Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship

During your tour as Ambassador to Iraq, what did you find most challenging and most important to confront the challenges you confronted?

First, let me commend you on this initiative and thank you for this opportunity to participate; it is an honor. When I arrived in Baghdad in 2014 for my third tour in Iraq, I found that there was a lot of anger at and suspicion of the United States. First, people thought we had not delivered on our 2003 promises and second, some blamed us for the rise of ISIS.

The most important priority was to establish a single CIV-MIL team. I was very fortunate to be able to partner with, first LTG James Terry and then LTG Sean MacFarland. They both had extensive experience in Iraq and the region and recognized that the counter-ISIS fight and politics and humanitarian response all needed close coordination and collaboration. Sean and I agreed on his first day to model our working relationship after the famous Ambassador Crocker-GEN Petraeus relationship. We always found a way to agree and make sure our teams see that we agreed.

The other thing that I benefited from was the relationships of trust established by my predecessors, even with Iraqi leaders who were hostile to our goals. LTG MacFarland and I were able to meet with Hadi Al-Amari, Commander of the Shi’a militias, and deliver clear guidance on what the US military would do to defeat ISIS; if the militia did not coordinate their locations with the Iraqi Security Forces, they risked being hit by U.S. airstrikes.

What were some of your management secrets that helped you achieve success as Ambassador to Jordan and to Iraq?

First, Ambassador Frank Ricciardone taught me to always have a leadership mantra. When I was in Jordan it was ‘hospitality, civility, thrift.’ It was clear, easily understood, and laid out our mission. Hospitality meant that we welcomed and capitalized on visits from Washington leadership; civility meant that we collaborated across bureaucratic lines and respected each other; and thrift underscored our goal to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ trust. I repeated the mantra constantly and knew it was meeting its intended purpose when I learned that it was being lampooned in wickedly good humor.

Second, I sought to aggressively use representational events as a tool of diplomacy. Especially in Amman it was possible to bring the Mission members into closer contact with Jordanians through events at the mission. Some posts do not use their funds and the bureau wants to be sure they are spent by year end, so it was sometimes possible to get plussed up mid-year.

What would you tell someone thinking of joining the Foreign Service? What skill should they focus on developing?

The Foreign Service is a wonderful career, a great adventure, but that is challenging and can be difficult. The most important thing to do if you are interested in the career is to live abroad and learn a language. It is pretty clear when you see entry level officers arriving at Post who has international experience in hard places and who does not. I liked to say, instead of laying out $100k for a Masters, get your GID from the Peace Corps, Marine Corps or Mercy Corps.

How about advice for a mid-level officer already in the Foreign Service?

Most important is to ask what you can do to develop into a better leader and officer and talk about ways to do so with your colleagues and mentors. I used to find it very useful, at the end of every performance evaluation cycle to assess what I wanted to accomplish in the coming year and in the coming decade.

I think it is also useful to think about career decisions in relation to the different ‘baskets’ that we have to manage in the Foreign Service. We are constantly balancing between the career basket, the financial basket, the family basket, and the lifestyle basket. We should look at each tour, whether abroad or domestically, for which baskets it will contribute to and which baskets it will draw down. I can imagine tours which can contribute to each of the baskets. Egypt and Jordan were terrific for career and family, paid nice differentials and were pleasant to live in. But sometimes we have to take tours to meet family or other obligations that will draw down the career financial or lifestyle baskets. And there is nothing wrong with taking a tour to meet a lifestyle goal, as long as we know that is what we are doing and that will draw from the career and possibly other baskets. The key, I think, is to understand how each career decision will contribute to or draw down from each basket and that gives a realistic sense of career development.

And third, I think it is very important to remember, we are diplomats, not bureaucrats. Our job is to create impact in foreign lands. And I’ve seen entry-level officers create extraordinary impact. In Amman one of the entry level officers recognized that there were hundreds of domestic workers from Bangladesh, the Philippines and other countries who were stranded in the basements of their Embassies, living under awful conditions, due to a Catch-22 in the Jordanian immigrations laws. She figured out a way to change the rules and repatriate and rescue literally hundreds of women; she improved a lot of lives. Likewise in Iraq a group of consular officers established a process for rescuing American citizens—mostly women—who were trapped and abused and helping them get home, again, improving lives of our citizens.

Who were your most influential mentors and what did you learn from them?

Between the years 1997 and 2014, I basically worked for either Ambassador Frank Ricciardone or Ambassador Jim Jeffrey. I feel very blessed to have these extraordinary leaders and diplomats as mentors. The lessons they taught were profound and complementary. Frank, the ultimate ‘field officer’, who had won the reporting award in the 80’s, taught me the importance of creating and exercising influence as a diplomat, through prioritizing relationships. I cannot emphasize enough how important his example was. As mid-level officers I think we spend too much time developing bureaucratic skills and not enough time developing diplomatic skills. Frank helped me reset that balance. Jim Jeffrey, also a consummate diplomat, taught us how to influence Washington policy makers from the field. He is a master at managing the inter-agency. They also both set a high bar for leadership, for how to build and motivate teams.