Last month, I chanced upon a familiar figure, walking along Castro Street. The man was wearing an old plain white shirt, slacks and leather shoes. He was carrying an old overused bag as he went quietly towards Taft Avenue, looking or staring at the ground.
I remembered looking the same almost half a decade ago when I had my immersion at Shoe Mart (SM) Megamall. All 40 of us in that class wore plain shirts, slacks that did not have pockets—a standard practice many supermarkets implement to avoid theft—and leather shoes.
In our four-day immersion, we experienced a life of a Shoe Mart bagger. We went to work at 7 am, and we finished when the other baggers finished. We chatted with our co-workers during lunch break and talked about their families and friends. It was an eye opener for many of us Xavierians, and we took it upon ourselves to try to give back to our friends.
We tried our best to work fast so that customers would not complain, and we made sure that we would not make mistakes because apparently, all cashiers and workers are accountable for their and our mistakes. In SM terms, they have to pay for any product left by a customer, which I still do not understand today.
I remember thinking that we could help them so much since we were educated, and we had better communication skills. For most of us, helping them is a first step in becoming a leader since the general norm is that the privileged have the most responsibility to contribute to the country and the “rest” or majority of its citizens.
Many of us graduated and went to the best universities in the country and abroad, and perhaps many of us have become leaders in our own areas. Some have become organization presidents; others have entered the corporate world; and some have taken their rightful place as heirs to family businesses.
But what is a leader? Does a leader have to have a good education, money or social status? Somehow, I remember myself thinking, “What if my cashier partner had not helped me during my immersion?” I probably would have incurred the wrath of management or worse, my teachers.
Somehow, our education, money and social status did not help us function that day. We did not know where to get additional boxes, plastics (back when the government used to allow companies to use plastic) and information, especially if we had customers who had a lot of questions and little patience.
We were not the leaders back then. We had to step down from our pedestal as privileged private school kids to learn from them, and to an extent, we had to understand and learn that they had more to offer us than we could ever offer them.
What was funny though was that I remember our partners talking to us about how we would change the country, and how much we could contribute to the community. In other words, they looked at us as their future leaders because true enough; many of us will become future leaders.
This is something I learned to understand in DLSU. I learned to value the privilege of education, and to one day use it to contribute to society despite the growing number of students in the country who have learned to value wealth over real value. Granted, many students if not all would become leaders one day.
My immersion, however, helped me gain a better understanding of leadership. I learned that good leaders could step down from their pedestal to admit mistakes. Good leaders have to realize that they do not know everything and should consider the opinion of others, as well as learn to look back at the people who helped them reach their goals. Most of all, good leaders need to have integrity.
Lasallians will, as I would like to verify, graduate to become “responsible” leaders in business, the academe and the corporate world. In other words, Lasallians will help steer the country, but do we have the best leaders, and are we leaders in the first place?
In my stay at DLSU, I have seen a great deal of good leaders, but there are also those who continue to believe that leadership lies in their position. Some professors in my stay treat students like liars and cheaters even before due process. The funny thing is that many get away with it because they have the position or the connections to do so.
I experienced this first hand. One of my professors accused me of faking a thesis presentation so I could leave class early. In the very first place, many students did not even ask permission to leave class on normal days, but left anyway for no valid reason at all. I have also seen valid cases that have been shelved or buried in excuses like, “We did not receive your complaint on time,” when in fact, they did.
Several administrators are also guilty of this. I had a not-so-pleasant experience with one who deliberately insulted my organization because he had the power to do so or rather, there was and is no real and tested system for students to complain against administrators.
Several student leaders also need to learn to look at their position as a means to provide real services to the students instead of ones that add little value to their development. Moreover, they need to see themselves accountable for their mistakes.
Truth be told, many in the University could benefit from learning from a good leader, one who has a conscience and one who knows that his position means that he works for the students and the rest of the administration. If only the man walking at Castro was an administrator. Oh wait, he is. The man walking along Castro was none other than DLSU President and Chancellor Br. Ricky Laguda FSC.
