Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI)

Institutional Transformation with Humans at the Heart

What if your institution actually lived its values?

Our institutions often have aspirational values, but lack the incentives, reward structures, and policies to put those values into practice.

It doesn't have to be this way.

The Values-Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI) is an opportunity for teams to uncover and leverage the influence, resources, and capabilities they already possess to create meaningful institutional transformation rooted in shared values. Applications from teams are due on February 12, 2025.

What is Values-Enacted Leadership?

Values-enacted leadership is a collaborative approach to institutional change that puts values at the center of decision-making, policy creation, and daily practice. Values-enacted leadership actively embeds explicit values in the systems, processes, and culture that shape institutional life. In values-enacted leadership, leaders and their institutions hold themselves accountable to visible and actionable values in everything from daily decisions to strategic planning.

VELI helps teams discover how to:

• Develop concrete strategies to align institutional practices with core values
• Build coalitions for sustainable change across departments and roles
• Uncover, map and leverage existing networks of influence within their institutions
• Identify opportunities and levers for change within current processes and practices
• Design strategic planning processes that put values into action

The VELI Difference

While many leadership programs focus on individual development, VELI recognizes that lasting transformation requires collaborative action guided by common purpose and rooted in shared values. We also recognize that leadership and the power to create change exist at every level of academic institutions and welcome teams that engage participants from across this spectrum. Finally, the HuMetricsHSS facilitation methodology approaches these issues from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences, and emphasizes the need for a truly broad understanding of scholarship and of what higher education can be.

How VELI Works

Teams will come together with a change project they propose in advance for an immersive five-day residential experience, during which time they will:

• Articulate and prioritize shared values
• Map institutional processes and power structures to reveal opportunities for values-enacted intervention
• Develop concrete, actionable plans for their specific change projects
• Build connections with change leaders across institutions

After the institute, teams will benefit from regular virtual check-ins with VELI facilitators, a follow-up on-campus site visit; and regular peer mentorship in a vibrant online community of practice.

The HuMetricsHSS team is grateful for the generous support of the Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations in supporting this program.

Which types of projects might benefit from VELI?

We anticipate most projects will engage broadly with one of the following:

• Cultivating transformative leadership rooted in humanities expertise;
• Reframing assessment and rewards structures;
• Facilitating values-enacted strategic planning

The projects teams might propose could include but are not in any way limited to:

• Strategic planning for a new program, center, department, or college
• Improving incentive and support structures for departmental chairs or other service-oriented leadership positions
• Creating policies to support and recognize a broader range of scholarship, including community-engaged, public, and digital work
• Creating strategies to work within changing budget models and priorities
• Significantly revising curriculum for a college or department, including revisions to general education requirements
• Revising review, promotion, and tenure processes to better reward underrecognized academic work;  to reimagine relationship between service, teaching, and research; or to create more inclusive and equitable practices across different types of faculty and staff appointment
• Developing collaborative decision-making processes in the face of constrained resources

Why HuMetricsHSS?

Since 2016, HuMetricsHSS has worked with dozens of institutions across the United States and Europe to transform academic culture through values-enacted practices. Our approach has already reshaped promotion and tenure processes, informed strategic planning at major universities, and catalyzed institutional change at both departmental and university-wide levels. Our team brings together expertise from research universities, liberal arts colleges, academic libraries, and scholarly societies, giving us a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities for institutional transformation.