Tag: foreign service

Posted on

Starting the New Job(s)

Below is the Capitol & the Indian Museum on my way to work.

It is always confusing in the first days back on the job.  This time the feeling is exacerbated because I am trying to do several things at once.  I am assigned to work on a strategy group at NDU.  While I am sure it will be very rewarding, it created a whole new set of challenges I had not thought about.  This is nothing earthshaking.  They are things like getting my clearances passed so that I can get the proper ID, finding my role in the groups and just finding rooms and offices in a place I have never worked before.  This comes at the same time that I am checking into my new job and checking out of the old one.   I have to file travel vouchers, get the logon, get the Blackberry set up, do check in etc.  Again, this is nothing earth shaking, but it takes more time than it seems it should and generally throws sand in gears.  

Below – chin up bars etc near Air & Space Museum

I have to be careful with the adjustment.  I had thought through my first weeks at the new job and had a good idea of what to do.  I don’t “hit the ground running”.  Rather I try to learn the new organization, the people and my place among them.  This requires time and patience, since it has the element of relationship building and not mere knowledge acquisition.  First impressions are not sufficient and I don’t want to move before I know where I am going.   It is especially challenging at IIP because I was here before, doing a nearby job, and I think I know things. 

It is easy to be overconfident when you think you know something.  I learned my lesson in Warsaw.  I had been in nearby Krakow so I knew most of the Warsaw staff.  I had even served as acting press attaché up there for a couple months, so I thought I knew everything I needed to know.   When I got to post, I just started to do things and make decisions and waves.  A few months into the job, I realized that I would have been better doing some things differently.   I like to take quick action, but I have come to understand the advantages of patience and doing not much at first.  Better to seem a little dull at first than start climbing the wrong mountain.  I am not talking a long time, just enough to start out on the right foot.

Below – Natural History Museum.  Notice the Roman style.  The Romans invented the kind of cement that allowed them to make domes like that.  Egyptians, Babylonians & Classical Greeks didn’t use domes because they couldn’t make them w/o what we today call concrete.  Alex & I visited the Pantheon in Rome.  The dome is still standing 1800 years later.  Even more impressive is Hagia Sophia in Istanbul built by Justinian the Great from 532-7.

I am reminded that my plans never work anyway.  I find myself doing something completely different, which will make my entry on duty seem more tentative and ragged.   It is like making the grand entrance just as you notice that you forgot to put on your shoes.   I am not sure how to handle this.   On the one hand, I can do both jobs.  This is not as crazy as it sounds.   There is a lot in my IIP/P job that is directly applicable to my NDU job.  Both responsibilities are involved with strategy, information gathering & public affairs, sometimes about the very same things.  What my IIP colleagues have done and what I can share with my NDU colleagues will add value to both.   There is a real possibility for synergy that I hate to lose.   On the other hand, we have the problem of being half there.  I guess the choices are limited.  I already have made the half there entrance and may as well make the most of it.

I attended my first staff meeting at my new IIP/P job and got the run down of ongoing activities. We are doing some interesting things.  We are going to do focus groups in Tunisia and Jordan re the impact of our outreach programs.  Another colleague is working on a conference and publication on the problems of extremism.  This is a very intellectually satisfying venture, since it will involve lots of scholars and get to play with ideas.  Other colleagues edit and post issue briefs and run the information distribution that gives our public affairs professionals information they can use to help them do their jobs.   We also run the public affairs toolkit, a kind of best practices wiki.   The media hubs in London, Brussels and Dubai also have a place on our pages as do the research people, who post their public opinion assessments.   There are a lot of interesting things going on and a lot of things I want to get involved with doing.

Posted on

Office Space & Pleistocene Brains

Below is our new office building across from Main State (Harry Truman Building). It should be ready for us to move into by June. Construction is ahead of schedule, which is uncommon.

We are moving to a new building where space is at a premium & we had to assign offices.  I really cannot picture the layout by looking at the map of the offices.  Fortunately, my colleague Joel did the thinking for both of us.  He evidently understands blueprints and knows a lot of those arcane rules e.g. how much space a GS-12, 13,14s etc are suppose to get. Office space allocation is one of the thorniest issues you can think of.   It is not so much about comfort – more about status.  The problem is that there are natural work flows and work groups that do not follow rank.   For example, by the nature of the job a low ranking receptionist will almost always command more space, albeit not very private, than a higher ranking analyst.   It might also be useful to group people by their tasks, but that almost always means that you might crowd the higher ranking group members and give more space to the lower one.   I think the whole rank thing is a little silly.   Of course we all want a nice big place with a window, but you have to consider the job to be done.  I figure that I need a big space to accommodate my big ideas, but not everyone agrees.  Some tasks require space, others not so much.

There is also the bugaboo of privacy.  It makes logical sense that a private workspace would be smaller because there is no need to have group interactivity.   In fact, it usually works the other way around, with people demanding large private spaces and the loudest or highest ranking people getting them. 

My favorite office arrangement remains one I saw in Norway at one of the environmental organizations.   Everybody from the director to the newest hire had the same small sized office, but there were common spaces in the middle where people could meet.  There was not much privacy, but I think that is a good thing if you are trying to create teams and synergy.   It is better if people see what is going on.   You want to avoid providing covered places to hide  Unfortunately in our organizations somebody always wants to knock down walls and expand his/her office, then close it off from everybody else.  I suppose the desire for mark off defensible territory goes back to our Pleistocene ancestors, but you would think after all this time we would have gotten over it.

