Monday, October 09, 2006 Amante: Queens and pawns By Isolde D. Amante Peryodistang Pinay
EVERY pawn carries a scepter in its backpack, James MacGregor Burns wrote in “Transforming Leadership” (New York: Atlantic Press, 2003).
The Pulitzer Prize winner referred to queening, the twist that allows patient chess players to trade a pawn for a queen, if they manage to push that pawn across the chessboard unscathed. It doesn’t happen often, yet when it does, it’s a jackpot: from a nearly helpless piece that can only plod one square at a time and never backwards, the pawn is transformed into a monarch, able to zip across the board and mow down nearly every obstacle in her path.
Such dramatic transformations are the true goals of leadership, Burns said. The school of thought that he puts forward views leadership as “the basic process of social change” and considers both leaders and followers as “agents of change.” For Burns, one only has to recognize the millions who lack food, shelter, work or freedom, to see the work that awaits “transforming leaders.” (We like to snigger at beauty pageant contestants who speak, dewy-eyed, of world peace. But when a Pulitzer Prize-winning academic extends the same idea, we sit up and take notice.)
Transforming leaders begin by imagining a state of affairs not presently existing. “They begin on people’s terms,” said Burns, and they do so by listening to what their followers want and need. Because they recognize that the work they do has moral implications, transforming leaders do more than guarantee their continued hold on power. They create, out of their followers’ dreams and disappointments, a vision of change. They communicate this vision to others.
How they convince others, above the din of cynics and naysayers, is part of what makes them leaders. Transforming leaders see that conflict is not only inevitable but, for as long as it is non-violent, is even desirable. Followers may see conflict in the gap between what their rulers profess to believe (justice, for instance) and the actual conditions of those they rule (such as widespread poverty).
“Conflict is crucial to creativity, as when new insights are tested and refined in the struggle to dislodge habitual patterns of thought,” wrote Burns. Transforming leaders know they cannot be empowered by subservient followers, Burns added. In a functioning democracy, only graveyards are truly silent.
Last week, I saw a TV news clip that showed Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia and University of the Philippines professor Cherry Ballescas confronting each other at a provincial development council meeting. They looked like two queens on a large and crowded chessboard.
The video clips and news accounts provide a limited picture, but it seemed to me that for all the raised voices, their positions were not irreconcilable. The professor wanted a full and detailed accounting of how the proposed P672-million annual investment plan for 2007 would be spent. The governor said some flexibility was needed—that she did not wish the Province to be “shackled by bureaucracy”—but that nongovernment organizations were welcome to inspect every project, to make sure no funds were misspent.
What at first seemed like a nasty argument may yet turn out to be a case of what Burns called principled conflict. “Conflict that sharply poses alternatives...mobilizes citizens and opens possibilities of decision and change”—the change that turns pawns into queens.
