating research and providing training for all architects to lead in the profession, community, or political realms while helping society gain a greater understanding of the importance of architecture. The CLE Advisory Group plans to develop its charter and seeks to expand leadership opportunities for architects, empower new leaders, nurture and promote leadership roles across the full spectrum of an architect’s career, and advocate opportunities for alliances with leaders in other professions.

Mission
The CLE supports the concept of leadership as a core value of the AIA and the architecture profession through training, outreach, advocacy, and education. Goals developed for this first year include 

• Research current leadership programs that exist both within and outside the AIA, taken by AIA members
• Develop two leadership programs (focusing on civic and firm leadership) in 2007 for use by AIA components to advance the importance of leadership in the architecture profession
• Survey AIA members to determine what they seek in leadership programs to ensure CLE programs match members'  learning objectives
• Collaborate with other knowledge communities and allied organizations
• Create relationships with educational institutions that offer PhD programs in architecture and business schools that offer leadership programs to stimulate or commission new knowledge pertaining to leadership in the architecture profession
• Continue development of the CLE Web site as the leadership education resource for members.