Below – rainy day at the shuttle bus stop.

There is another point of view on all this.  I understand that my insouciance on this matter leads to my getting rolled on space issues.  The Pleistocene warriors get to take over my hunting grounds and eat my lunch because they are so much more passionate.  Sometimes I suppose I should toss a few rocks and feign a scream.   But I am speculating way too much on way too small an issue in this situation. 

I don’t want to leave the false impression that I am having problems already.  The office space thing was just interesting, not a problem.  My new colleagues are great and I got no worries.  I am pleased to report that everyone seems reasonable.  Perhaps that is because they are mostly new in their jobs and in relatively new offices.  Nobody has developed an abiding attachment to their space.  I don’t suppose everyone will be as lucky as I am.   Some offices look like they have been occupied since Neolithic times and moving those offices may require an environmental impact statement to ensure that the ecological communities that have grown in and around them are not disturbed.  I pity the guys who have to make those choices.

Posted on

Unhappy Camper in WVA (Seminar Day 7)

Explanations of pictures are below.  Mixing the captions in the text was too confusing.

I am not very happy with this offsite part of the leadership seminar.   IMO this week has been not about leadership as much as about negotiation 101 or inclusiveness 102.   These are very good things in and of themselves, but much of what has been presented is the kind of things I have heard in my self-improvement and management tapes I listened to in my car years ago.  And they are things we all have practiced for 20+ years.   The review is okay, but we don’t need too much of it.

On the plus side, I am learning a lot from my colleagues and have benefited by sharing their experiences.  But I have to say that my high hopes for the seminar itself have not been met. 

We learned a lot of management techniques, but as I mentioned above they were usually ones I had learned before.  I would like the course to be more about leadership.   Leaders are what we are supposed to be.  We were told that we were supposed to transition from management to leadership.  I think the best way to learn about leadership would be by using experience of our State colleagues and case study method using examples from successful, and unsuccessful, leadership from history.    

I would also like more State Department specific information.   Surely we could do that.  Maybe we will get that next week back at FSI.  We have some good speakers on the schedule. Here in WVA we are assembling puzzles and practicing techniques of mediation or empathic listening.  I don’t find much use in practicing these techniques w/o context or value content.   It is great to be open, but I think we have to be more judgmental.  Leadership means making judgments & choices and setting priorities.   It is not merely employing Dale Carnegie techniques to win friends and influence people.    We need to persuade and change minds, not just take opinion polls.  Sometimes – often – the needful choices will be unpopular.  We need to talk more about that aspect of leadership.  

 

Don’t get me wrong.   My experience with participatory leadership has been good.  I believe in it and truly practice it.  Working with others and having them support me has been the key to my success.   Lord knows I could never have done anything by myself.  But sometimes the buck stops with the person in charge and it is our job to take the responsibility when it falls to us, not spread it out as far as possible. 

I have the opportunity to walk around during lunch breaks and listen to a Roman history course on my I-Pod.  You can learn from history and I enjoy examples of leadership – good and bad – and the consequences.  It is interesting when you study history and look at leaders to see that it is very rare for a leader to be well thought of and/or remain in power for a long time.  It says something about the episodic nature of leadership opportunities.  Solon left town after he made his laws.  Themistocles was exiled soon after the victory over the Persians.   In more modern times, Churchill was tossed out of office after WWII and Harry Truman left office with an abysmally low approval rating.   Of course these are much bigger deals than our small leadership challenges, but I think we little guys can learn a lot by looking at the big challenges, choices and their consequences. 

We had modules on coaching.   I think it is a good idea to coach employees and I recognize that I do it very often.  But the coaching we learned about in class was (my complaint again) very non-confrontational and value free.   I remember reading a biography of Vince Lombardi.   I think it was called “When Pride Still Mattered.”  Vince Lombardi was a pretty good coach, but I never got the impression he engaged in much of this touchy-feely stuff we are learning.    The Lombardi quote I recall is “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”  I didn’t hear anything like that in our coaching session.

Anyway, I ranted a little about these sorts of things in class, just like I am ranting a little here.  I am not sure the instructors liked me very much by the end of the day and I don’t think it did any good.   Once again I get to be the skunk at the barbeque.   I don’t like to do it, but I guess I don’t mind either.

About the Pictures

1 – clouds over the conference site.

2 – You can see that there is no shortage of whitetail deer.    I saw nine at this one time.   That is the most I have ever seen.  Deer numbers have risen significantly in recent years all over the eastern U.S. 

3 – I don’t think “the Woods” community is doing very well.  I saw dozens of for sale signs.   This part of West Virginia was especially hard hit by the housing downturn because high gas prices made commuting out here to/from the population centers around Washington very expensive.   But that affects mostly the older, cheaper cabins build in the 1980s.   While they are up for sale w/o lots of offers, people are building new and improved cabins, presumably with the intention of using them. 

