Tradecraft > Teamwork and Expertise
Nick Burns
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The Importance of Humility and Teamwork
To succeed in diplomacy, it is really important to have a high degree of humility. When we switch jobs every two or three years we move into completely different cultural and institutional environments, especially given the mix of Washington and overseas assignments. I think that for us in the Foreign Service, we have to prepare a mindset ready for constant change and to approach each of our assignments really with an original view, with a blank slate. I think FSOs, when we switch jobs and go off to new assignments, should expect to have a tough three or four months. It is important to have a high degree of humility and to be willing to learn.
For example, when I became our PermRep (Ambassador) at NATO after a career focused on bilateral diplomacy, I realized that NATO is really unique. And so I had to, in my first four or five months, lean heavily on my deputy Toria Nuland and political advisor John Heffern. It took me three, four, five months before I felt comfortable with the full range of issues from tactical nuclear weapons to the chemical weapons treaty, to how NATO is funded and not funded, to the intricacies of the American military presence in Iceland versus the American military presence in Italy. It was also challenging because not only is NATO a consensus-run organization, but almost none of our Allies have our unitary government structure so the decision-making process of our Allies can be very different and specific – for example, Denmark had a provision that required parliament to approve any invocation of Article 5 that states that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all of its members. It was dizzying and I really didn't realize on my first day just how difficult it was going to be or how steep the learning curve was going to be.
This was especially true as we dealt with 9/11 and worked, with then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s encouragement, to get the other 18 NATO Allies to invoke Article 5—a high risk maneuver since if we had failed to achieve consensus it would have seriously undercut NATO’s credibility and would have been really discouraging to us in the wake of 9/11. We then had a “near-death” [politically] experience 18 months later when Turkey invoked Article 4 which is when an ally fears it is threatened and may be attacked and convenes a discussion at NATO that could lead to a military response. Turkey feared that the Iraq war could have security implications in its region and asked NATO to help. We worked to convince all allies to support the Article 4 request and gradually picked off each of the recalcitrant Allies until we were left with France as the lone holdout. It was blocking NATO’s effort to respond out of a principled objection to the Iraq war. However, if we had not been able to provide military assistance to Turkey and helped them respond to the threat they were under, the alliance would have suffered a possibly mortal blow.
Here's where creativity can come in with diplomacy. My mission used its deep and arcane knowledge of the organization to find a solution that allowed us to sidestep France—the lone holdout—by avoiding the North Atlantic Council, the primary decision-making body where France could block consensus. Instead, we went through the defense planning Council of Ministers with France, because France was no longer a member because under de Gaul it had left the integrated military Alliance at NATO. The French were furious, but it was worth it because NATO honored its promise to Turkey. This was vital since the alliance rests not on its power from tanks and airplanes and missiles, but on its credibility. My team’s deep substantive knowledge was key to solving this crisis—a crisis I could not have resolved on my own and which highlighted the comparative advantage of the foreign service to craft diplomatic solutions.
Delegation and Decision-Making in Different Roles
Many in the Foreign Service, except consular and management officers, do not get significant management experience early in our careers. We don't usually manage money or American officers at the beginning of our career, but then suddenly when you reach more senior levels you are thrown huge management responsibilities when you are an ambassador or DCM or assistant secretary. Suddenly, you’ve got a tremendous management load. I think we have to do a better job preparing people for those responsibilities earlier in their careers. To do this, our ambassadors should be delegating more to the junior and mid-level officers so they get real management experience early. The military could serve as our template as to how to delegate more effectively as they do this very deliberately.
It’s important as people move up the ladder that they realize that we have to work differently and to recognize where you fit and how to be effective in different roles. I had learned the lesson that when you're an ambassador, second secretary, or when you're a political counselor, you make a lot of decisions. Ambassadors have executive authority overseas so the buck stops with you. You end up owning your issues and making a lot of decisions and moving things forward. As Under Secretary of State, I had responsibility for and led numerous negotiations, but a lot more of my job was supporting our assistant secretaries and getting decisions from the Secretary, President, or interagency. I was really focused on helping them do their jobs and delegating which required clear guidance and quick decisions.
