Q&A > Greg Delawie
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What inspired or motivated you to become a diplomat?
At the age of 12, I accompanied my father on a round-the-world business trip for two weeks. Along the way I met a diplomat in Japan, who inspired me to look into the Foreign Service. When I got home, I read about the State Department in the library, and decided it sounded pretty neat. While my life did not follow a straight line from then to the Senior Foreign Service, I could say that for 35 years in the FS I was fulfilling my childhood ambition.
Who was your best boss and why?
I had several great bosses who had one thing in common: they helped establish my goals, and let me figure out how to achieve them.
What would you tell your a-100 self?
Your job is to make the world a little bit better every day for the benefit of the American people. Not every day will be a good day, but you can’t get discouraged by setbacks. Just keep pushing forward.
Describe a day you felt you made a difference.
In Kosovo, over the course of a week a small team of Americans and local employees from Embassy Pristina negotiated every night for a week to win the removal of a Berlin-like wall erected as a provocation in an ethnically-mixed neighborhood. With a return to ethnic violence a real possibility, we kept pushing the two sides until we finally reached a deal at 2:00 a.m.; the wall was gone by noon that day. We all felt like we had saved the lives of a significant number of people.
What has a colleague done for you that made you wish all of us had a colleague like that?
Several times colleagues gave me the opportunity to take on new responsibilities in areas I had not worked in before. While initially challenging, these assignments helped me grow and become a more well-rounded FSO.
What was the mistake you learned the most from?
When faced with weak performance from a subordinate, I did not act fast enough to move him on when he did not show improvement; I felt I could carry him. What I did not recognize quickly enough was that this poor performance was not just a burden on me, but on several others in the office. Later, when faced with performance challenges, I gave the poor performer a reasonable amount of time to improve, and then called it quits when improvement was insufficient.
What was your best and worst experience working with the interagency?
Best: working with the country team at Embassy Pristina, where agencies were all working together to achieve agreed USG goals. Worst: working in a Washington assignment with another agency whose employees did not accept that a USG policy decision had gone against them, and worked to undermine the policy line.
What is the one tour you would recommend FSOs consider?
Do a tour in multi-lateral diplomacy by mid-career; UN, NATO, AU, etc. My first assignment in multilateral diplomacy did not come until I was a Deputy Assistant Secretary negotiating arms control agreements at NATO and the OSCE. I had to learn a lot about the process of multilateral negotiating before I could hope to make progress on the substance of these agreements.
If the state department had a mascot, what animal should it be?
I don’t think we need one.
What was the biggest challenge of FS life for your family, and how did you manage it?
Since my spouse was also an FSO with a full-time job, it was always a challenge dealing with childcare issues, especially when the children were sick or out of school for some reason. This was more of a challenge in Washington than when we were assigned abroad. We ended up hiring people to provide childcare using various mechanisms like the au pair program, but things often ended up being more complicated than we expected.
What is your leadership philosophy?
From Eisenhower: Leadership consists of taking the blame for everything that goes wrong, and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes right. Other than that, it’s helping your team set the right direction and focus on the key factors necessary to achieve USG goals.
What tips would you give a first-time manager?
You should not take a managerial position until you are ready to spend a considerable amount of time supporting your team, assigning them work that will help them grow in their careers, and defending their interests to your superiors.
What would you change about the State Department?
Too many people are focused on careerism and promotions rather than finding work that is interesting and fulfilling. We also need to find a way to evaluate people more fairly that indicates how they work to support their teams. We tried to attack this issue multiple times over the years (I participated myself in the 2003 effort) but have not been successful.
What were your pet peeves?
The clearance process always annoyed me. It was not so much the idea that others could contribute to make a better product or to introduce new ideas, but the idea that many clearers felt they had to make some kind of contribution, even if it was minor, just to validate their existence. When clearing others’ work, I always felt that if a memo or cable was 90% of what I would write, that was close enough, and I should not bother the drafter with my minor “improvements.”
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