If we had to hire a general manager to run a business in which we invested our life’s savings, we would probably exercise more care in looking for a manager for our business than we would in choosing a new president for our nation. In spite of exhortations to vote wisely and according to our conscience, our choices are often guided by hair-trigger emotions.
These may be our approval or disapproval of the incumbent president’s performance, our frustrations over recurring problems, or even our apprehensions about looming international threats (ISIS, China’s encroachment on Philippine territories, loss of OFW jobs in the Middle East, etc.).
These issues provide the lens through which we subconsciously assess the candidates who are pushing themselves to be our nation’s next CEO. Indeed, choosing a new president for a country carries a responsibility a thousand times greater than that of hiring a corporation’s chief executive.
The difference is that in an election, the voter’s responsibility falls on the millions of people of a country’s electorate, while, in a corporation, the hiring responsibility falls only on a few people who make up the corporation’s board. However, the stakes involved in choosing a president are immensely greater because the risks to a country are exceedingly high when the wrong candidate gets elected. Up to now, we are still undoing many of the mistakes committed in the last two administrations.
A proof of how badly we did in choosing our leaders is the fact that both presidents of the immediate past two administrations went to jail. Since the responsibility for choosing a president is shared by millions of voters, individual voters may sometimes feel that their one vote will not make a difference.
This attitude is used to justify not going out to vote. Others are considering the suggestion that says “not voting for a particular position can also be a valid political choice when there is no suitable candidate”. The rationale given to justify the “no vote” is this: “Voting for the “lesser evil” is still voting for evil.”
This can be dangerous. In a tight race where no one candidate has an overwhelming majority, a vote not cast for a “lesser evil” could well become a vote cast for the “greater evil”– the one candidate we would absolutely not want to get elected. Edmund Burke said it well: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” In a future scenario (which requires legislation), an alternative to the “no vote” option could be what I call the “negative vote”.
When a voter finds no candidate worthy of his/her vote, but is strongly opposed to a particular candidate, the voter may instead cast a “negative vote” – his/her one vote – against that particular candidate. His/her negative vote is counted as a “minus 1 vote” against the candidate’s total votes. The option of casting a “negative vote” allows a citizen to exercise his constitutional right to vote, albeit in a negative way – a vote of “no confidence” against a candidate instead of an affirmative vote for another candidate.
How then do we choose our next president? How do we increase the odds that we get it right?
I offer four assumptions for consideration:
1. There is no one perfect candidate qualified for the job of president.
No one ever steps into the job of the president fully equipped with the knowledge, experience and set of skills needed to do the job. The president’s job will always be a new learning experience.
There is no OJT to prepare anyone for this position – not even the vice-president’s job. In most administrations, the vice-president is often given a position that is challenging and visible enough to satisfy his/her appetite for power and prestige, but never close enough to the president to second guess and vicariously experience the actions of the president.
2. No promising candidate is completely good or entirely bad.
No candidate is ever completely good or wholly evil! Every candidate with some measure of following is endowed with abilities and strengths. Indeed, without strong qualifications, no candidate would long remain in contention. When a candidate is supported by a statistically significant part of the electorate, it is because they either believe that his/her strengths are indispensable to the job, and far outweigh his/her weaknesses; or, because they believe the candidate brings to the job some qualities that are critically needed to address the nation’s current ills.
3. Promises and political platforms during the campaign period should never be taken seriously.
Campaign platforms are crafted by marketers, copywriters and PR firms. They are the stuff of advertising slogans and jingles. A brilliant political platform flops if it doesn’t win votes. Campaign platforms are meant to accomplish only one objective: to get the candidate elected. The campaign platform is always calibrated to maximize the candidate’s strengths and minimize his weaknesses.
His/her promises are always calculated to gratify the voting public’s clamor for better perks or instant relief: more government assistance, benefits and dole-outs; fewer taxes; quick fixes to complex problems.
Should the candidate get elected on this platform, his PR team can eventually sanitize his campaign promises. The true political agenda is slowly built by the new president as he and his new government begin to grapple with the problems they inherit from the past administrations.
4. The newly elected president’s honeymoon with the public is always short-lived.
The novice president, being inexperienced and “flawed” from the outset, will commit mistakes sooner, more than later, no matter where he/she is in the learning curve. How the president acknowledges and accepts these mistakes, and with what accountability, speed, honesty, and humility he/she addresses them, will determine to a large extent, and how the public perceives these mistakes, and to what extent they will understand, ignore or forgive them. In fact, most mistakes by the president will be ignored and/or forgiven.
Some presidential mistakes, however, can potentially be toxic because the magnitude and quality of the errors represent a watershed. These mistakes have the power to discredit the president’s character, question his judgment, and cast doubt on his capacity to take responsibility. This watershed becomes the president’s “moment of truth”! If he does not address them with wisdom and dispatch, these mistakes can significantly squander in a very short time his political capital.
This is the moment when the public realizes that the person they voted for (a vote often made in knee-jerk reaction to frustrations over the way the country is mismanaged), is human like them and possessed with “feet of clay”. In that moment of truth, the public may make up their mind that their president is either a true statesman or a complete jerk!
