In the wake of the inaugural gathering of the Values Enacted Leadership Institute (VELI) we held on the University of Oregon – Portland campus during the week of July 13-17, 2025, I have been reflecting on the question of excellence in its relation to integrity in values-enacted work.
I tried to capture the signature of my evolving thinking in this regard in a recent blog post on cplong.org entitled, “Integrity as an Expression of Value Enacted Excellence.” In so doing, I returned to one of our earliest articulations of the HuMetricsHSS values framework—it turns out that we’ve been trying to give meaningful voice to the all-too abstract idea of excellence for almost a decade.
At the heart of my most recent post is a passage that tries to articulate the meaning of integrity as an expression of excellence:
The power of values-enacted work lies in its integrity. The consistency we enact between the values we identify as shared and the practices we embody must be demonstrated and verified at every stage of the process. One of the biggest misconceptions about values-enacted work is that values are too abstract to be much more than empty signifiers. The great secret of values-enacted work lies in the intentionality and the discipline required to specify what each value-term means in a given context and how it will be enacted in the relationships among the creators and show forth in what is created.
The most difficult and the most rewarding aspect of values-enacted work is this disciplined attention to how we are putting our values into practice with one another in everything we do. I say “are putting” here rather than “put” here to capture the continuous and progressive aspects of our efforts to align our actions with our values.
In connecting integrity in this sense to excellence, I’m returning to an ancient way of thinking about excellence that can be heard in the Greek term “aretē,” which names those activities done well, that is, undertaken in ways that activate the full potential of an endeavor, or express the full realization of what is created.
The great joy of working on the HuMetricsHSS initiative over the past decade has been the deepening relationships and enduring connections our disciplined attention to putting our values into intentional practice has enabled. May these relationships continue to deepen and new connections endure in the communities of practice established at the inaugural meeting of the Values Enacted Leadership Institute.