FROM COUNSELLOR COMPETENCE TO ORGANISATIONAL GREATNESS: A GOOD-TO-GREAT FRAMEWORK FOR UNIVERSITY COUNSELLING CENTRES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35631/IJEPC.1164093Keywords:
Counselling, Competence, Leadership, Excellence, WellbeingAbstract
University counselling centres are increasingly expected to address complex student concerns related to mental health, academic adjustment, personal development, crisis support, and institutional care. Although counsellor competence remains a foundation of quality service, professional skill alone does not explain how counselling centres sustain excellence across leadership, service culture, strategic direction, accessibility, and institutional trust. This conceptual paper develops a new framework by applying Jim Collins’ Good to Great principles to university counselling centres. The framework integrates Level 5 Leadership, First Who Then What, Confronting the Brutal Facts, the Hedgehog Concept, Culture of Discipline, Technology Accelerators, and the Flywheel Effect with counselling competence, organisational psychology, service quality, and whole-university mental health perspectives. Individual counsellor competence is positioned as the foundation of service quality. At the same time, organisational drivers are conceptualised as the mechanisms that translate professional capacity into ethical, accessible, student-centred, and sustainable counselling services. The paper contributes to counselling, psychology, and higher education literature by offering a conceptual model for examining counselling centres as organisational systems rather than isolated service units. It also presents implications for counselling centre leadership, supervision, service planning, digital support, institutional policy, and future empirical validation within higher education mental health contexts.
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