I think the most efficient, effective system of decision-making that I saw in my career was led by Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. We convened a small group of the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Chief of Staff, her Legal Advisor, me (as Under Secretary for Political Affairs), and a few others every single morning between 7 to 8 o'clock in the morning in a meeting we called Vespers. We discussed whatever unbelievable crises had occurred overnight, discussed what “fires” required our attention, and which ambassadors around the world needed our urgent support. We also used the meeting to get answers from the Secretary to questions about how we were going to vote at the UN or what we would tell the Chinese about the issue. We would discuss top priority issues with the Secretary and the senior team, and then John Negroponte, then Deputy Secretary, and I would work with the relevant offices in the Department. We reconvened at the end of the day from 6:00 to 7:00 pm and discussed what's ahead for the following day. This led to a very efficient way of getting decisions from the Secretary of State and it allowed us to provide clear, timely answers to our people in the field.
Being Effective Working With Big Personalities
I think one of the big challenges in working with strong willed, successful people is speaking truth to power and that's not a one-size-fits-all exercise. I had a lot of superiors in my career with big egos. A lot of obviously intelligent, capable people who thought they could do the job alone. In our job in the Foreign Service we’re always working for other people and everybody in the Foreign Service including the Secretary of State, works for somebody. It’s important for us to speak truth to power when we have to—but you need to learn to read personality types and to learn how to deal appropriately with strong personalities.
I found that with some of the people for whom I worked you could be very blunt. You could do it openly at the country team table and you could say “Ambassador or Assistant Secretary, with great respect, I think we should do X and not Y” and they would want to know why you thought that. There were other personalities where you never wanted to do that in a crowded room, because they might feel defensive. In that case, you had to find an opportunity to raise those concerns privately and delicately.
I found that when I became an ambassador and then Under Secretary, the most valuable people were those who would come into my office or send me an email saying, “With respect, I think we're going in the wrong direction. I think that decision that you've made should be reconsidered. We think we could do this better than the way you're planning to do it.” I think nearly everybody I worked with was open to this kind of advice. There were a few people who thought they knew it all, but frankly the more successful the person, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Warren Christopher, James Baker, Condoleezza Rice, or even President Clinton and President George H.W. Bush all really wanted to lean on us and they wanted to know what we thought. It is critical to have the courage to be able to say to leaders every now and then, with great respect, “I think we're failing here.”
When You Raise a Problem, Offer a Solution
It is key to never drop a problem on a boss’ desk without a proposed solution. You should say, “here is the problem, and here are three options for you.” You don't want to go into the office and say we're heading in the wrong direction, good luck. I actually did that once when I was a junior officer. And my boss said to me, thank you for your opinion. Please come back when you've got some solutions. That was a huge learning experience for me. We are trained to be too deferential to our hierarchy and we do have to have the courage to call a spade a spade. But it is important to do it in the right way so it is productive and respectful.
The Foreign Service Will Sink or Swim on Our Intellectual Expertise
There are times when the promotion and assignment system sometimes leads people away from focusing on developing area expertise, but the most valuable people to me when I was Under Secretary were the people with the deepest knowledge combined with understanding of how to get things done. We should be the United States government’s finest experts on the politics, economics, military, social, and cultural aspects of each country in the world and have substantive expertise on every issue in front of the United States in those countries. We need more Victoria Nulands; we need more officers like George Kents, Kristie Kenneys, Herro Mustafa. Herro is our new ambassador to Bulgaria and I think she embodies this expertise.
Officers still need to be able to be operators and do things like run counter-drug programs in Colombia and run anti-corruption programs in Ukraine. Those are important and it's good to have an operational job in your career, especially if you're a political, economic, or public diplomacy-coned officer, but our comparative advantage is our intellect and area expertise and that we know the history of issues cold.
The Foreign Service has done best for the nation when our diplomats understand their job. I don't think that we should be trained to be wing men and women for the Pentagon. We are problem solvers, we are negotiators, we are coalition builders. For the next generation of Foreign Service Officers, the big challenges ahead are almost all transnational: climate change, trafficking of women and children, drugs and crime cartels, pandemics, nuclear proliferation. The need to find responses to these complex challenges will play to the strengths of the State Department and the Foreign Service. I think our future President or Secretary of State will have to lean on the State Department more to create coalitions for us on a variety of issues and to build or build up alliances whether with NATO or in Asia or elsewhere.
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