Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship

Who was your best mentor? What did you learn from them?

I find the whole topic of mentorship artificial. Many junior officers ask “how do I get a mentor?” It’s organic. You can get lucky like me and converge with someone. I had a great mentor in Bill Burns for eight years and he propelled me from Special Assistant to many of my next senior positions, including to the White House and my ambassadorship. But you can learn as much from bad bosses as the good ones. I had an ambassador who was great at managing up and a genius analyst, but he decimated his mission. To this day I remember important lessons I extracted from his performance.

I also think there is this tendency to idealize mentors. When it came to Bill Burns, he was inspiring because he was self-effacing and a diplomatic genius, and as a female officer there were never any off-colored jokes or inappropriate comments; but it was all hard work. He drove his staff to provide him with the best possible, tightly written, persuasive material. One thing that he was truly famous for is that he was brilliant at pitching his ideas in notes to senior officials in person, through emails, or other informal (non-cable) ways. He would churn out the front channel cables of course, but when we had the Secretary or senior visitors come in, he would write in a concise and engaging way through prose with verve and hard points about the topic that the official raised. He also did this in memos to the Secretary, for example, when he wrote about the memo of the consequences of invading Iraq.

That said, it was hard work. So let’s not idealize the perfect mentor. I learned a lot from writing a speech for Bill Burns, but it was like death while you’re still alive. And you don’t need to work for a tour de force in order to pull out incredible life lessons and skills, both good and bad.

There's an upside. We’re not the Japanese, getting years of training. So it’s on you. Think of it as adding more tools and skills to your toolkit as you go. You’re in charge of it. You get to determine what kind of diplomat you want to be. Are you a negotiator? International aid specialist? Who are you as a diplomat? And then you can find the assignments, bosses, and missions that give you those skills.

You were chief of staff for Bill Burns, worked at the NSC, and were Acting A/S under both Secretaries Pompeo and Tillerson, so you must have learned some lessons about survival in DC.

The most important lesson is that it is rare that you only engage someone once. It is an iterative process. So you always have to remember that as angry or frustrated as you may be, and want to short circuit a clearance, you are going to be partnering with that person again in the future. You can play hard—and bureaucratic politics is hard—and fight for your position, but do it fairly and respectfully. For example, if you are thinking, “should I send this email?” Don’t. Wait eight hours and come back to it. Inevitably the answer is “no.” This is also true not just in the interagency or at the Department, but with countries, like Tunisia under Ben Ali. There had been no relationship with him, so why should we have a meeting? Tunisia was represented in the IAEA when we were working on Iraq weapons programs and they were helpful to our efforts.

You have to treat people with the respect they deserve. What people will judge you on is your reputation. If you are smart, tough, fair, hardworking, and reliable, that will save you. The highest levels of Washington is the big leagues and sometimes it is not fair. What will save you is that everyone knows your reputation and will find you a perch. I had a searing experience with an ambassador and I curtailed. I was at the 02 level on precipice of 01 and therefore not a good time to curtail. A Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary had met me on a trip and saw this curtailment and reached out and brought me to his bureau. So care about your reputation.

There are always times when you are put in a situation where things are stacked against you. You want to live to fight another day. If you hit a situation you find untenable, work on another issue where you can continue. You do not need to fight every battle, just fight another day.

Be effective as you can be, learn the building, do the hard work. To do the jobs that I have been fortunate to have done, you have to come at it with energy and entrepreneurship. That is what was fun about it. That is what generates the goodwill that you can bank on in the future.

You’ve served in some very difficult posts in your career. How did you cultivate relationships with host governments where U.S. foreign policy was at odds with their own positions?

The truth is, American diplomats are lucky because we represent the United States. You will never have to acquire the skills of a diplomat from a country like Hungary or Bangladesh because the door is already open to you 90% of the time. That allows us to be not as good as fellow diplomats because we can charge in and lecture in ways that other countries cannot. I tend to serve in countries where we have difficult relations. This is the point of diplomacy. How, despite the huge chasms and differences in core strategic interests, can you start to build some common interests? As American diplomats, we have opportunities that other diplomats from other countries would only dream of.