4 & 5 – These two are forestry pictures.  What you see in the first one are wind throws of Virginia pine.   The Virginia pine is easily pushed over.   They are transition trees and not long-lasting.   I did, however, count the stump rings of a Virginia pine that was at least 47 years old.  The ones standing nearby with similar stem sizes were about as big as a twenty year old loblolly in Brunswick.    The second picture shows loblolly.  I don’t know how old these are.   They don’t grow very fast around here.  The soil is not good and this is the northern edge of the loblolly range.   This stand is no longer under real management, as you can see by the dead heads.

Posted on

Leadership & Vision (Seminar Day 6)

Below – still no pictures from today, so I used some old ones.  The first is Vienna from my 2006 visit there and the second is London Bridge, moved some years ago to Lake Havasu, Arizona from 2005.

Our leadership seminar continued along the lines of process, not content.   We learn that we should have vision and that we should be collaborative with others.    I am not sure that is always the best idea.  IMO the most important thing about a vision is that it be right and that is not always what most people see clearly. Good leaders can often see that better than most others.  That is one of the traits of good leadership.  I don’t think you can assess leadership properly if you accept that it could be content neutral.    We have to judge by where leadership is leading and how it is working.  I am learning more from my colleagues than from the course.  This is the way it often works.  One of my colleagues gave the example of the “Music Man.”  The guy in the movie (Robert Preston) has vision, but in order to get buy in from the satisfied citizens of River City he has to create an artificial problem that only he can solve.    Con-men can create compelling visions.  In fact that is one of their peculiar talents.  Many “leaders” paint an inaccurately depressing picture of current events so that they can create support for their proposed solutions.   Honest decision makers know that it is very important accurately to assess where you are before you decide where you want to go.   The saying is “describe before you prescribe.” 

If you can make a bad vision popular with scam tactics (as in the “Music Man,”) it is also true that good leadership and vision may be unpopular.  Even the best plans don’t sell themselves and you may not get “buy in” from majorities or even large numbers of people despite the fact that the end result may be good or necessary.  Change is usually perceived as risky and often painful.   It may make people openly hostile, but that is why we need leadership.    Leadership means setting priorities and making the tough choices.  Leadership is not required if conditions are stable and decisions are trivial or within routine norms;  that is just administration.   You cannot be a leader by merely following the long-stated preferences and routine procedures of the groups you ostensibly lead and you cannot lead from behind.   My criticism of the leadership course is that the instructors seem uncomfortable with the harder, less popular and maybe the tough parts of leadership. 

I agree with the emphasis of the instructors of putting people first and trying to get cooperation, but that good bias can be taken too far.   As one of my colleagues pointed out, leadership must sometimes put the mission before particular people.    People are willing to sacrifice for a good cause and sometimes they have to do that.   I don’t think we talked enough about those situations and we don’t talk enough about the sometimes scary and lonely decisions leaders must make.

All the people of the past who we consider great leaders took decisions that were deeply unpopular at the time.    It is only with the fullness of time that we have come around to seeing the wisdom of their choices.   As someone who is interested in history, I wish we had more historical examples in the course.   Our course is being held not far from Antietam that back in September 1862 saw the bloodiest single day in American history.   That is a classic case study in the results of poor and timid decisions contrasted with bold ones.    McClellan had twice as many men as Lee and he had captured Lee’s battle plan, yet he still managed to produce only an inconclusive stalemate.  I think it would be useful to consider that George McClellan was very popular with both his troops and the public.   His decisions were broadly popular and particularly wrong.   On the other hand, Lincoln’s decisions almost cost him the election in 1864 AND that was considering votes only with the half of the country that had not taken up arms against his leadership (a fairly good measure of disagreement).    An opinion poll that included the whole country certainly would have given him a very low approval rating.

One highlight of the day was when three of my colleagues formed a panel to discuss transformational diplomacy.    They had been talking about it in a side discussion and shared it because it was of general interest.   (Such things excite us.  I guess we are indeed a pack of nerds.)  Most of us agreed that the ideas behind transformational diplomacy were good, but our class was divided about the efficacy of the program.  Some of the places that got resources had trouble absorbing them and the places that lost them suffered painful cuts.   It would have been better to ask for additional resources rather than just move priorities.   We all agreed that places like India, Brazil & China deserved more resources and diplomatic attention, but it was not a good idea to take them away from places like Germany, Spain or France, which are still very important places that matter to us even if they are pleasant, peaceful and familiar. 

One of my colleagues speculated about how the events around the Iraq war might have unfolded differently if we had sufficient diplomatic infrastructure on the ground in Germany & France to carry out strong public relations and diplomatic programs.   This was BEFORE the diplomatic transformation, but we had already lost a lot to the cuts of the 1990s and the movement of resources to the new states of the former Soviet Union.    You can only do so much with less.   We opened and staffed post in places like Kazakhstan, Latvia, Armenia and Azerbaijan w/o a bump up in resources.   I am convinced that we had significant problems with public diplomacy after 9/11 because our public diplomacy infrastructure was so decimated in the 1990s and spread too thin.   I wrote re that in an earlier post and won’t repeat it here.  Anyway, it was an interesting discussion.   

My colleagues made some comments worth writing down.   One said that vision means a leap beyond where you are – a leap of faith because it usually represents discontinuous change, not very catchy, but true.  The best line of the day was, “if you ask for infinity, you can easily settle for half of infinity.” 

