Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship

What can leaders do to build team cohesiveness, a sense of mission, and good communication?

I have a pretty simple model for the fundamentals of leadership. Leaders must provide their organization with a vision. Then, a leader should lay out to his team how to actually get there. Lastly, there needs to be diligent follow-up in the implementation phase.

These fundamentals relate directly to cohesiveness. The first thing you need is a vision, a practical way forward and an implementation plan. Once you have that basic outline that orients the organization, it's important to marshal the human resources—to build the team—and figure out how the pieces of the team fit together to advance the plan. That's a complicated jigsaw puzzle that changes with every organizational setting and also changes over time. At USNATO, our approach changed in the preparation for the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales and this was different from the approach and preparation two years later for the 2016 NATO Summit in Warsaw. Horizons and visions must change, but I think the basic ingredients remain the same.

You have extensive experience in formal/informal coalition-building including from your work at NATO, the Iraq war, and Afghanistan. What are the conditions and approaches that lead to most success in coordinating major multinational efforts?

In any of these multi-national settings where I have experience, the United States is the biggest player in the room. We bring the most diplomatic horsepower, we bring the most military capability, we bring the most economic and development resources. So we are the big players. It’s easy, however, to overplay our role, and to edge towards a dominant or domineering American role. So one of the keys to coordinating a multinational effort is to have a sense of self, and to avoid over-playing our role in a heavy-handed way. What does this mean? This means that basically we need to abide by an old saying, which is “nothing about us, without us.” We need to respect other views, be collaborative. If we aim to put together a military coalition or multinational diplomatic, humanitarian or relief effort, we have to make sure all those involved have a voice at the table. They need to feel included and consulted and we should not be talking about others without those others being part of the decision process.

This is not always easy for Americans because we’re so dominant and often impatient. Sometimes we edge towards what seems the easy way to “let’s just do it ourselves.” In the short run that might be true, but most of these projects need to be sustained politically, diplomatically, and financially. What I’ve learned is that staying power comes from keeping the multi-national team together. That's what gives our policy and approach staying power and durability. NATO has an old adage that captures this point, “in together, out together.”

Therefore, my advice would be not to rush to an American-only, quick and easy solution to every problem, because most of the problems we confront will defy that approach. Second, be respectful, be empathetic, and be in listening mode with regard to the perspective of others. My experience is that when American leaders are empathetic, listening, and respectful of others, we actually catch others off guard because they know that we could dominate if we wanted to and expect us to fall back to this mode of diplomacy. When we choose not to dominate and we choose to be respectful, it’s actually great in that it propels and greatly enables our coalition building effort.

A follow up on that regarding going it alone. Could you describe how well we did in Iraq and Afghanistan with bringing and keeping multinational partners involved?

There was a contrast between how we approached the Iraq war versus the Afghanistan war. In Iraq, we dominated military activity, which frankly dominated the political and diplomatic efforts as well. That over-dominance of American military effort caused us to pay a very high price. Aside from that, it was also very off-putting to some key allies, who essentially opted out. If you look at Afghanistan by comparison, this is 2019-18 years after the initial post-9/11 intervention—and we still have a coalition of some 40 countries. Afghanistan is a good example of the durability, the staying power, of a multi-national coalition.

It’s true that America in Afghanistan is still playing a leading role but there have been other key contributors like Australia on the military front, Japan on the financial front and others that have contributed significantly. So these are two very different approaches to coalition building, and I think if you want to go with the model of staying power and multi-national political legitimacy and a coalition that stays together for the duration, then the Afghanistan model has a lot to offer while the Iraq model has a lot less.

How can we better coordinate diplomatic efforts across the Interagency?

Speaking especially with military audiences about my interagency experience, one of the points I make is that anytime anyone calls for “interagency cooperation” or the more recent euphemism “a whole of government approach” it should send out alarm signals because in my experience, we seldom put together a whole of government effort. When we have been successful in doing that, it tends to be more localized at the tactical level. For example, provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those were an interagency, whole of government effort at the tactical level, and I think we saw some reasonable successes. But when you move from a tactical team like PRTs across the 14 provinces in Iraq and the 34 provinces in Afghanistan and move up to the country team level, we have some pretty sketchy results in terms of a major military command working alongside our most senior diplomats.

Therefore, we should ask ourselves whether our organizational structures are set up in an appropriate way to promote interagency cooperation. I would argue probably not. Inside the Department of Defense the largest organizational restructuring of the last 50 years was the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which mandated the DOD to reorganize its approach to war around the principle of jointness, where Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines were mandated to work together. This reform literally took an act of Congress—it had to become federal law to make the armed services work together in a new way. I think today’s challenges of interagency coordination are even greater.

Would legislation to address deficiencies in “interagency jointness" make sense?

