When we speak of fighting all the way up to the bloody end, we refer to the heroic exertion often required of operating departments and units as they do their best in delivering on their commitments. The process of making such a delivery can be bloody: It can take quite a lot out of people.

How does a center for governance and leadership try to get people to work very hard and sacrifice quite a lot for the sake of meeting their targets in each review period? There are many ways, and each organization has its own particular ways.

No matter what those ways may be — and they differ from one organization to another — they all boil down to caring. Everyone needs to care, enough and indeed deeply enough, for their organization, their community, and our country.

Unless they do care enough about their organization, they would not work hard and heroically for it. This is why it is essential for a center for governance and leadership to instill deep loyalty to the organization. It can do this in many different ways, including among them a clear commitment to the core values, mission, and vision of the organization. There should also be other ways that are best suited to the personality and the over-all culture of the organization itself. At the end of the day, however, a center for governance and leadership must win the hearts and minds of every one in the organization. They should be proud of being a part of it.

A center for governance and leadership should also get everyone to care deeply about the community, which the organization is serving as a core part of its mission, and about our country. Every one in the organization should see that the stronger and more sustainable the organization becomes, the better it serves the community and the country as well. This comes through not merely as an advertising slogan. It also becomes real via the community projects that the organization undertakes, promotes, and supports. It takes on real flesh in the few initiatives of the organization, which aims to contribute substantively to the long-term task of nation building.

Caring is about expanding hearts and minds. Caring for the organization gets every one in the organization to be less focused on self and more focused on the organization’s strategy map that needs performance-oriented execution. Caring for the community and for the country as well gets every one to have a much broader mind and a bigger heart: They should see that their work, oftentimes merely humdrum but also occasionally heroic, is a building block that contributes substantively to nation building. It is because they see this bigger picture and wider motivation for the work they do that they should be more willing to go that extra mile and put up with that extra sacrifice in delivering on their commitments and meeting their targets.