Posted on

Crucibles of Leadership & Telecommuting (Leadership Seminar Day 5)

The pictures are from a trip we made a couple years ago to Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.  I don’t have any good pictures from today and I like to have pictures with my posts.  The Hoover Dam was a heroic project.  I thought it was an appropriate example of planning and leadership. 

I don’t agree that leadership is something that can be learned equally well by anybody.   Anybody can learn many of the leadership techniques and become better leaders, but I think a lot has to do with talents, temperament and personality tendencies.  Some people can get better faster and move farther than others.   An analogy would be Michael Jordan compared to me.   I can play basketball and I could get better with practice, but I would be unable to get up to the professional level much less play like Michael Jordan.   Of course, if he never saw a basketball before we played our first game of one-on-one maybe I could win, but I suspect it would be only a one time victory.  

Of course, I have to modify my idea by saying that there are different types of leadership appropriate to different types of situations.    I think this is the place where this seminar adds the most value.  It has helped me think about leadership in different contexts.  There are some situations where I think I would be a good leaders; others where I am less appropriate and some where I don’t want to lead at all.  

Our morning session was devoted to discussing crucibles of leadership, hard situations that tested character.    The question that occurred to me was whether hardship tests, builds or merely reveals character.     As with most things, it is probably a combination.   Great leaders require great tests.  We forget about those that fail outright, so we have a bias toward believing that hardships build character, when they are in fact both a filter and a builder. 

Most members of the class shared examples of their “crucibles”, times when they had to look deep into their characters and draw resources they didn’t think they had.    I was impressed by my colleagues.   One of the things I find most beneficial about these sorts of meeting is that it renews my confidence in my colleagues.  None of us revealed a case where we failed and/or chose the less responsible or moral course.   I didn’t either.  It was too embarrassing, but we learn a lot more when we fail than when we succeed.    The key to the crucible is not the events themselves, but what happens after.  Suffering w/o learning is just suffering.   It is not uplifting.

I thought about my own failures and lack of courage in some of the crucibles I didn’t share with my colleagues.   That I still remember them and have thought about them indicates (I think) that I learned something from them.    I am not going to talk about them here either, however.    

We also talked a little re efficiency at work.   At State we often put in too much “face time.”  Maybe it could be more efficient to be at work less.  I remember my telecommuters.   I think that my response to telecommuting was a minor crucible of leadership for me.    I learned a lot from it.   

Below is something I wrote and widely distributed  in August 2007 re telecommuting.   I think it is still true today and I look forward to going back to IIP and seeing how things are working.    I did not edit or update it.

Telework Best Practices 

IIP/S is in the lead in managing and implementing telework.  We allow the maximum of two days per week for telework.  As I have been managing a staff that includes teleworkers for almost a year, I would like to share some observations.   These might seem simple or obvious, but some of their management implications are profound.   Teleworking is an important tool in any good management toolbox.

IIP/S work is well suited to teleworking
Much of IIP/S programming work involves communication with overseas posts, outside speakers and diverse sections of the Department and other USG organizations.  In all these cases, the best (sometimes the only) medium of communication is electronic.   Face-to-face interaction is required only for internal periodic meetings. 

Teleworkers are productive
Soon after I started to direct IIP/S, I surveyed the productivity in my new section.  What I found was that productivity, as measured by the number of programs done per person per year was higher among teleworkers and absenteeism was lower.   I think that is because the ability to avoid a commute is helpful to people with responsibilities outside the ordinary workday and allows them to be flexible.  For example, a parent who needs to take a child to the doctor perhaps can do it in two hours and take only two hours of SL.  A non-teleworker might need to take off a whole 8 hour day to accomplish the same.  I have found that teleworkers are also more flexible.  This is especially important to IIP/S, since we are likely to have programs in process in time zones around the world.  The sun never sets on IIP/S activities.

Telework is good for quick responses
In my experience, I can get a quicker and more complete answer from my staff when they are teleworking.   Teleworkers have fewer distractions and can take the time to consider a surprise request.  They can quickly access data and are, by definition, near their computers all the time.   Quick online data retrieval allows them essentially the same access as they would have sitting in the office.

Telework improves morale
Even among those who do not telework, having the option is important.  Allowing telework indicates that management trusts the employee to work outside physical supervision and that the employee is valued for his/her contribution, not mere presence. 

Teleworking creates a more robust work organization
As I learned during the snow and ice storms this year, teleworking makes us largely immune to capriciousness of nature.   Our teleworkers can continue to work unvexed by the frightful weather that throws physical commuters into the ditch.   If SA 44 had to close down for any reason, IIP/S could continue its functions almost without interruption.   We not only have the installed capacity to work remotely, we also have developed the management structures, habits and culture to make it work.

The environment benefits
This is a larger issue that makes a difference to me.  Although it does not directly impact our organization, it is important that State is in the teleworking game as local members of congress have mandates that government offices encourage teleworking.  Teleworking  takes people off the roads for at least a few days.   It eliminates the need for miles of commuting, lessening pollution and traffic congestion.  Next time you are stuck on 495, consider that telecommuting might mitigate this. 

Downsides of teleworking
Managing an operation with significant numbers of teleworkers requires a higher level of management skill.  Managers need to consider schedules of work and when teams can best be assembled and be able to motivate a workforce they sometimes cannot see (and it is sometimes less fun to “boss” over an online connection).  Mangers also have a higher responsibility to monitor teleworking to prevent abuse.   The downsides are easily manageable, IMO, while the benefits to morale, productivity and the environment more than make up for them.

