Every politician in Belize should read this little book about ducks and eagles

By Horace Palacio: Today I want to do something different. I want to recommend a book.

It is a small book. You can finish it in about an hour. But I promise you, the title alone is worth more than a hundred political speeches.

It is called You Can’t Send a Duck to Eagle School, by an American businessman named Mac Anderson, the founder of a company called Simple Truths, a man who has written more than twenty books on leadership that have sold in the millions. And every politician in Belize, red, blue, or undecided, should read it before they ask for another vote.

Let me tell you the story behind the title, because the story is the whole lesson.

Anderson once sat at lunch with a top executive from a company world famous for its customer service. Anderson assumed the secret was some massive training manual, two inches thick. The executive told him they had no such manual. Their secret was simpler. They found the best people they could find, and empowered them.

Then he said the line that gives the book its name. You cannot send a duck to eagle school. You cannot teach someone to smile. You cannot teach someone to want to serve. You cannot teach personality. What you can do is hire people who already have those things, and then teach them the skills.

Read that again, slowly, and think about Belize.

The whole book stands on one simple truth. Skills can be taught. Character cannot. You can train anybody to follow a procedure, quote a statistic, or read a speech. What no training on earth can install is desire, integrity, drive, and a genuine heart to serve. Those come with the person, or they never come at all.

Now let us talk about how we do things in this country.

How does a person become a candidate in Belize? Too often, not because they are an eagle. Because they are loyal. Because of their surname. Because they raised money. Because it was their turn. Because they can deliver a division. The parties are the hiring departments of this nation, and too often they hire ducks, pin a party shirt on them, and send them off to eagle school.

Then we act surprised.

We hand a duck a ministry and expect vision. We put a duck on a statutory board and expect stewardship. We give a duck the people’s money and expect integrity. And when the performance disappoints, what is our national solution? Training. Another workshop. Another consultancy. Another study tour abroad, per diem included.

My friends, hear Mac Anderson clearly. You can send a duck to every workshop in the hemisphere. You can fly it to conferences in five countries. It will come home with a certificate, a suitcase, and some duty free. It will still be a duck. You can teach a duck to flap harder. You cannot teach it to soar.

The waste is not just the salary of the wrong person. It is everything downstream. The broken project. The demoralized public officers underneath them who actually could fly. The eagles in our civil service who watch ducks get promoted above them and eventually fly away to another country that recognizes wings when it sees them. That, too, is how a nation loses its eagles.

The book carries a second lesson our politicians need even more. Anderson warns that nothing destroys a leader faster than the gap between stated values and actual behavior. Say the values and live the opposite, and you lose your people’s respect twice over.

Does that sound familiar, Belize? Every manifesto sings about transparency, accountability, and service. Then we watch the behavior. The book calls that gap fatal for a company. It is worse for a country, because the thing that dies is not sales. It is trust.

And there is a third gem, so small it is almost embarrassing. Anderson says the most powerful sentence a leader can utter is a six word question. What can I do to help?

Imagine that. Imagine a minister walking through a village and asking, sincerely, what can I do to help, and then doing it. Not at election time. On an ordinary Tuesday. That single habit, practiced honestly, would transform politics in this country faster than any reform bill.

So here is my open recommendation.

To the leaders of both parties. Read it, then look hard at how you choose candidates and make appointments. You are not just picking politicians. You are the hiring department of Belize. Choose for character, desire, and drive first, because those cannot be added later. The skills, the portfolios, the briefing notes, all of that can be taught to an eagle in months. No amount of teaching turns a duck into one.

To every sitting politician. Read it and ask yourself the question honestly, in the mirror, where nobody is watching. Am I an eagle who came to lift this country, or a duck who came for the pond?

And to us, the voters, one short word, because I wrote about this recently. The parties hire the candidates, but we do the final hiring on election day. When we sell that decision for a ham and a t-shirt, we are choosing ducks with our eyes wide open. Eagles in office begin with eagles in the voting booth.

The book costs less than a lunch. It takes an hour. It might be the cheapest governance reform available to Belize.

So buy a copy. Better yet, buy two, and give one to your area representative. Tell them Horace sent it.

And if you are wondering how to tell the ducks from the eagles around you, here is a simple field guide. Ducks quack loudest when elections are near. Eagles you measure differently, by how high they lift everything around them.

Belize has spent enough on eagle school for ducks. It is time we simply started choosing eagles.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.

The post Every politician in Belize should read this little book about ducks and eagles appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.