There's been some academic work on what you might refer to as “Goldwater-Nichols II”—meaning beyond the Defense Department and expanded across the interagency. But most of this has not advanced beyond the conceptual phase. Part of the challenge here is our congressional structure. For Goldwater-Nichols, only the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee needed to agree on a way forward. They could agree to pass laws, they could mandate the kind of organizational reform required inside the Department of Defense. To expand that logic beyond Defense, however, you'd have to get Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees in addition to the Armed Services Committees to all consider their mandates in a more cooperative, collaborative way. Quite frankly, I just don't see that prospect anytime soon.

We’ve been engaged in armed conflict since 9/11, and when you look at what that experience has taught us by way of organizational and interagency reform, the answer is: not much. So I’m skeptical of the prospects for improved, systemic interagency cooperation. Therefore, to make progress, it comes down to a lot of hard work, constant day-to-day attention and in a way each leader has to swim upstream against the current of the bureaucracies themselves.

What leadership skills are taught in the military that state folks could/should work on developing?

Perhaps the sharpest contrast from my military experience with my admittedly short State experience relates to accountability, and the sense of teamwork from the very outset. We don't challenge our most junior State officers early enough. We should give them responsibility, make them feel accountable, reward them, give them feedback and ensure there are consequences when they don't do so well. Not career ending consequences, but the consequences that provide learning experiences—that inform learning. In the military, this leadership laboratory, this process goes on almost from day one. And it’s very repetitive and produces results.

It seems to me that the State Department defers that whole experience until later for more senior Foreign Service Officers. The result is that we may be expecting our mid and senior officers to pick up these leadership qualities by example, but not necessarily by repetitive practice. So I would focus more on leader development, even from the outset. As much as possible, we should construct and design opportunities for experiences that have to do with accountability. This could be pretty mundane stuff. This can be conducting meetings in a multinational setting. This can be engagement with multinational partners. This can be the writing of cables. The basic point I want to make here is start young and then build skills through repetition.

We’ve talked to about 30 or 40 ambassadors, and almost every person has said their best boss has been the person that delegated to them and trusted them. So how do we learn this delegation? Specifically, what did you do at NATO and at the NSC to foster this sense of trust, delegation, and this offering of responsibility?

One way a leader or boss can develop and engender trust among his or her subordinates is by sharing information. So the boss who delegates a project to a more junior officer should do it with an open book. Empower that junior officer by offering context, classified material, everything that that junior officer might need to be successful in that task. Doing this demonstrates to the junior officer that the senior officer has expectations of performance, and has enabled performance and delivery on the task by sharing all relevant information. So one important element of trust-building is this sort of free and open communication channel between the senior officer and the junior.

A second way to build trust is for the senior officer to look for ways to give the junior partner credit for performance. For example, every time a secretary of defense or secretary of state visits NATO, there's a middle grade Foreign Service Officer who designs the project and prepares the visit. A two- or three-day visit to NATO by the Secretary of State is a big deal, so an example would be to ensure that the control officer—not the ambassador—gets credit for a visit that goes well. And to make sure that the Secretary actually meets the control officer and that this isn't just an officer who does all the hard work in the background and gets no senior recognition. It’s important also to build on this notion of giving credit by after the visit recognizing the control officer publicly—within the mission or with the Secretary's senior staff.

Thinking of embarking on a career in foreign affairs, whether it be DOD, CIA, Department of State, what skills or experiences should folks develop as they consider such a career?

We are at a point in history where deep expertise is really going to be vital. One emerging challenge is global competition with China. So if we are going to contend and compete effectively with China over the next several decades, we have to have a deep understanding of China. Do we understand China domestically, politically? Do we understand Chinese history and Chinese culture? Do we have people studying China in the way that we studied the Soviet Union when it presented the premier strategic challenge to America? There was a whole machine that produced Soviet-ologists. We had people who devoted their entire careers to understanding this premier strategic competitor. So, I would look on the horizon. The biggest challenge in a foreign affairs professional starting now is going to be China. So we should go to school on China.

Regarding expertise, I would put a special premium on language skills because I believe that we don't really develop the richest possible understanding of a strategic competitor without speaking in that competitor’s language, so that we can tap written and oral exchanges. So that you can engage one-on-one and demonstrate not only knowledge, but respect. It’s very hard to demonstrate respect without at least an attempt at mastering the other’s language. And finally, mastering the other’s language is perhaps the perfect demonstration of empathy, in the sense that we step out of our comfort zone as Americans—rich, privileged, secure Americans. We attempt to better understand the strategic opponent by stepping into that opponent’s shoes. Learning the language and the deep study of that culture and politics is a very powerful demonstration of commitment to empathy. These are the starting points of effective engagement and diplomacy.