Final thoughts on teleworking
In conclusion, I would say that teleworking in IIP/S’s first year of operation has been a great success.   We have found that allowing the maximum of two telework days per week has worked out wonderfully.  IIP/S office director and divisions chiefs closely monitor telework schedules to ensure that each office is “manned” during regular working hours and all IIP/S staff must work on Tuesdays, which is our face-to-face meeting day.   Telework clearly does not function well in all situations, but based on our success, I would recommend that others expand their use of telework when possible.  It is good for morale, good for productivity, family friendly and environmentally beneficial.  It is worth the effort.

Posted on

Crap-Shoot (Leadership Seminar Day 4)

It doesn’t mean that you just give up but sometimes you have taken the data as far as you can go and you just don’t know.   In those cases the best idea is probably to use probability and random chance.   I felt foolish saying this at our leadership seminar and I know that advocating a throw of the dice  amounts to apostasy among most decision makers, but it makes sense when the information available provides no reason to come down on either side.

I have thought about randomness in decisions for some time and did some reading on the subject.   I even made up an Amazon list of titles that I read.  My position is easily caricatured.    I know that.  What comes to mind is monkeys throwing darts or sequential games of rock-paper-scissors to decide really important issues.   But think about it for a more than a minute.  If you really have no basis for a particular choice, using randomness is the most efficient way to get past the dilemma and the only way to guard against systemic unconscious bias.    Why pretend to have more wisdom than you have?

Our leadership seminar produced a good example.  We broke into four groups each with the goal of choosing a fictional DCM for a fictional country.   We were given a situational analysis and brief bio/descriptions of five candidates.    The exercise was meant to let us practice negotiation and communication but the results were interesting for a different reason.     All of us are reasonably intelligent and successful people.  We all actually have participated on similar selection committees in real life.   We took the exercise seriously and spent forty-five minutes each discussing the issue.   There were five candidates and four groups of us trying to decide.   Despite all our expertise and experience, none of the groups chose the same winner.   Beyond that, the one candidate that my groups eliminated first as the lowest performer was the top candidate for one of our colleagues’ groups.   Who was right?  Who knows?   I don’t want to read too much into this lesson, but the results of all our serious deliberations were no better than random chance and could have been produced by a random process in seconds.   So what can we do?          

Using randomness to break a tie or resolve a situation with no firm direction from the data is not the same as being disorganized or relying on chance in all situations.    Having a diverse portfolio of skills, stocks etc. is a way of acknowledging randomness.  If you were dealing with certainty, you would just put all your eggs in the one BEST basket.    A smart decision maker sets up his/her affairs to take advantage of probabilities.    You diversify because of randomness.  We all know that any hard decision is made in a climate of uncertainty and randomness will affect us in unpredictable ways.    Underneath all the planning, analysis and carefully crunched numbers lurks a random wildness we just cannot figure in.  The recent financial meltdown is a good example.  

I have my own example and a suggestion.    Good universities have more qualified applicants than places in their classes.    A qualified person is one who can do the work.   You don’t want mere qualification; you want to get the best qualified, but how can you do that?   You can assess their academic records and test scores to determine basic qualifications.   Many schools spend lots of money and time trying to go beyond that to find out the total person.   This is something they really cannot do.   There is not enough information available on the eighteen year old applicants to assess the total person.  Most kids this age have not finished developing into the “whole person” they will soon become and none of them have had enough time to create the kind of track record you would need to make an informed choice.   I advocate a threshold requirement to determine whether or not the application could do the work.   After that, I think we should go with random chance.   It is not a wonderful solution, but it is the best we can do.   Random chance has the auxiliary benefit being unbiased.    It doesn’t and cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender, creed, color or national origin.

Most students apply to several universities.   It is a crap-shoot for them anyway.  If we did it my way, at least they could be assured that they were playing with honest dice.

It takes courage to admit what you don’t know and even more courage to recognize that there are some decisions that you cannot make as well as random chance.   But if you know your limitations, you can extend your abilities.

Posted on

Leadership Seminar Day 3

Below – some FSI buildings

Some of the same themes came up with today’s speakers.  The big one might be taken from the “Wizard of Oz” – you are not in Kansas anymore.   The things that got us to this position will not necessarily sustain us in our new jobs.    In our old jobs, we avoided risks to get ahead and worked in a stable environment.   In the new world, we have to produce positive change and be able to understand how our operations fit into the bigger world.   My experience with big changes is that they usually are not … so big that is, but we will see.

Anyway, this is not new to me.  I remember learning it way back in business school when we read Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker and Tom Peters on organizations.   Most of my business literature I read since re leadership said the same sorts of things.  It is good to see that this long-ago education still makes sense.    We also heard the familiar ideas re management by walking around.  I read that first in 1983 in “In Search of Excellence,” but it is always good to get confirmation.