It is not so much about establishing relationships, but creating effective relationships. How do you make the best of a situation when your countries or leaders are at odds? It was interesting in Jordan because I arrived shortly after ISIS crashed over the Iraqi border with Syria and it was obvious ISIS was not only an Iraq problem, but we only had an ISIS-in-Iraq strategy. If you are Jordan with ISIS at your border in Syria, it is frustrating that the United States is not addressing fundamental insecurity challenges. Every Congressional Delegation to Amman—some four within my first three weeks alone—heard from the King about his dissatisfaction with the policy. The relationship between Jordan and the White House was extremely fraught.

On the surface, it seems like a great relationship. You can be operating in a country where the king has been in power for over 20 years, and is accustomed to reaching many senior American audiences, including the White House, directly. The foreign minister may also be used to working directly with the secretary. I had to work in that situation by identifying where I can still be effective. For example, I could make a difference in ensuring that policies were working towards refugees and host communities, help Jordan manage their energy crisis, reach out to Jordanian people through public diplomacy, and more.

We are looking at building a more inclusive, anti-racist Foreign Service. What can we do in terms of structural, tangible interventions and building a culture of inclusivity and equity?

We cannot divorce the Department of State from American society. I was always frustrated in leadership in not having enough diversity, but we are all fishing from the same small pond. That means I can recruit a person of color for my bureau, but then another bureau does not get that candidate.

I was shocked going out to country teams as Acting Assistant Secretary and seeing all male teams. I would think, “How does this happen?” It is easy, because every hiring decision is a one-off decision, not made in relationship to the entirety of a country team. If I could change anything, I would want to stand back and look at the nature of the entire country team and think collectively about the organism.

The core issue that I worry about in the Department is that thinking big, being sensitive, setting aside assumptions requires leadership. Leadership can be learned but we do not teach it. I was never a natural leader and I was never really pushed to attain tools that would have been helpful to be a leader. We should look harder at how the private sector is undertaking leadership training—and do it seriously and not just as a box-checking exercise. So we should have perpetual training and modules to help people to think. I believe most people want to be good leaders and they are well intentioned, but they do not have skills.

I have seen change for the better and it’s way too slow. I am very hopeful that time is speeding up in terms of how we as a society have these conversations. The younger generation is so much better than older ones and it gives me a lot of hope.

We are likely about to prepare for another transition in management and leadership, irrespective of the outcome of the election. What tools or advice can you give as we prepare for a possible period of transition in leadership?

The transition is more difficult now. The problem you face is that the policy process of the post-WWII period is deteriorating. The question is whether it gets put back together in some form. The hard part about being a Department of State official today is that everybody knows (including foreign interlocutors) that you are probably not speaking with authority. They know that there is not an interagency process led by the NSC that gets approved by the President. Foreign interlocutors are thinking about who knows Jared Kushner, for example, rather than how to work with the U.S. embassy or an Assistant Secretary.

You are now on the threshold of whether we are going further down the road of deconstructing the policy process and foreign policy norms, and whether the system is going to emerge as more stable. Many of our policies are good ones, and I can always pick out qualities and values of America that provide a basis of conversation with foreign audiences. But we are weakened as an institution because it will mean that the Department of State will be seen through a political lens. As long as diplomats are seen as political tools of another party, you will not be trusted. How do you build a new institution that is apolitical and therefore better able to advance foreign policy with authority?

The paradigm has shifted and relative power has shifted. You are dealing with a world now where countries still want to work with us, but they also want China to be a predictable partner too. For example in Europe there is the EU 17+1 where 17 countries of the EU disagree with our policy on China, which shows you how much work has to be done to create a new paradigm for dealing with a China that will be more assertive. Countries are having to balance relations in a way that they have not had to do since post-WWII. It is going to be a very different world and you will have to be a better diplomat.