HAVE you heard of Stephen Covey? Many people who’ve taken leadership seminars have.
I’m bringing up Covey because in private life, we find many people obsessing over leadership, while in public life, we keep obsessing about how leaders seem to lack leadership skills. And so, Covey is not just about your planners and seminars, he can be about politics, too.
A speech by Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D. explains Covey’s high-impact ideas: “In his famous book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,’ Stephen Covey complains that the long-standing ‘character ethic’ has been replaced by the ‘cult of personality’. Suddenly leadership has been reduced to a set of ‘techniques’, whether it’s ‘winning through intimidation,’ ‘thriving on chaos,’ or simply knowing how to ‘make friends and influence people’. It’s the ultimate triumph of image over substance. Why bother learning how to be a leader when it’s so much easier and simpler merely to look like a leader? Learn how to dress, how to smile, how to use a Palm Pilot, toss in a little Botox, and presto... instant leadership! Except it’s not.”
Covey argues that for 150 years, the focus of leadership was on building the Character Ethic: Integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Success is measured by integrating these principles with one’s basic character.
In recent decades, the focus has been on Personality ethics: Covey himself wrote, “The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.”
So let’s say we’re not unique: We Filipinos are like people anywhere else, and anywhere else, the politics of character has given way to the politics of personality. Or to be more precise, in politics, the politics of personality today is about the politics of celebrity; and celebrities are as susceptible to fashions as hemlines. We elected lawyers long ago; we started electing actors; today we’re tiring of actors and who knows what the new political fad might be?
Now there’s a book titled “The Vote of the Poor” by the Institute of Popular Culture of the Ateneo de Manila University. I’d like to put forward conclusion number 6 of the book: “Corruption is widely seen as making a bad leader. To be good, a leader must have the following attributes: (a) God-fearing, (b) helpful, (c) loyal, (d) responsible, (e) intelligent, (f) hardworking, (g) faithful to one’s word, (h) principled, and (i) trustworthy. Rural and female participants look for intelligence, while urban participants value religiosity. Older participants give priority to helpfulness, while youth and male groups emphasize a leader’s sense of responsibility. Participants tend to cast their sight on local officials for examples of good leaders and on national officials for examples of bad leaders.”
Let’s make some connections. Let me suggest to you that there’s no difference between what Covey says we should retain — a principle-centered approach to leadership — and the views of our poor countrymen and women, as borne out in this book.
The problem is, if rich and poor alike, we know what makes for good, or desirable leaders, rich or poor alike, we also tend to say our present crop of leaders, on the whole, are uninspiring.
But let me suggest something further to you. Just because a candidate doesn’t provide it, doesn’t mean the public hunger for good leadership isn’t there. It only proves that if the larger public has a sense of traditional, ethical values, our political class has no feeling for those values.
The American writer writer Garry Wills defined leadership as “Trinitarian”: That is, not just the push and pull between a leader and his followers, not merely the stories of people who have had great numbers either pushing them forward or being bullied forward by them, but rather the leaders who mobilized “others toward a goal shared by leader and followers.” As Wills points out, “one-legged and two-legged chairs do not, of themselves, stand. A third leg is needed. Leaders, followers, and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.”
In less than a week, Filipinos at home will join their countrymen who’ve already been voting overseas. The best reason for doing so, was provided by rural female interviewed in The Vote of the Poor: “Tungod kay kung dili mabotar, dili kita tawo sa gobyerno, mura tag tagalasang.”
Because, she said, if we do not vote, we are not people of government, but like those of the jungle.
