Interviews > Tom Pickering

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What can leaders (at all levels, including peer leaders) do to foster team cohesiveness, a sense of mission, and good communication/division of labor? 

TP: Treat your colleagues and staff with a kiss up and down approach. Listen to ideas from wherever they come. Employ collegiality through meetings and by passing around drafts to ensure partnership. Explore pending issues with subordinates and peers. Practice the best of good business management techniques where they fit the government pattern. Avoid playing favorites. Help mentor, in private, officers and colleagues, especially those who can benefit from help. Respect and honor good work and solid ideas and make sure credit goes where it is due and is shared when that is right. Agree on goals and strategy with your team. Make tactics count but always in terms of objectives and priorities.

You have extensive experience in formal/informal coalition-building and multilateral diplomacy. What are the conditions and approaches that lead to most success in coordinating major multinational efforts? 

Develop the key personal contacts and relationships that can make a difference. Work to ensure your objectives and best ideas are made up from concerted discussion with those whom you are dealing [with] and give them credit [for them]—even if they don’t deserve it entirely! Use friends to help influence their friends where needed. On substance, construct a framework of common interests upon which to collaborate. Know what the other side does, wants, and needs, and see if you can help provide it in a way that supports U.S. interests. Use top level people sparingly and for key closures of deals. Don’t jump over subordinates or go around them without talking to them first. Listen, listen, listen.

What would you most like to see change about State and the way we conceive of the work of diplomacy looking towards the 2020s and beyond? 

Delayering and simplification of the number of bureaus and layers and reports. Ideally no more than five bureaus each for regions, functions, management and support; three layers—S and D and Undersecretaries, Assistant Secretaries (A/S) and their Deputies, Country and Office Directors and desk folks. No more than one clearance per bureau per layer. Make sure there is at least one meeting on any new policy where all the relevant bureaus are in the room. Make sure A/Secs know when their policies need upgrading and change. Use Ambassadors as policy critics, reviewers [critiques] and advocates. Build more knowledge of science and technology into FSOs and use more FSOs in functional bureaus. Stop civil service from taking over desks and key policy functions which limit permanent FSO access to these jobs. Stop using new FSOs as consular officers in their first tour and hire consular specialists to fill those jobs on 10-year service contracts (in addition to longer term consular officers who will progress in the cone.) 

Did you ever dissent? If so, how? 

Yes, regularly as Ambassador but never in the formal channel which I felt was only a last resort. I never complained without saying what should be done. Always tried to prepare for changes with colleagues in other embassies and by secure phone with DC. I never tried to block a dissent channel message from my post but always offered front channel access and my support wherever I could. If I couldn’t offer support, I always said the dissent memo should be sent and read. 

Any best practices for working with the NSC and Interagency? How can FSOs be more effective in driving the interagency policy process from within State? 

With the NSC, always insist they stay in the policy coordination, not operational or policy implementation [development] business and use senior officers to back you up when needed. Make sure the best FSOs get assigned to the NSC and that we stay in close touch with them and their colleagues. Work hard to get A/Secs to chair foreign policy third and second level NSC interagency groups wherever we can. Their chairperson-ship should be done with respect and understanding of other agencies as potential allies and supporters—and bring people along to meetings with solid ideas. Make sure someone is always considering monetary costs as policy is put together. We should work on a course at FSI for all new mid-grade officers to learn about the NSC and the Interagency and how to lead it.

Who was your best diplomatic coach? Why and what did you learn to do? Not to do? 

A series of people for whom I worked and observed, Ron Spiers, Joe Sisco, Roy Atherton, Henry K, Vance, Shultz, Newsome, Alex Johnson and others. I learned the craft and art of diplomacy from them. On the job training (OJT) is our life blood in many ways and I have lobbied without success for an FSI short course on OJT and how to make the best use of it for all new FSOs. Not all such learning is good and the dangerous stuff—too much freelancing, failure to communicate, beating up on others, and failure to be objective, not considering the full range of possible objections to new policy ideas etc. are not good traits to learn, but watching, even trying to correct people blundering [while doing them] is also a way to learn.

What would you tell someone who is thinking of joining the profession of diplomacy? What skill is most important they develop?

I would say don’t count on money or fame. But State is the only place where you as a professional can help a great nation craft its foreign policy. Much to learn and a day when you don’t learn something important is a day wasted. Skills needed include: keen observation and an ability to listen; ability to offer clear oral explanations in short sentences carefully crafted; know how to write succinct prose and have an ability to think out of the box; and an ability to put yourself solidly in someone else’s shoes. Always be on top of your brief. Master as many languages as you can and a few solidly enough to work in them. Enjoy travel and make use of it. Develop an appetite for the history and culture of the place where you serve and learn the niceties of respect and good behavior. When you make a mistake, step up and take the heat. Truth is our handmaiden and twisting and bending it is not our craft. Not all the truth all the time is excusable, but truth is an ally when you know how to use it.

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