Filipino Leadership

I was wrong.

For decades, I’ve been taught that leadership is about one single person on top, and in order for me to be there, I will have to beat every person in my way, whatever it took.

Because that’s what I knew, I competed and fought my way to the top. Sometimes, I would win. Many times, I would lose. Either way, the result didn’t make me happy. After all, knowing that I have beaten someone is as equally as heartbreaking as knowing I’ve been beaten by someone.

Nobody wins in a competition. However, the concept of leadership that has been around for a long time encourages people to compete on different levels, at different times, in different styles. If you want to be a leader, you’ve got to be on top, in front, and in control. Beat everybody else and rise from the ranks. It goes on and on. Not only that, the same competitor’s mindset cascades down to the very last man in the organization.

It wears down everyone eventually.

No wonder many leaders today say it’s lonely at the top. You have to defend your position constantly from whoever is trying to steal it from you. As it happens, the people under you will never stop challenging you and your rivals will never stop jockeying for power. You’ll keep hanging on until you’re exhausted or it’s simply time to let go and admit defeat. Beating everyone during the quest for leadership won’t make you happy. The same goes for the people you work with. But maybe it’s the system that puts you there. Regardless, you’re trapped.

In the end, nobody gets out of it unhurt. Yet, we are made to believe that competition is good for an organization because it brings out the best in all of us. In reality, it does not always work that way. In fact, many times it breaks the leader, then the people, and in the long run—the entire organization. While competition drives progress and gives the leader the focus and energy to great heights of accomplishment, it can overwhelm the leader.

Admittedly, winning can bring satisfaction to leaders. It also leads to recognition, which leaders need every once in a while.

However, winning over our fellow human beings for the sake of recognition, if that’s the only thing that defines our leadership, can also lead to self-destruction. That is when the winning mindset leads to extreme stress, unfair judgment, or unethical practices and misbehavior.

In the long run, we can’t sustain an organization fueled by greed, self-centeredness, and rivalry.

Chances are, our type of leadership today creates a culture of self-centeredness, individualism, doubt, and competition—a perfect recipe for an inevitable disaster where everyone becomes a casualty. 

But in the grand scheme of things, this is not even the original Filipino leadership philosophy. It was imposed on us and we embraced it. And because we have gotten used to it, we’ve forgotten our own art of leadership.

Prior to the European invasion of the Philippines in the 1500s and Americans in the late 1800s, we already had our own unique leadership structure. In fact, it built one of the world’s most advanced mega-structures in ancient times.

Learning about it can shed light on our leadership challenges today. It explains what brought us in this chaotic leadership situation and why you can’t get away from it.

Let me tell you a story.

Two thousand years ago, the Filipino ancestors built the world-famous rice terraces in the Cordillera Mountains in the northern Philippines. They did that with nothing but their hands, ingenuity, and a strong sense of community. They used no machinery, no heavy equipment, no technology. Generally, they carved out the mountains by hand, using only basic primitive tools made from wood and rocks.

All the other wonders of the ancient world like The Great Pyramid of Giza, The Great Wall of China, The Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal were built by either salaried skilled workers or slaves through an order of one ruler. In contrast, the machinery-less, hand-made Ifugao rice terraces were built in their entirety by freemen with a deep sense of collectivism, trust, collaboration, and humanity.

All these are contrary to the leadership and management concepts that we apply in our organization today: Our people are not free. Our leaders act like kings who are entitled to a royalty service. Everyone tries to save their faces every time. We doubt our teammates’ ability or worse discourage them to work better. We compete to prove we’re better than anyone in the room. We put our own interest before that of our team. To be part of something bigger than ourselves doesn’t interest us.

Another amazing thing is that unlike their counterparts elsewhere in the world, the Ifugao Rice Terraces were built without a single leader getting credit for the achievement.

This is another contrast of the idea that leadership is about one single person on top, in front, and in-charge. Yet, our leaders today seem to do exactly the opposite. If there’s a chance, they’ll take control and if something goes right, they’ll take the credit, too. If something goes wrong, it’s the people who are at fault.

Still functional today after more than two millennia later, those mountain terraces were built out of the community’s collective desire for a common good. They worked together regardless of the tribe they belong to.

In retrospect, they built those terraces not just to feed their generation. As visionary as they were, they made those terraces for all succeeding generations to come.

Rediscovering this lost art of Filipino leadership is key to our success as a people and as a nation. The western concept of leadership is broken. It turned us from collaborators into competitors, from friends to enemies. It turned us into weapons. It set us up to take arms against our own race. It divided and eventually broke us. It allowed us to take more than we need. It lured us to be greedy. It didn't fit our culture. It never did. And to put it bluntly, it didn't bring out the best in us.

We have been slaves long enough to endure another century of being slaves to western leadership ideology and management systems. For at least 500 years, we subscribed to their influence because we thought we didn’t have anything here at home. Or maybe, we thought theirs is the best in the world.

Thus, we think as westerns do. We speak their language so fluently because we thought it’s our own. Our decision-making process follows that of the west. We dream as they do. And on any given day, it’s business-as-usual.

It’s time to set ourselves free from the mindset and systems that have since broken us and our organizations.

Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras is a full display of our leadership and management ingenuity that stood the test of time. There’s no other ancient structure in the world that survived that long which still serves its original purpose to this day. The Filipino ancestors made it as an indelible proof of our greatness as leaders and as a people.

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The philosophy and management systems I wrote in this book are products of a cultural archeological research I made through a leadership expedition. Inspired by the magnificent beauty and mystery of the mountain terraces, I immersed myself in the Ifugao culture. I tried to find out what leadership philosophy could have built such an outstanding structure. Living with them allowed me to appreciate and distill the ancient leadership wisdom that we have lost over hundreds of years.

We were leaders before we are slaves to someone else’s leadership concept. It’s about time to re-imagine leadership. This time, it’s the leadership art that we can proudly call our own.

It’s time to see the bigger picture.