The conference aims to challenge our assumptions about leadership, particularly the importance we attach to titles, positions, and influence. It's a worthwhile conversation in a country where we sometimes treat the title as though it were the achievement.
When we talk about what makes a good leader, we tend to focus on qualities such as vision, decisiveness, the ability to inspire confidence, command respect, or break new ground.
These are all reasonable expectations, although our preoccupation with them sometimes leaves out another important quality: the ability to recognize what other people are capable of, especially those who haven't yet had the opportunity to prove themselves.
Can a leader recognize exceptional ability in someone who lacks the looks, the loudness, and the confidence that usually attract attention?
Part of leadership is knowing who else is good, especially when it isn't immediately obvious.
Having seen excellence
The leaders I admire have always been unusually difficult to impress. I suppose that comes from having seen enough excellence to know what deserves admiration.
It's difficult to judge a great book if you've hardly read, or appreciate fine leather if you've never handled one. The same applies to people. How do you recognize greatness if you've never encountered it?
Not everyone gets to experience excellence up close. I'm not even sure everyone wants to. Being consistently around people who are very good at what they do can be uncomfortable, especially if you prefer to be the most impressive person in the room.
But those who have spent enough time around exceptional people tend to develop a better sense of what excellence actually looks like.
The art of looking important
And that is becoming increasingly useful now that everyone has become so good at appearing accomplished. With LinkedIn, AI, and social media, it's easier than ever to look impressive to people who have no way of knowing whether you actually are.
Of course, good, honest work deserves to be talked about, preferably by the people who actually did it. It's refreshing to encounter people who are excellent at both the work and the telling.
But there are also those for whom the telling appears to be the principal accomplishment. With enough exaggeration and selective omission, even the most unremarkable background can be made to sound extraordinary, until the resulting biography is technically defensible but bears little resemblance to the truth.
I guess that's just advertising. And like all advertising, it helps to know your audience.
Anyone who has spent enough time in the Philippines will have noticed how much attention we give to social signals of standing. The economy of social importance. The titles, the affiliations, the people they know, the places they've spoken at, the awards they've received, the RMs and the APs.
Sometimes these are useful indicators of someone's abilities. Sometimes they are simply evidence that the person is very good at being visible.
Visibility itself can become a form of authority. Someone who is sufficiently visible and frequently described as an expert may eventually be accepted as one, without much examination of what that expertise actually consists of.
This works especially well in the Philippines, where we are fond of titles. A former senator remains a senator long after leaving office. We are very generous with attorney, doctor, chairman, and president, even in conversations where the distinction has very little to do with the subject at hand.
Knowing important people helps, too. “Kilala ko si…” is practically a professional qualification. A photograph with an important person becomes evidence of access, which is easily mistaken for influence, and sometimes even for achievement.
Social media has made it possible to display these associations to a much larger audience, many of whom have no reason to question what the photograph is supposed to prove.
I can imagine that this also explains our extraordinary pride whenever someone with even the slightest Filipino connection does well abroad. We celebrate their achievements with so much enthusiasm, even when the connection is a distant ancestor or a Filipino parent they've barely mentioned. We may have had nothing to do with their success, but somehow we get to share in the glory. Our talent for pride by association is quite something.
For those who would rather skip all this, or simply want a more impressive biography, there's no need to wait for an institution to confer a title or for an important person to associate with because — thou canst always, thus, appoint thyself.
Starting an organization, a company, or a startup is one way to go about it. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Some organizations do excellent work, and there is virtue in starting. But starting one also conveniently gives you a title: founder, even CEO. And that alone can lend importance to a name, even before the organization has accomplished much.
Give the organization a serious-sounding name, a logo, a website, and an acronym, and it begins to look like an institution. It can hold conferences, confer awards, and recognize other people doing important work.
Those people may, in turn, invite its founder to speak or present an award of their own. Before long, everyone has recognized everyone else, and all have something new to put in their biographies.
Meanwhile, some of the best people I know are not particularly good at advertising themselves. You find out they are good by working with them or by simply interacting with them enough, sometimes too late. They have been doing excellent work all along without producing the usual markers of importance.
Somebody has to find these people. And more importantly, give them the platform to show what they can do.
Next generation’s perennial problem
We have been repeating the words famously associated with Jose Rizal: “Ang kabataan ang pag-asa ng bayan.” We certainly enjoy celebrating young leaders. There are conferences, fellowships, mentoring programs, and awards devoted to their potential. Sometimes, we also allow them to live and run for public office. But many of the positions from which they might actually lead remain occupied by the same old men who have held on to power for decades.
Some of the older leaders I admire have become even better at what they do with age, while others seem to have developed an attachment to power that makes the prospect of being replaced almost unthinkable.
This may not even be entirely conscious. After decades of experience and the hardships that came with it, it can be genuinely difficult to imagine that someone younger could have acquired comparable wisdom without having followed the same path or taken just as long to get there. But more than that, relevance is an understandable human need.
Mentorship and encouragement come generously, along with recognition of young people's potential, although the enthusiasm can diminish when that potential develops into the confidence and ability to exercise judgment independently of the very person who nurtured it.
Even opportunities to lead sometimes come with an unspoken understanding that the mentor will continue to have the final word. The titles may change hands without much change in who actually holds the power.
Humility is leadership, too
Of course, being overlooked does not necessarily mean being exceptional. Some people are obscure for perfectly sound reasons, while some very visible people deserve every bit of the attention they receive.
The difficulty is that neither visibility nor seniority tells us enough about what a person is actually capable of, particularly now that technology has made the organizational chart a very unreliable guide.
A junior employee may be doing more complicated work outside the office than anything assigned to them inside it. Their job title tells you what the organization has asked them to do, not necessarily what they can do.
This is where the ability to recognize talent becomes especially important. The most interesting leaders are those who can distinguish between the usual markers of importance and actual ability, including in people who have neither the credentials nor the inclination to advertise themselves.
This is not easy. It takes enough confidence in one's own judgment to recognize when somebody else knows better, and enough humility to give the other person the platform to act on it.
It means allowing other people to be right, occasionally at one’s own expense, and being comfortable with decisions one would not necessarily have made. It also means accepting that the outcome may be different from what you intended, and that much of the credit for what gets accomplished may eventually belong to the people you found.
Their success will seem obvious in retrospect, and few people will remember that somebody had to recognize and had in fact recognized ability before it became apparent to everyone else.
Good leaders are discerning
We are not merely spectators in this business of recognizing ability.
We're supposed to be our leaders' leaders, and choosing people for public office requires much the same judgment as we expect good leaders to exercise.
But we encounter the same performances when people seek public office. The credentials are engineered for our admiration accompanied by endorsements from important people, photographs with even more important people, and an impressive amount of material explaining why we should be impressed. Some of it may be entirely deserved, but we still have to work out which parts tell us something about a person's actual ability to govern.
There are also familiar figures who have spent decades in positions of influence and seem to regard continued public office as the natural extension of a long career.
Experience counts for something, but years spent in power tell us little about what was accomplished, and less whether someone else could do better.
I started writing this thinking about the leaders who are unusually good at recognizing excellence in others, without needing to be the source of it. I have been fortunate enough to meet a few, and I admire the confidence and humility that make such judgment possible.
It occurs to me that we are expected to exercise the same judgment when choosing the people who will lead us.
We put so much importance on asking what makes someone fit to lead us, and not so much on asking what, as our leaders’ leaders, makes us fit to choose.
Being difficult to impress is a good place to start.
Nikki Mendez is a corporate lawyer specializing in technology, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, privacy, and intelligent systems, guiding pivotal technology transactions and policy developments.