We also got some State Department specific information, referencing a Mckinsey study on the “War for Talent,” which warned that State had to do more to recruit and hold top-quality employees.   One finding was that junior officers didn’t trust or much respect high level officers.  Maybe that was because high-level officers paid so little attention to them.  According to the study, only 30% of high State officers considered developing talent a high priority, compared with 76% of the high executives in the private sector.   One of the speakers commented that perhaps the private leader talked the talk but maybe didn’t walk the walk, but State leaders thought talent development had such low priority that they didn’t even bother to lie to pollsters about it.   The School of Leadership & Management was created in 1999 to try to address some of the deficiencies, but it really got going a couple years later with Colin Powell’s diplomatic readiness initiative.

When we talked about Secretaries of State who were good for State, two names came up repeatedly:  Colin Powell & George Schultz.  I agree.   I don’t have the high-level knowledge to back that up with statistics, but I know that morale was good during the Schultz times when I came into the FS.  Conditions were abysmal during the 1990s and improve a lot when Colin Powell came in. Condoleezza Rice has valued the professional members of State in the practical area of jobs and there have been more career than political appointees in the higher levels.   I hadn’t really paid attention to that, but now that I think about it when I was in Washington in the late 1990s there were a lot more political appointees hanging around.   The guy leading IIP used to be a political appointee as were many of the regional guys.  Now they are professional.  Career appointees are a good thing from my point of view, although I have seen many good political appointees and some bad professional ones.

We also talked about resources.   State has been resource poor for as long as anybody can remember.  It got worse during the early 1990s when we opened many posts in the former Soviet Union w/o getting more resources and worse still with the cuts and post closings of the middle 1990s.  (State almost closed my post in Krakow at that time, and thye DID close Poznan & Porto Alegre).  It looked like conditions might improve after 2000, but then our resources got sucked into Iraq and Afghanistan.   I think State has lots of challenges and places where diplomacy can add value, but we really cannot do it on the cheap.  I have no solution.

I also got back my 360 degree evaluations.  There were no big surprises, but I wonder how valid it is.   We name our own respondents.   I tried to get a “random” sample, but it is not really possible.  Most of the time you only get 7-10 people filling in the forms.  There is no statistical validity.  That is no problem IF we recognize that it is more of a guideline and ignore the precise looking statistics.   The most useful parts of the survey are the open-ended comments.  Some people make them; others don’t.

Posted on

Leadership Seminar Day 2

Below are trees at FSI.  They are all sweet gums, all about the same age growing in almost the same spot, yet for some it is fall color time and for others it is still summer.

Today we did a simulation exercise on leadership.   It was fun and useful but not realistic.  Leaders were decided essentially by random chance and after that the game was specifically rigged to give the leaders continuing advantages in gaining points.   I was lucky enough to be one of the three leaders and although I firmly believe the redistribution is a bad idea in most cases, in this artificial game with points distributed by random chance that is what I advocated and what we did. 

I think the game was designed to show us how power and privileges can be distributed unfairly.   I understand that and I got the point, but the game made me think about the real world versus the simplified and contrived one in the game.   Luck plays a role in life’s outcomes, but so do things like hard work, expertise and smart decisions.  In the case of leadership we could also add judgment, integrity and vision. Leadership opportunities and skills are NOT randomly distributed in real life.   I think that is the real point about learning re leadership.    Otherwise there wouldn’t be much use to study it or try to develop it.    That certainly doesn’t mean that the same people should be in charge always and in every situation, but it should not be a random event.

“Asking ‘Who ought to be the boss’ is like asking ‘Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet’, obviously, the man who can sing tenor.”  So said Henry Ford and he was right.  Sometimes the situation determines who should do what.   Games cannot really catch all that goes into a decision like that, which is probably why most people who can consistently win at Monopoly aren’t rich developers in real life and why you wouldn’t want your appendix removed by somebody who plays a doctor on TV.    We all know that.  The problem comes when people have a simplified game-like interpretation of things in real life w/o thinking about it.  I think that is one big reason why socialism and its relatives still maintain their hold on minds of the credulous. 

Another interesting take away for me was different attitudes toward leadership.  One of my colleagues in the “leadership council” essentially wanted to abdicate the position and just let the group decide by consensus.   Her rationale was that we got the jobs essentially by random chance and so did not deserve it.  While she was right, I really disagree with her reaction.   I know it was just a game, but in this game and I think in a real situation the leader has the responsibility to lead.   Maybe you should lead to the group to another leader, but just letting the group drift is not an option, IMO.   It is a problem with leadership in government that we too often do just that.   I admired the Marines for their attitude, which is a different.  If a Marine finds himself in a leadership role, he takes it and does his best.   They have it right.   Leadership is a duty, not a privilege or perk.   If it falls to you, you have to do the best you can until there is an alternative.   Capitulation is cowardly. Anyway, the day was useful and the game was useful because it stimulated a lot of thought and discussion.  For we read an article re emotional intelligence of groups.   It was a disappointment.   I read the book “Emotional Intelligence” many years ago.   It is an interesting concept, but it can easily be taken too far and applied to precisely.   I think the useful aspects of article we read could have been summed up in a couple of paragraphs.   It was a waste with all the pages.

Below – the same fall-summer thing goes for this maple branch.  

Below – they are building a new apartment near my house.  This thing takes wet concrete in the bottom and can distribute it way into the construction site.   I am interested in this as part of my general theme re how much industry has changed and replaced people with machines.   This thing does the job of dozens of workers.  Jobs have not gone overseas; they are just gone.  Industry will eventually be like agriculture, with few workers producing the products for everybody else.

