Ethical Leadership Training in East Timor
I arrived in East Timor (otherwise known as ‘Timor-Leste’) on a very hot afternoon not long after the end of term at Hong Kong University. I was in the country on behalf of the International Republican Institute (“IRI”), a U.S. based non-profit organisation whose mandate includes the promotion of the Rule of Law and democracy in developing nations. Specifically, I had been asked to design and deliver training on ethical leadership as part of an IRI initiative designed to provide leadership skills and training to promising young leaders in East Timor (the “Leadership Development Programme”).
I was not really sure what to expect of East Timor or of the participants who were going to be attending the training course. I had been informed that the participants represented a diverse cross-section of professional institutions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Armed Forces, the National Police, the Ministry of Tourism Trade and Industry, the University of Timor Leste, the Women’s Business Association, the Judicial Systems Monitoring Program, and from the Secretary of State for Defence Forces.
Aside from English being a secondary language for all participants the challenge for me lay in ensuring that the training session was able to take into account the political and cultural context in which it was being delivered. Very soon into the design phase of the training I realised that whilst it was going to be relatively easy to confront ethical dilemmas from the safety of a training session, the practical reality of life for the participants was that they were going to be regularly challenged to choose ethical courses of action in situations where the pressures were likely to be contradictory, immense and certainly beyond anything that I could speak to from experience. The contradiction of my situation was that a central theme of the session was on the topic of ‘authentic leadership’ and yet I wondered how authentic my presentation was going to be as a foreigner to the country and someone removed from these practical realities. In light of this, but also because it is a more effective mode of training, I structured the session so that my role was that of a facilitator, encouraging open discussion and acknowledgment of the difficulties participants were likely to face. The focus of the session was not on what participants should do in any given situation as much as developing tools to be able to think through a decision, after reflection and with regard to the possible consequences that lay ahead. An understanding of what possible different pressures people were under when faced with an ethical dilemma was central to this.
The morning of the training session arrived and my fears of barriers built around language soon dissipated as the morning’s session began, my ‘class’ proving itself to be both articulate and eloquent in describing the challenges facing their new-born nation. Later, as I sat writing this article and pondering the remarkable optimism and energy that had enthused the training session, the distinctive sound of a ‘Huey’ military helicopter sliced across my thoughts and line of vision, barely skimming the tops of the palm trees surrounding the hotel; a not so subtle reminder of the ubiquitous presence of the U.N. and the latent force that the country still apparently needed to keep the peace. I could not help but wish that more of the resources countries were prepared to spend on the show of military presence was invested in the future of the east Timorese people through education and training initiatives such as the one that I had the privilege of contributing to.
