A center for governance and leadership, whose task it is to install and sustain an institutional culture, would wish to ensure that everyone who works within the institution is a deeply committed and highly competent professional, who shows love of country by attending to one’s duties with care and diligence. Indeed, the institutional culture it seeks to promote should encompass the core values of the institution as well as these values which should be common within institutions, i.e. commitment, competence, professionalism, and patriotism.

Commitment is basic to strategy execution. Everyone within the institution should identify with the strategy it is pursuing; moreover, we should be able to see what role we are expected to play in the execution of that strategy, and we should then be deeply committed to do whatever is expected of us. The goals that are set for us we aim to achieve, and the targets that are laid out for us we go all out to meet. Indeed, we show operative loyalty to our institution by helping ensure that its vision is realized within the timeframe specified, and by working as best we can to turn in high scores in our work-related personal governance scorecard.

It is also necessary that we complement commitment with a high degree of competence. We work towards acquiring the knowledge and skills that our work requires of us. Since the demands of work keep changing and standards of performance are set ever higher, we need to keep re-inventing ourselves through continuing education and training. We should be deeply conscious of our duty to keep up with the dynamically changing times, recognizing that new knowledge and skills are always necessary in the discharge of our duties: We do not have the luxury of trying to attend to our current tasks with the same knowledge and skills we had a few years ago, much less a decade past.

At work, expertise counts, but a genuine spirit of service is equally essential. We have to serve with our ever-higher level knowledge and skills, but always putting equal accent upon serving with care. We take into account the real needs of others, and we should always be on the look-out for ways and means by which we can serve those needs much better, more effectively, and more humanely. It is in this light that we aim at ever-higher levels of professionalism, which demands of us the use of our expertise in order to serve others well, i.e. also with human grace.

Through the service we extend to others, we show care and concern for them as well as for all those who come in contact with us. This is the first demand of patriotism, our love for country. It is soon followed by other demands, which extend to ever-wider circles of people, whose lives we can reach and touch positively: Our respective families; the others who work with us in the same institution; our local community; our province, our region, and finally our nation. The key is in the care and concern we show towards neighbors so that in the process they become brothers, with whom we have a deep sense of solidarity and towards whom we extend many acts of charity.

Commitment, competence, professionalism, and patriotism: these four are the institutional values that serve as reference for all institutions. They are the “other” institutional values – common to all institutions – that a center for governance and leadership should promote in addition to the core values proper to each institution.