Posted on

Back to Work … Sort of (Leadership Seminar Day 1)

Below is Ben Franklin on the NFATC campus. Franklin was our nation’s first diplomat.

I went back to work today.   Well, actually I went to the three-week training seminar.   It was good to have free time, but it is good to be back at official work.   Life needs a good work/leisure balance.  

The training started at our Foreign Service Institute (FSI) at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC) in Arlington, Virginia.   Next week we will go to an offsite in West Virginia. They call NFATC the Schultz Center after former Secretary of State George Schultz.  

Below is part of the FSI campus where I like to each lunch.

Things have improved for us.  During the middle and late 1990s it wasn’t so good.  Our budgets were slashed and a lot of officers were looking for jobs back then.  Our diplomatic readiness was gutted, as the general consensus was that the world was a much more benign place and we were less needed.  There were very few promotions and we lost about half of our public affairs officers to attrition and people being selected out.  Colin Powell corrected the situation and immediately (the program started in FY 02, which was October 2001) started a diplomatic readiness initiative that brought in a lot of new officers.    It takes years to “build” an FSO and we still weren’t ready when new demands were put on us after 9/11.  I firmly believe that one reason why we lost ground diplomatically after 9/11 was the simple reason that we lacked the diplomatic infrastructure to properly do our jobs.  During the 1990s we closed most of our libraries overseas, cut overseas staff and closed posts.   We just didn’t have enough left.  I hope that we don’t go back to those management conditions in the new administration.  I don’t think we will.   Both presidential candidate claim they want to strengthen our diplomacy and I am sure they understand that you cannot do that w/o diplomatic infrastructure. 

Below – our classroom building

The leadership course was good the first day.   We had sessions at NFATC/FSI (old guys like me tend to call it FSI) and at the Harry Truman Building.  I cannot go into specifics about speakers etc.  We have the rule that we can talk about what was said, but not who said it.   It makes sense.  Otherwise people would feel constrained.   We talked about some interesting leadership issues, although we only began to scratch the surface.    Below are a few of my take-away items, in no particular order.   What you see in these notes is my take on the results of discussions among participants and are not any official points of view, BTW.

Below – we did the afternoon at Main State (Harry S. Truman Building) so I went for a walk on the Mall for lunch.  This is Memorial Bridge on the Potomac.

Strategic Challenges for State Department

State, like all big-established organizations, may have trouble adapting to the new world of dispersed decision-making and diffuse power.    For a couple hundred years, diplomats represented America and contacts among citizens were not very common or sustained.   This began to change with faster communication, but we still had the power of official position and a control of information.   Technologies such as radio or television required big investments and didn’t allow for much audience interactivity.  They were ways for the leaders or elites to talk to the masses.   Things are changed.  Everybody has access to tools only high government officials had ten years ago.  For example, I can use Google Earth to see details of almost any place on the planet.  I remember how impressed I was twenty years ago to see satellite photos that the average teenager would scorn today as too grainy and primitive.  Beyond that, many people now appoint themselves “represent” America.  This can be good … or not.  A year’s work to build America’s image and communicate with a foreign audience can be ruined when some celebrity shows up with a movie that trashes it.

Governments do well with communications where one can speak to many.   It is a challenge with something like web 2.0 where many creators interact with each other.    State, and the U.S. government in general can be one voice and a very important one, but no longer do we have the predominant position we had even ten years ago.   We have been overtaken by technologies and we are not sure how to respond.   We do not currently have the tools and will need to develop them.  Success is not assured.

Below – Vietnam Memorial

On Being Promoted

Many of us were a little diffident about our promotions.  We should get over it.  As leaders, it is up to us to lead.  We now have the responsibility to take a stand and be proactive.    We cannot blame “them” anymore because they are us.  

Below – heaven & earth in the reflecting pool near the Korean Memorial

There will be some difficult transitions.  Most of us made our careers by becoming masters of detail.  Higher leadership requires a clear, simple vision that cuts through complexity.   Some of us will suffer withdrawal and miss doing things with our own hands.   In our new roles productivity comes through other people.   We rarely will be able to point to something we can unambiguously take credit for doing.   We all need to network more with peers, mentor those below us and know when to stand aside and let them get on with the work. 

Below – Korean Memorial

On Leadership

One of the speakers quoted Colin Powell who said the secrets of leadership success were simple. You just had to represent U.S. values, build trust and take care of your people.   Simple is not always easy.

Below – Vietnam Women’s Memorial

Other speakers commented that their biggest regrets came when they did not show courage and do what they thought was right at difficult times.  Everybody thought trust, candor and integrity were important to leadership. 

We have a lot more to do.  I think we made a good start. 

Homework

For homework I read an article by Peter Drucker.    I read most of what Peter Drucker wrote years ago.  I even had a Peter Drucker daybook with quotes, but I had forgotten a lot.   This article reminded me and I was surprised at how much of his advice I had internalized. 

Below – last roses of summer near Dunn Loring Metro

For example, Drucker advises people to work on their strengths instead of their weaknesses.   Successful people are generally NOT well rounded.    Do you know or care if Albert Einstein could fix a car or if Henry Ford knew anything about advanced physics?   Of course you should get your weaknesses above the threshold point where they prevent success, but after that you are probably going to get more mileage out of building on what you are good at doing.   The implication for leadership is that you should ask what a person can do well and let others compensate for the downsides.   That is the strength of a team.   This idea is counterintuitive.  In school we are tested on the whole course and usually being really good at one chapter won’t make up for knowing nothing about the other ten.  In life it does.

