Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship

Who would you say was your best diplomatic coach and what did they teach you?

Perhaps my greatest teacher was my father. He was not a career diplomat, but was a political appointee who ended up serving four presidents at three posts. A few lessons from him and other mentors:

—Understand where people are coming from and to listen deeply. He underscored that you can't work too hard at building personal relationships.

—Explain your decisions to maintain people's respect, even if they disagree with you.

—Don't speak down to subordinates.

—Encourage people to argue with you on your staff because that is just part of thinking. This is hard for folks to do, so make an effort to encourage your team to speak up and offer their opinion.

What would you change or reform about the State Department?

I don't think the Department is a very courageous institution and I don't think it encourages courage. Partly, this is institutional as I don't think any big bureaucracy does encourage courage. However, I do believe very much something that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about once, which is that if you are going to have the courage to do important work, you need to be ready to present and argue for your position. This doesn't mean that you should be out there screaming in the wind but one should learn how to be effective in arguing a position. It is important that if you believe something should go in a different direction, you need to stand up for what you believe. This approach does not come automatically; you should build the habit of standing up for what you believe. Anyway, it's not a new problem. I remember maybe 50 years ago, my father coming back and saying he'd learned two things in Washington. He had learned that he had a reputation for courage, which he found pleasant, and he had learned how little it took to have that reputation.

Any advice for working with the interagency?

The Department is not going to lead the interagency in the making of policy by right or fiat. So if it is going to return to being the leading organization for making policy, it is going to have to work much harder and learn how to lead others and how to take other agencies' concerns into account.

What do you look for in hiring?

When I hired a desk director, I looked for substantive expertise and bureaucratic skill. However, if I could not get both, I would look for bureaucratic skills. As director, you should have a good team that can support you substantively, but if you cannot manage the bureaucracy, you cannot do your job effectively. Obviously, best to have both!

When hiring a DCM in Afghanistan, I looked for someone who could work with and manage Washington. Each job requires different skills, so it is important to look for the right skillset each time and to ask around about each applicant since it is hard to find out from emails or efficiency reports how a person will perform or where their strengths and weaknesses are.

What is a blind spot State officers should pay attention to?

Most importantly, Foreign Service Officers should keep in mind the importance of respecting subordinates, particularly specialists and local employees. Also, I would tell folks to get their butts out of the chair and get out and meet people and work hard to understand the culture and the politics of the society in a way that you just can't if you're working at the desk.

Bureaucratically speaking, Foreign Service officers could better recognize that the interagency in Washington is a culture with subcultures just as much as any foreign culture and you have to use the same skills used overseas to learn how to be effective. One needs to treat the interagency as a foreign culture and understand bureaucratic wrangling is a contact sport—we should play to win but play fair and enjoy the game.

Practically, one should never edit for style.

Any regrets?

In 2005 in Afghanistan, I recommended a 600 million dollar economic supplemental for the country and I knew that Iraq was sucking up all the air so it would be hard to get the support that I recommended. We only got 43 million. And I did go back and reclama with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice but I did not ask to go to the president for a final decision. At the time I figured Rice had such a close relationship with President George Bush that I should defer to her. I don't think I'd have moved anything or changed anything if I had appealed to the President, but I wish I'd made the effort to ask directly.

What sort of skills would you say are most important for someone coming in at a junior level?

Curiosity. If understanding other people is interesting, it excites you, you are well suited to this career. Important to have a certain taste for adventure considering all the moving around involved. And I suppose a certain humility—a certain sense that you can learn.