This “moment of truth” happened for every single president of our nation, and will inevitably happen also to the one we will choose to be our next president. It is good to ask ourselves these questions: “How soon will the candidate of my choice – given his personality and his character – face his/her moment of truth? How well will he/she survive his/her moment of truth?”
How then should we vote?
We can learn from the hiring practices of the best-run corporations. Warren Buffett practices what most successful CEOs do: “In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” What do you get when you hire a person endowed with intelligence and energy, but lacks integrity? You get a smart and tireless crook!
Integrity is the first key qualification for a president.
There is no requirement more important to look for in a candidate for president. It is not always easy to prove integrity in a candidate. It is easier to observe the evidence of lack of integrity: The most obvious characteristic of a person who lacks integrity is a weakness for lying.
Careless lying may be dismissed as a harmless weakness, yet it is always the telltale tip of the fatal iceberg! Lying takes many forms: it takes liberties with the truth; it exaggerates and window-dresses it; it twists the facts. Politicians, who like to project themselves as truthful or factual, often lie by using statistics. Mark Twain used to say, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” When a person habitually tells small lies and half-truths, we can be sure there are many more and bigger lies where they come from. As the saying goes, “A half-truth is a whole lie.”
Where you find the habit of lying, its twin brother – stealing – cannot be far behind! Obviously, integrity by itself is not enough. Without integrity, however, all the other strengths of the person – his/ her knowledge, intelligence, competence, diplomacy and winning personality – serve to mask the lack of integrity.
Lack of integrity corrupts these strengths and converts them into liabilities! A simple test of our appreciation of a candidate’s integrity is to ask ourselves this question: “Would I want this candidate to be the role model for my son or daughter? Would I want this candidate’s values to be my son/daughter’s norm of behavior?
Intelligence is the second key qualification for a president.
By intelligence, I do not mean the inborn IQ; I mean the ability to think. The Philippines does not need a “genius’ president. The genius can memorize mountains of data and crunch stacks of numbers; yet, he/she is often unable to survive in the real world. What we need is a president who knows how to think; who can understand relationships among unrelated phenomena; who can perceive meaning in patterns; who can draw useful insights from ordinary data; who can “think out of the box”. We need a president, who takes time to think through the key issues of government by listening to all sides; who can intuitively learn by observing routine events and circumstances and by listening to ordinary people.
This ability to learn from others is the hallmark of a great leader and a key qualification for the job of the country’s CEO. The foundation of this ability is the skill of listening. A president cannot lead if he cannot listen to those he leads. The president’s most important source of continuous learning on the job is the people he manages directly (his cabinet and those who report to him) and the people he leads (“ang boss ko”).
He cannot manage and lead if he is unwilling to be educated by them. To do this, the president needs to listen and to communicate. And the most important thing in communication is to hear what is NOT being said. (Peter Drucker). Without this ability to listen – to listen in depth, without fear or favor, without preconceived positions; to willingly leave one’s comfort zone and say, “I am wrong” or “I made a mistake”, the president is doomed to constantly repeat them because he cannot or will not learn.
Energy is the third key qualification for a president.
The foundation of energy is health and a sense of well-being. Obviously, a candidate who has major health issues is unfit for the job and will do a disservice to the office. But health and fitness alone do not produce high energy. There are healthy people who are listless and bored.
There are not so healthy people who are bouncing with energy. The energy required by the job is the mental and spiritual energy that ignites the body and fires up the spirit. This energy is rooted in one’s passion for his/her mission in life. This kind of energy is what distinguishes great saints and charismatic leaders (St. John Paul II. Mother Teresa, John F. Kennedy, Benigno Aquino, Pope Francis, and Chiara Lubich to name a few).
This mental and spiritual energy fuels leaders with the enthusiasm, intensity and single-minded focus that – in periods of crisis, lifts the spirits of an entire nation and inspires people to work hand in hand and make sacrifices for the common good (Sir Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela easily come to mind). Without this characteristic, the president is a functionary but not a leader.
Peter Drucker made energy a cardinal qualification of the leader: “Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help orchestrate the energy of those around you.” In our country, it is difficult to single out a president whose most dominant characteristic is his or her “energy.”
The “touchstone”
INTEGRITY, INTELLIGENCE AND ENERGY. All three are essential to qualify – and in time – transform the winning candidate from a holder of the office of president to the leader of our nation. Integrity, however, is the “sine qua non”, the essential condition without which a president cannot mature into a true leader.
Peter Drucker considered “integrity” to be the “touchstone”, the one indispensable character trait of the leader: “The proof of the sincerity and seriousness of a management is an uncompromising emphasis on the integrity of character. For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is the character that sets the example and is imitated. Character is not something one can fool people about. The people with whom a person works, and especially their subordinates, know in a few weeks whether he or she has integrity or not. They may forgive a person a great deal: incompetence, ignorance, insecurity, or bad manners. But they will not forgive a lack of integrity in that person. Nor will they forgive higher management for choosing him.”
Rene C. de Jesus is founder and president of ThinkTools and Consulting that brought the Edward de Bono Thinking Programs to the Philippines. In 2004, he became the first independent and accredited trainer of de Bono Thinking Systems in the Philippines certified in Dr. de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, Direct Attention Thinking Tools and Lateral Thinking programs. He is also the author of a new book, Mary Mediatrix of All Grace, A Journey of Suffering and Holiness (Carmel of Lipa).