Anyway, Drucker has lots of good advice, but I will let you all read Drucker if you are interested.   I look forward to the rest of the course. 

It is a sweet deal, IMO.   I enjoy this sort of thing. They pay me to do what I would pay to do.

Above is a street scene in Arlington, VA.  They planted those oak trees years ago and it makes a big difference.

Posted on

Pixelated

I recently was asked about how I adjusted to life in Iraq.  State Department even has a course we have to take when we get back re adjustment.  They worry about our mental health in a high stress environment and they want to figure out how our experience can help the next group.  I don’t know how much my experience can help others.  Each experience is unique and I was lucky in my timing and my place.  I arrived in Anbar just as the violence was ebbing.  Given the extreme pessimism and scary stories in the media, I was ready for a horrible experience.  Instead there was steady improvement and strengthening peace.  It is much easier to adjust to better than expected conditions than the opposite.

Luck was also on my side in my decisions and the couple of hard decisions that turned out well.  For example, after a few successful attacks against Coalition Forces in Anbar and another PRT that resulted in deaths, some members of my team were feeling a bit skittish about all the travel we did outside the wire.  I determined that the successful attacks were just a statistical cluster and did not represent an actionable trend, so I put on the mask of certainty and told my staff that we would trust the ability of the Marines to keep us secure and continue our activities w/o pause.  We kept up our busy schedule and nobody got hurt.  Now we all feel brave and it was the right decision, but if it had turned out differently it would have been hard to take.  I respect my military colleagues, who often must make decisions that WILL result in people dying.    

There were not many heroic decisions I had to make.  Mostly I had to deal with the more prosaic problems of dirt, uncertainty and discomfort.   A lot of the same problems we have everywhere else, we have in Iraq.   I think being away from family and familiar surroundings is the hardest for most people.  It was hard for me.  There is a special sort of isolation in a place like Iraq.  I felt doubly away from home because there were few trees.  Everywhere else I have ever been I have always found ways to walk in the woods.  It is how I relax.  Not in Iraq.

You are reading one of the best things I did to adjust to isolation.  Keeping this blog and sharing my experience kept me feeling in touch and helped me in concrete ways. I could give my blog URL to people asking questions about Iraq.  Writing also helped me keep my own experience in perspective.   You take a different role when you try to explain something in writing to others. 

When reading the biographies of great individuals, I am always impressed by how much information there is about them in the form of letters, diaries and journals.  I am beginning to think that the relationship is casual in both directions, i.e. people who do important things keep journals and because they make the writer think through his ideas, journals help make people important. I have always kept journals, but never regularly.  I started to keep the blog because I thought that my experience in Iraq might be important enough for others to want to see.   I found that it helped me a great deal in the way I mentioned above and it made my thinking clearer and my actions more effective.   I recommend it to all.

I did other things experts recommend, such as keeping regular habits.  I would advise anyone living in a climate like Iraq’s to wake up at or a little before dawn during the summer months.  That is the time of the day when the weather is pleasant.  I like to run.  At 0530 running is good.  By 0800 it is already too hot and somebody who woke up at 0700 and did not get moving until around 0800 would only see experience the blistering heat and have that impression of Iraq.   You are smarter to change habits in winter.  In December it is cold in the morning, but nicely warm in the afternoon.  In that season it makes sense to wake up a little later and do your outdoor activities later in the day.  Actually nature gives you the directions.  The sun comes up later in winter, so if you just get up around dawn all the time, you have a good general schedule.   Iraq does not have daylight savings time, BTW. 

You don’t have to be in Iraq to be TOO busy.  Many people are too busy.  They brag about it, but it is no virtue.  I hate it when people claim to be too busy to read books or exercise regularly.  Nobody is that busy on a consistent basis.  They are just bad managers of their time.  I am not saying that there are not periods when you have to just work constantly, but if you do that too often it is like trying to sprint through a marathon race.  It is a losing strategy.  In Iraq, as everyplace else, I have carved out time to read and run.  People who don’t read don’t learn.  They end up wasting their time because of their bad judgment.  And people who don’t exercises slow down and/or die young.  Reading and exercise are investments, not expenses.  “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” calls such activities sharpening the saw.  It is harder and more effort to cut wood with a dull saw.  Taking a little time to sharpen saves time and energy. 

Finally, I think it is important to find the good and the fun in all situations and to learn from them.  There were so many interesting people & things in Iraq, so many things to experience, that it almost had to be an enriching experience.  Much depends on your attitude.  I always pity people who are too anxious to get away from or get to something.  They think that if they can just get somewhere or something different everything will be great.  This is rarely true.  No matter where you go, you have to take yourself along and if you are not happy with that who you are it won’t help to change your scenery.  In other words, if you are unhappy you probably should work on yourself before you work on other people or things. 

Anyway, what I said from my first days in Iraq remains true.   I am glad that I volunteered to go to Iraq and I am glad to be finished.  Both things were and are true.   I will add that right now I am glad to have the free time (State gave me fourteen working days of home leave) but I will also be glad to get back to regular work.  Nothing too much.