FnF Leadership Training Insights

(June 5 – 12, 2009)
by Jesse Robredo

Jesse Robredo

The leadership training program was a refresher course on the various requisites of leading and the necessary skills that go with it. While I have been required to exercise leadership in the political arena over last two decades, the program provided new dimensions on how we formulate and communicate the goals we wish to achieve. Especially interesting were the exercises on working on the media strategy --- structuring the message, prepping and doing the television interview itself. While there were some language problems that we needed to hurdle, in fact, it simulated real life situations when you have contending parties who come from different backgrounds and cultures. The unstructured debate highlighted these differences. Personally, I think, this was where I got to understand more the difficulties of these situations, as a participant in the exercise.

While the lectures and the presentations were theoretically grounded, the problem of context often comes into play. Whether it be media, constituency response or the support structures and systems, using the skills learned requires localizing how it is done. While the European context thrives in a formal way, the Philippine context operates in a very informal way, especially at the local level. Certainly, new knowledge on how things are done differently is important. But localizing the tools (admittedly it will be more costly) would have balance the different dimensions as to how the skills would be put into practice. It would have provided the opportunity to compare similarities and differences and how to best balance them. I realized that while the substance of the tools remains basically the same, the method of interaction differs. This was especially true when we had to apply the tools in the exercises and take away insights from them.

An important sidelight of the program was the visit to a polling place during the EU Elections. Coming from the Philippines, how they conduct the exercise seems to be odd. No poll watchers, no ballot boxes with multiple partitions and padlocks and a very simple system of counting and canvassing. But in fact, this is how elections should be. In this regard, given our collective desire to promote genuine democracy, some discussion on how this came to be would have been more enlightening. I believe, how elections are conducted in our jurisdictions is a function of how the political leadership shapes it and how the constituency responds.

The visit highlighted the weaknesses of the party system in the Philippines. Probably, it is difficult for the other participants to understand the political dynamics in our country where we are more person-base than ideology-base. The kind of discipline in the candidate selection and election processes is something that we can learn from. The challenge is to bridge where we are and where we want to be.