Reflections on My Life as a Leader [Part 1 of 4]

Excavated Lessons from Childhood

At 38 years of age, while learning about the intricacies of leadership through extensive reading, film watching, and numerous interactions with over a thousand leaders in the course of my work as teacher (17 years) and leadership consultant (10+ years) to various organizations, I began to consider my own journey as a leader.

What led me to this intense interest and passion to learn leadership?

Among other things I mention three leads:
Dr. John Maxwell says that “everything rises and falls on leadership.” Now if that’s true then everything means that my family, work & business, community, my faith, and my own journey as a person, will rise and fall depending on how effective or ineffective I am as a leader.

And over 200 years ago, William Wordsworth wrote: The Child is the father of the Man. That means my childhood experiences served as father to my adult life, i.e., to teach, model, discipline, and mold what I am now becoming. So I decided to retroactively inquire from my childhood what it tried to teach me about life and leadership.

Then there is that quote I read or heard somewhere that I could not retrace, the idea being- “Everybody is leading all of the time,” with leading synonymous to influencing. Every move we make impacts another person directly or indirectly, and every action is a choice. So by this fact I dare call myself a leader, and look at everyone as such.

Mining for Meaning
Initial reminiscences showed nothing but disconnected events, many of them seemingly trivial and remote. But when I probed deeper still I began to see connections, patterns, and lessons that have long been pushed aside by life’s incessant preoccupation with daily urgencies.

Unbelievably, as soon as I began to re-view some of these events with the emerging eyes of leadership wisdom, I gradually uncovered untold gems of revelation, so even if many of them took place more than 25 years ago, they still speak to me and inform my life and direction today.

And those revelations are more than worth their weight in precious gold.

Natural Born Leader

Early on in life I knew I had some natural leadership tendencies because I was good at relating with, pleasing and entertaining others. I did not take to provoking others nor agitating them. Since I was a wit, I had good lines delivered at the right moment, so others noticed me and were drawn to me, and I would easily be the life of the party. Of course at times the wit would hit a wrong chord, but they were more exceptions than the rule, so my leadership prevailed.

An Easy Start to Early Glory

So much so that when my mom decided that I would run for president of the grade school student body, I had no anxiety about losing. Aided by my mother’s aggressiveness and artistic ability to make what at that time would be considered fancy campaign materials (she “hired” a budding neighbor artist to hand print each colorful campaign bookmark and used wavy scissors to mark the outline), I was clearly on my way to victory. My presidential opponent, (a classmate and good friend Peter) had his pamphlets letter pressed, so there clearly was competition. I must have delivered a good speech because I spoke well, though no doubt my mom must have used her English co-teacher as my ghost writer.

And if you think I’ll drop the bomb by saying that after all these efforts I lost anyway, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. I won by a landslide, a 5:1 victory. So from nothing, I was “El Presidente” in a whiff and a half.

On that same year I also became the battalion commander of the school boy scout. So at 11 years of age, I held all the power that could be given to a student in what was then considered the best school of our city. I wish I could say all this was because I was great, but now this was nothing but hype and momentum kicking in. A charming, witty kid whom nobody could fault yet, catches the roaring imagination of a clueless crowd that loves a winner, or somebody who looks like one.

I certainly was not tall compared to half my classmates, nor was I well-built. I remember having a slight frame, which got quite disproportioned because by grade 5 I developed a tummy while the rest of my body stayed slight. Thus my friends christened me “Butete,” the visayan word for tadpole.

In terms of achievement, I remember setting up the crack troop, a group of elite and disciplined boy scouts who would train more and harder than the rest to represent the school in interschool parades. With our fancy uniform we would man the traffic outside of campus, a privilege many coveted since the girls of our sister school passed by the road we trafficked, and we could by choice stop their father’s car so his daughter could get a more prolonged view of us “in action.”

But I was scared of some the students’ expectations, One time, while patrolling the school perimeter, I was approached by some students complaining about some outsiders who were harassing them. They expected me to bust those bullies. At first I charged toward the outsiders with fire in my eyes clearly ignited by my constituents’ expectations, but drawing closer, and feeling alone (since the students were not following close by), I realized that those bullies were much bigger than I was, and certainly more street smart. Now the only bullying I had done till then was toward my baby sister, and I was not even good at it with her, so this was clearly out of my league. Thankfully a teacher came to the scene and warder them off in time to save my hide and reputation.

Unfortunately I do not remember having achieved anything as student body president.

Academically I graduated co-valedictorian with 3 other classmates. That was a strange setup, but somehow the principal decided it would be that way. Suffice it to say that four of us delivered our valedictory addresses.

Looking back at that event, I realize that was my first taste of shared leadership or shared victory, which I of course disliked then, as “looking out for number one” was supposed to be the only theme of my growing years, as had always been demanded by institutions, societies, and stage mothers.

“There are none so blind as those who will not see…” (John Heywood 1546)

High School- Clouds Loom Overhead
High School presented me with an emerging crisis of leadership. In the first two years, I still served as battalion commander of the Boy Scout and president of our year level science club, but some of my classmates were also getting other top positions in the now greater assortment of high school clubs.

This presented an even greater unease for the once king of the hill, and I wondered how much longer I could hold the fort of dominance. Little did I know that in the next landslide I’ll experience, I would go down with the rubble. (Part 2- the crack begins… coming next week)

Teaching 1+1 to a Math Professor

I was giving a workshop to the faculty of one of the top universities in the country. Expounding on the concept of synergy I flashed a slide with the equation: 1+1=3 to infinity. One participant raised his hand. “I have a problem w/ your equation sir, you see I am a math professor, and it is fundamental in math that 1+1=2. Mess with that and the whole mathematical foundation falls through.”
For a while I was stumped. How do you respond to an erstwhile mathematics professor that synergy was not violating the basic truths of his domain?
I let the question percolate, desperately sifting through possible answers in my mind, almost embarrassed that I was causing a gradual tension to build among the 50+ professors in attendance.
Part of me was relishing the tension, anticipating the hushed questions from the distinguished body assembled: “I wonder how he will duck this one?”
Deciding that I had setup enough drama, I took a deep breath to respond. But the gratification was not to be mine that morning. A hand was raised in the back, with enough authority which I could not ignore. He stood up and replied, sir, with all due respect to my colleague from the mathematical discipline, I would like to express that in fact 1+1 can and does result in infinite sums, and even more strangely, we observe that 1×1 does yield the same infinite product. You see, I am a biology professor and we deal with mitosis and meiosis all the time.”
And at that moment, the crowd reacted with delight, and I quietly sighed with relief, proud of myself for having done the smart thing, and that was to shut up, and allowed the experts to sort each other out. Looking back I do not remember what I would have said if I did respond, but no doubt it would have been a mere babble compared to the credible punch of the professor of life.