Focus. A mission and vision focused on students' and other stakeholders' expectations provides the quality-driven higher education organization with the foundation it needs to shape its communication systems, its organizational and decision-making structures, and its planning and improvement processes. The institution earns the trust, confidence, and loyalty of its current and potential students and its other stakeholders, both external and internal, including faculty, staff, administrators, and trustees, by actively developing and regularly employing listening tools essential for gathering and understanding their diverse and distinctive perspectives. The institution interprets and weighs these expressed needs, preferences, hopes, and requirements to frame ongoing communication, discussion, and refinement of a common mission and vision. Faculty, staff, and administrators integrate this shared focus into their individual work goals and decision-making strategies.

Involvement. Broad-based faculty, staff, and administrative participation encourages better decisions and strengthens individual and group ownership of systems, activities, and initiatives. Individuals understand how what they do affects others within and outside the organization, and appreciate how their work helps further the institution's mission. A culture of involvement draws on the expertise and practical experience of people closest to a situation and helps leaders across the organization anticipate the complex implications of decisions. Such collaboration often helps initiate and implement improvements that better meet student and stakeholder needs. A culture of involvement requires ongoing development of people's skills in making fact-based decisions, working with diverse groups, resolving conflicts, and using quality based tools to build consensus.

Leadership. An institution thrives when its leadership actively creates and supports a quality-driven culture, modeling values and behaviors that communicate a comprehensive and focused vision to all constituents. Leaders have a responsibility to make sure that everyone understands and values the institution's mission, goals, and directions— and uses this understanding to inform their individual work goals and decision-making strategies. Leadership must work to help students and other stakeholders share this understanding as well. Further, leadership must ensure that the institution's systems and processes align with its mission and vision, making certain that the necessary resources — people, funds, facilities, equipment, supplies, time, energy, and other assets — are allocated and used in support of the overall mission and vision.

Learning. The quality-driven institution dedicates itself to developing everyone's potential talents, centering its attention on learning. It continually seeks more effective ways to enhance student achievement through careful design and evaluation of programs, courses, and learning environments. The institution and staff both demonstrate an enthusiastic commitment to organizational and personal learning as the route to continuous improvement. Seeing itself as a set of systems that can continuously improve through measurement, assessment of results, and feedback, the institution designs practical means for gauging its students' and its own progress toward clearly identified objectives. Conscious of costs and waste Ñ whether human or fiscal Ñ leadership champions careful design and rigorous evaluation to prevent problems before they occur, and to enable the institution systematically to strengthen its programs, pedagogy, personnel, and systems.

People. The quality-driven higher educational institution prizes and supports the systematic development of its individual faculty, staff, and administrators, recognizing that fully developing and using their abilities constitutes its most valuable resource. It consciously invests in all its people as leaders and learners through ongoing education, training, and opportunities for continuing development. Leadership encourages individuals to take responsibility in crafting and following through on professional and personal growth plans aimed at acquiring, practicing, and using new skills and knowledge to better serve students and other stakeholders. It nourishes a sense of responsibility and ownership in which all individuals understand how their role contributes to the measurable success of the institution and how they can become engaged as full participants in its improvement processes

Collaboration. The quality-driven institution encourages active collaboration among and within different internal departments and operational areas, and, externally, between the institution and other institutions or organizations. It removes internal barriers to collaboration, such as the constraints individuals often experience within a hierarchical chain of command or when they find themselves working for a sub-unit rather than the larger organization. The institution promotes shared support for a common mission among its faculty, staff, and administrators by providing them with the training and resources successful collaboration demands. It rewards effective cooperation and celebrates model collaborative efforts with internal or external partners.

Agility. While it has been true that higher education institutions have traditionally existed in a more reflective and deliberative environment than the rest of society, the rapid development of new knowledge and technologies, and the rising expectations of external stakeholders, is greatly altering this condition. As the pace of change quickens and competition becomes commonplace in higher education, the quality-driven institution develops the flexibility to respond quickly to opportunities, threats, and changing needs, and practices, focusing its attention on the allocation of resources, when needed, in response to pressures for change, and measuring its performance in responding to such demands.

Foresight. The quality-driven institution thinks into the future, tracking trends in order to better predict how conditions will change, and anticipating how those changes may affect the institution's students and other stakeholders, operations, and performance. In dynamic or trying situations, foresight enables the institution to innovate, making meaningful changes to improve its services and processes in ways that create new or additional value for its students and other stakeholders. While it remains open to new approaches and techniques, the institution designs, tests, and improves its planning structures and processes through practical use and experience.

Information. The quality-driven institution and its personnel seek and use data and information to assess current capacities and measure performance realistically. Faculty, staff, and administrators track progress concretely and consistently, and use performance results to set ambitious but attainable targets that increase and improve the institution's capability to meet its students' and other stakeholders' needs and expectations. Data-enriched thinking nurtures evaluation and a results-orientation concentrated on increasing the benefits and value produced for students and other stakeholders. The institution develops and refines systems for gathering and assessing valuable feedback and data, and continually seeks better methods for obtaining the most useful information on which to base decisions and improvements.

Integrity. The quality-driven institution recognizes and fulfills its public responsibility and demonstrates responsible institutional citizenship. It treats people and organizations with equity, dignity, and respect, and models its values in words anddeeds. It anticipates and takes into account the consequences of its actions upon the various larger communities to which it belongs, and upon the higher education system, regionally, nationally, and globally. Mindful that education serves society, the institution continuously examines its practices to make certain its effects and results actively contribute to the common good.