Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship

Who was an important mentor to you and why? What did you learn?

Deputy Secretary Talbot showed me you can be a great professional and still be a good human. From Ambassador Kristie Kenney I learned not to confuse your career and your life. Ambassador Harry Thomas taught me the hardest thing in the world sometimes is to help people. You cannot make decisions for people, you can only provide them options and help them think it through. You have to give people space to make mistakes.

Perhaps my biggest mentor was cancer, with which my first wife lived for many years. The illness taught me the importance of living in the moment, not planning too far ahead, and seeking joy in every day. If you look for it, it’s there.

Having worked in journalism before you joined State, any useful lessons on writing you pulled from there?

Writing to a word count, on deadline, was invaluable preparation. We’re always task-saturated, so instead of constantly refining a piece, get it out and move on. Think about your audience—what do they need to know? Tell them only what they need to know, not everything you know about the subject.

I used to tell our team in the Operations Center that the scarcest commodity in the building was the Secretary’s time. If you’re asking people to invest their time reading your work—don’t waste it. That's also why it helps to make your writing interesting, add a personal style, and complement it with strong arguments and facts.

Also, remember your competition. We need to rethink how we add value overseas in the digital age. We’re not the only source of information in a given place, so we need to leverage the unique insights we have, or the information that is not publicly available.

What leadership advice would you give to mid-career officers on ways they can help build a more enabling ecosystem for equity and inclusion?

Alerting supervisors to problems is important; don’t assume they know. Some well-intentioned managers may not be aware if the offender “kisses up and kicks down.” It’s important to support one another and build coalitions within an organization. If you’re hesitant to confront a problem, others probably are too. Their problems could be worse.

Model the behaviors you think are important in the workplace. Remember the first rule of kindergarten: share. Share contacts, experiences, tips and, especially, credit when things go well. Our competitive promotion system drives people to focus on individual contributions, but working collaboratively produces better results and creates better leaders. The reality is that success is never individual.

Beyond mentoring, we need to sponsor others. Put colleagues’ names forward for opportunities. Take a chance on someone; at some point, someone took a chance on each of us. I realized over time I should have actively sponsored more colleagues and regret not doing more.

Do you think the Department has a sufficient culture of institutional learning where we analyze our successes and failures? If not, what can individual officers do to foster that?

One of our biggest shortcomings is a culture of scarcity: we rarely have enough people and other resources to handle everything we are asked to do. That has meant an overreliance on individuals’ prior education, a default to on-the-job training, and an under-reliance on structured professional development. We don’t invest enough in training, and admitting mistakes is often seen as a sign of failure.

We need to harness modern technology and escape the defensive crouch that past data leaks has put us in. We learn differently and we are in different places at different times, so we need a private, collaborative space that enables a fluid, free-sharing of information. People need to be able to discuss problems and debate issues without fear of it ending up in the media or hurting their careers. “Lessons learned” exercises should become the norm—and be more accessible. We should prioritize exit interviews with departing colleagues.

How do you balance between respecting the independence and unique character of your host country while advancing our nation's interests abroad?

Our job is to be “other-oriented”—to use empathy and try to understand the motives and interests of the person on other side of the conversation. If you understand the other person’s perspective, it improves your odds of developing solutions they can support. We can achieve only a certain amount through transactional or coercive approaches, and they rarely lead to sustainable, durable outcomes.

I often think of professional relationships as a bank. If you constantly withdraw from the account without making deposits, you’re overdrawn pretty quickly. It’s the art of figuring out what others need—without undercutting our own interests. Fortunately, the United States has an immense variety of tools to help others to achieve their goals and aspirations, while keeping them in balance with American interests.

Many of us go to Iraq or Afghanistan for the first time, for short tours, and arrive with misperceptions and erroneous received wisdom. How can we mitigate that?

We are often hampered by an expectations gap between what we aspire to achieve, our self-imposed deadlines to reach the goal, and the capacity of the host government to deliver results. Conflict zones increase the gap and make it harder to acknowledge; clever host government officials can use it against us.

Short tours create inertia, as new arrivals lack context credibly to reevaluate objectives. They feel pressure to show results. We need to step back and reevaluate what we do more frequently—without simply producing a lot of words and not enough critical thinking. The military does a good job of harvesting lessons learned and preparing its units for deployments. We should look to apply aspects of their models to our process for preparing for challenging environments.

The decision to suspend NIVs for Turkish citizens in 2017 in response to the arrest of a local employee was uncommon. What was the thinking behind the move, and what was the response of local staff?

The decision stemmed from the challenges of cross-cultural communication—including between two very different legal systems. The Turkish government was frustrated when information it considered evidence of individuals’ culpability in the failed coup attempt did not produce rapid action in the U.S. legal system. After the Turkish government began detaining many of its own officials due to their alleged affiliations with the coup plotters, it arrested one of our local staff members as a result of his professional interactions with some of the detainees. We faced the prospect of other locally-employed staff being arrested as a result of their prospective interactions, on consular matters, with Turkish officials. To protect our local staff until we could clarify the situation with the government, we decided temporarily to suspend visa services.

The decision came after lengthy deliberations. It underscored the importance of creating an ecosystem of dissent and open dialogue in an embassy. I made an effort to value everyone’s contributions and to be accessible. This enabled colleagues closest to the human face of the issue to come forward with their thoughts. The open deliberation with my staff and with Washington ultimately yielded the uncommon decision.

What advice do you have for mid-career officers serving in posts where mobility is restricted, but who are still motivated to report, engage, and connect with locals?

Our profession is not risk-free. Many of our leaders have made safety of personnel their highest priority. Achieving zero risk is impossible; I believe our highest priority has to be achieving our top objectives. If the standard is minimizing risk, rather than managing it, our job is much harder. It’s difficult to justify the incremental benefits we gain from individual interactions against the potentially catastrophic consequences of losing someone despite our best efforts.

As a leader in dangerous environments, I told my team that security was my ultimate responsibility. I instructed them not to be more conservative than they thought necessary, and I would be accountable for any bad outcomes. We also encouraged personnel to be creative in finding meeting places that might be less secure than the Embassy, but were not open-air, public settings either. It’s about doing the best you can to achieve good results. I’d often ask the question, paraphrasing a quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, “am I doing what I can, with what I have, where I am?” Especially in conflict zones, each person ought to define success for themselves. “What does a successful assignment here look like for me?”

You’ve gone from one high-pressure ambassadorship to another, and are now at FSI. Any thoughts, assuming you’ve had a chance to reflect some?

We undervalue the importance of persistence. Sometimes “success” is simply maintaining the status quo, which isn’t emotionally satisfying if you’ve made sacrifices and have seen the human cost of conflict.

What are some mistakes you’ve made in your career? How can officers learn from mistakes?

I have sometimes over-personalized my work. If you lose balance between your role and yourself, you can undercut your effectiveness. You constantly have to take your ego out of the equation. Otherwise, you don’t hear others’ perspectives and end up narrowing the range of viewpoints and options.

It’s tempting for American diplomats to conflate the professional role and the person, and get an inflated sense of themselves—in other words, they let the importance of the job they temporarily inhabit go to their heads. This not only limits their effectiveness within the U.S. government, but it also hinders their ability to admit mistakes and learn from them.