Interviews > Barbara Leaf

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What do leaders at all levels, including peer leaders, need to do to foster team cohesiveness, a sense of mission, good communication, and the division of labor?

The key word in that whole sentence is communication. Often people, as they move up in the hierarchy think that it's communicating their vision, communicating their direction, but I think of communication not as this one-way radio transmission. It's making sure to listen and taking in almost as much as you give out. Starting out in your career, communication with your peers is really quite important but it becomes critical as you're moving up because you're also taking in a lot and I think this is something that many would-be leaders forget along the way as they begin to sort of unconsciously think of themselves as some sort of Olympian figure sitting high on the mountain top, some Oracle giving out words of wisdom. But if you don't have an understanding of your team, what's going on in your team, what the strengths are of your team by simply conversing with them on a regular basis, then your attempts at sharing your vision will be half-baked or it will be half executed. Communication binds your team together. You know, it was not just the town halls, which I really did relish, but also the smaller settings where I did gatherings with entry-level or mid-level officers or a cross-section of the sections at post. I looked for opportunities to get a large, but manageable collection of my team together that went beyond my country team so that they felt they had some idea of what was going on in my mind and vice versa. 

You have extensive experience in formal and informal coalition building and working within a bureaucracy. What are the conditions and approaches that lead to the most success in coordinating major multinational or multi department efforts?

You'll hear me throughout this conversation use the term networking. It’s an overused word perhaps, but it really is the essence of what we have to do even within our own institutional setting in Washington and then certainly, once we get into a true multilateral setting. So building up relationships with people who are in different parts of an organization, or if you will, across national lines or in multilateral organizations. It's a constant kind of process where you get to know these people and they get to know you. It allows you to arm yourself with an understanding of where your collaborators, or in some cases your adversaries, are. Effective networking will give you an understanding of where they're coming from, what their interests are, and that helps you formulate the winning argument. It's not enough to know your own brief. You have to understand the wider context in which you are attempting to provide advice.

What would you like to see change about the State Department and the way we conceive the work of diplomacy as we look towards the 2020s and beyond.

I would like to see much more public speaking. I would make Foreign Service officers, as a component of their early formation, do time on the Hill so that there is a much more organic relationship between the Congress and the career Foreign Service than currently exists. There's no excuse for us not to have much more collaborative relations, on an individual basis, between the Department and the Hill.  

We're also very hamstrung by our own extraordinarily restrictive security model. To shake up that model requires risk-taking at a leadership level that you just don't see very often and there's a very strong resistance to it. 

Did you ever dissent and if so, how? 

I never formally dissented, but I spent my whole career dissenting, my boss or bosses my best advice regardless as to whether that comported with their thinking; I found—perhaps because of the way I was raised—that I couldn't just shut up. But you have to know your audience, and you have to know your brief excruciatingly well. The worst thing you can do is go on and on and then somebody just punctures your argument with a few facts that you haven't bothered to master. So, you know, you can be opinionated, but if you don't know your brief, and know your audience, you may well fail. So you need to take those into consideration as you're dissenting. You're not going to win the day with anyone if you come off as just sort of a smartass who's showing off. Instead frame it in such a way that ”I know this is the policy and I know why I know the policy guidance, but here is a new set of facts that have changed the formulation which we should look at.” And you have to be a bit fearless about it. You can't be, you know, a shrinking violet. You can't be afraid of getting your feelings hurt. But you do it in a way that is fact-based and firmly knowing what we're trying to achieve. 

Who is your best diplomatic coach? Why? What did you learn to do from them? 

My first mentor in the Foreign Service was Skip Gnehm. You know, I always joke that he taught me the bureaucratic dark arts, the cut and thrust of interagency work. I learned from Skip how to set the setting or the context of a discussion or issue.  Skip was supposed to go to Kuwait the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait. So he found himself without a job. The U.S. government was in some state of turmoil In the wake of the invasion. There was no way Skip was going to spend seven months running a task force. So he pretty much conceived of, and ran with, a project to help the Kuwaiti government pull together and plan for a post-war posture to re-build a destroyed country. He worked the policy angles of thinking ahead to post-liberation. What was that relationship going to need to be and he was relentless and an active initiative taker. What really stuck with me was his ability to work the most obstreperous bureaucratic resistance with charm, relentlessness, and persuade people to move. 

There is also nothing tougher, more challenging, more life force sucking, than the issues that bubble up around personnel and when you have toxic personnel. So the old adage that you spend 90% of your time on 10% of your people is definitely true. You need to manage difficult people in a way that preserves morale and guide troublesome people in the best direction. And, frankly, when they are not salvageable, you get rid of them and that's important. I learned that from another great leader, Tina Kaidanow. But you have to be able to make a hard decision with people, including at senior ranks, who are creating a toxic environment and I spent my career watching people get bogged down by that. 

How do you take over a position in times of crisis, make lemonade out of lemons?

I thrive in crises. They always brought out the best in me. [I started on the Kuwait desk the week Iraq invaded it] and at first, I was just a cork bobbing on the sea of this turmoil. But I started finding the people around me who are a little bit more senior and asking them constant questions. The worst thing you can do is be passive. So take charge of your little space of whatever it is. Figure out where you're going so you can contribute to the mission and then widen it as you become more capable. 

Then there is also a resilience part of it. I wasn't very good at resilience in my first crisis. I mean, you know, I was in the building at 7am or earlier and I was leaving at 9pm every night. I traveled a lot and came in on weekends. So I learned in subsequent periods of intense work to live by the ”Work Hard Play Hard” adage. You need to recognize that there are going to be intense periods of work driven by crisis, a high-level visit, etc. and that what you need to do is get sleep, exercise, manage your diet,  and then when you are past it, regenerate yourself. I banned the phrase work-life balance in Mission UAE,  not because I don't believe in it but to be real with our folks -- because we need to recognize that as Foreign Service officers, you can have balance in periods and then you are crazily out of balance because of the needs of the service. But then you need to look to readdress things as you come out of the crisis and consciously look to recover. For me, I have my golden hour of solitude in the morning, sitting in the garden, or on my front porch, or by the pool. I sit and I read and I think but I don't read the news. So I have a golden hour of reflection. Sometimes I read a good book, but I don't let myself get sucked into the day that first hour and in the same way, I, in the evening, you know, I turn off. You need to just restrict yourself to looking at your work email at a given time frame. If it's urgent, people can call you.

In the era of Skype and rapid air travel when people can communicate in an instant, how do we diplomats operate most effectively? 

We're not in the 1920s where in large part only the American ambassador talks to the high levels of the host government, not Washington. But as a diplomat you are keeper of the 24/7 relationship and those are relationships that must be tended constantly—which Washington cannot do—and it's not just for information gathering, it’s also for building influence. Why do we have these relationships? It's because we are trying to understand what's going on or to alter it in a given way. Senior Washington figures are not tending to that relationship 24/7 as part of their larger global brief. That’s where we in the field come in, and it’s critical role, notwithstanding the marvels of technology.

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