Maria Edera Spandoni: Okay, so good morning everyone, it’s a pleasure for me to be here and to moderate this panel about leadership. My name is Maria Edera Spandoni, I’m a UNITAR Senior Fellow, and it’s a great pleasure for me to be here with the panelists because we will talk about a really important subject, which is leadership and the skills you need to have in order to be a good leader. A brief premise about myself, I’ve been a parliamentarian for nine years, Vice President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies for five years, and Member of the Council of Europe for five years. So basically, one of the actors you have to deal with as a diplomat. So, in my ten years of experience, I understand that leadership is really an important role, and you need to have some skills. And what I’ve learned are basically three things. The first one is that a good leader has to have a vision. You need to have a vision, you need to inspire your colleagues, your team, your followers, in order to be able to get that goal, to get that vision. The second thing is influence. You need to be influent if you want to achieve that vision. And the third thing, I think the most important one from my point of view, is communication. You need to be able to communicate to others what you want to achieve and which is the goals, which is the goal you need to see and the vision you want to achieve. So these are the three things I learned from my personal experience. And now I’d like to give the floor to the panelists who will talk about leadership. So we will start with a brief introduction of themselves, and then we will talk about a scenario. So, as leaders, which kind of challenge did they have to face in one particular occasion? And then we will have a round of questions and answers. So, I would like to start with Ambassador Abdulaziz Al-Horr, which is the Director of the Diplomatic Institute State of Qatar. Ambassador, if you want to stay here. Okay, you come here, please.
Abdulaziz Al-Horr: Good morning, everybody. Has everybody recovered from the long day yesterday? Say yes. Okay. I am Ambassador Al-horr, the Director of the Diplomatic Institute State of Qatar. I would like to thank the host for the warm hospitality and wish you all the best. Next year will be in Peru, and the year after will be in Qatar. In my country, I will be more than happy to really host you in Qatar. Let me start by this question. How many of the institutions already have a competency framework? Raise your hand. Good. Keep it up. And how many institutions working on competency framework? Raise your hand. And how many planning to work on developing a framework? With these three questions, it seems that most of us either have a framework or working on one or will be working on one. I’m a fan of competency framework. I have introduced competency framework for three industries and fields that I worked in. But today, after 33 years of experience, I have more questions about competency framework than answers. Our competencies framework are available there in Arabic and in English, and there is one full episode of our magazine all related to developing diplomats. Feel free to grab one. They are available both in Arabic and in English. However, now I have the question to question the competency framework. Is it the best approach for developing diplomats? I mean, if all of us are working on developing diplomats according to this competency framework, does that mean that we are producing same quality and same prototype of diplomats? Are these becoming like assembly lines? Especially that competency is originated, it’s a very industrial corporate terminology used over there in a very highly regulated industry. Is diplomacy highly regulated industry? With the complex world we are living in, with the uncertainty we are facing, with the differences in regions and resources and the size of country and everything, is still competency framework is the best solution to develop our diplomats? I’m starting to question the competency framework because sometimes I felt it was very rigid. You have this competency framework, it’s becoming your point of reference, and it’s really limiting your creativity. It’s limiting the innovation that you can make as an institution. So the question then, and we are in the process of developing a program for our leadership level at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so I asked myself the question, is it still identifying the competencies as the best way to develop such a program? Now I would like to share with you our new approach or a new journey, the alternative to the competency framework or the way we are developing our new leadership program. We developed a document called the vision document. In the vision document we answered several questions. What is our vision? What are we trying to do? What are the challenges that we are facing? What are our priorities? What are our national interests? Where are our ambassadors serving? What is required from them? So we listed a few questions as leading questions to develop this program for our leadership level. So the program now, it’s not about subjects, it’s about themes. For example, we sent this vision document to four different institutions and universities. One of them is the Fletcher School. I mean, Hillary is here. They already submitted their proposal to develop our leadership level. We are waiting from Georgetown University, from Oxford University, and we received from Johns Hopkins University also their proposal against this vision document. So the proposals came with themes rather than subjects and topics. And the value or the most important feature of these themes, these are holistic themes. It’s not a particular competency that you are targeting, but a holistic one doing it in a simulation style, in a scenario planning style. For example, one of the topics is the individualized lab, diplomatic lab. Mindset for complex world. So it’s not a normal topic or normal subject you did, but it’s a holistic approach that will include very sub-skills in a very interactive experiential learning. And we are waiting for more proposals to come. My conclusion here, try to think of alternative for your diplomats. Don’t stick to one approach that is competency framework. It’s perfect for the foundation program, perfect for juniors. But for mid-career and high-level diplomats, I think we need to find an alternative. Thank you very much.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you, Ambassador. Now I leave the floor to Professor Weisman. Professor, do you want to stay in the chair?
Geoffrey Wiseman: I think I too will be breaking some of the rules of the game, but nonetheless, bear with me. I’m going to just say something about my own career, which I’m going to characterize upfront as trans-professional. That is to say I’ve not been a lifelong diplomat, and I’m going to make a slightly subversive argument that I don’t want everyone in this room to think only in terms of lifelong careers in diplomacy. Try something else along the way. My very first posting, by way of introduction, was in Stockholm, Sweden. I was an Australian diplomat, and the leadership lesson that I learned in Stockholm was, in fact, think beyond the foreign ministry. Think about taking risks, which we heard about yesterday, but do so in a whole-of-government and a whole-of-society way. Don’t stay within the foreign ministry bubble. That’s the big lesson, leadership lesson, I think I took away from my posting in Stockholm, Sweden. My second posting was in Hanoi, Vietnam, and this is getting at the case study, I think to some extent that I want to just mention. Case study is a rather elaborate term, but nonetheless, in Hanoi I learned what it was like as a second secretary, very low in the pecking order, as you know, what is the role of being a number two in an embassy, what is the role of the deputy chief of mission, what is it like to be charge d’affaires when you don’t expect to be charge d’affaires, and in other words, what’s it like to be an acting leader? So that’s the question that I’m sort of putting on the table. And so after Hanoi, I was cross-posted to Brussels, and I would say that the great experience that I had there was in fact seeing this experiment in multinational parliamentary democracy, really quite extraordinary. The European Parliament came in for a lot of criticism then and now, but nonetheless I do think it’s an extraordinary democratic experiment, and the one thing I would just simply say there is that in fact dealing with politicians is an important, I think, skill that diplomats need to come to terms with. They are not monsters, although I should say that my nemesis at the European Parliament was none other than the British Conservative member of the European Parliament, Stanley Johnson. I recognise the family name as the father of Boris Johnson, the much-loved late British Prime Minister. Late, you know what I mean. So after I served in Brussels, I went back to Australia, I worked in the Foreign Minister’s office, and here I think I would make my sort of leadership point. If you do want to understand the relationship between the politician and the diplomat, work in a politician’s office, as an advisor, as a private secretary. If you get half an opportunity to do that, I strongly urge people to do that. After my foreign service career, I worked in the Ford Foundation in New York City. What did I learn there? That there are many diplomatic actors in the world, again a point that we heard yesterday, especially from Group 5. And what I realised is that there are thousands of think tanks, research institutes, university centres outside the beltway in Washington DC that contribute one way or another to foreign policy and to diplomacy. What’s my point? Don’t stay within the foreign ministry, the embassy bubble. I’ve since been an academic and what have I learnt here? A number of things. A project that I’m working on with Yolanda Spies is to how do diplomats balance the contending impulses between the international and the national. We heard that yesterday to some extent and I think the interesting point about the European Union Diplomatic Academy is that it’s trying to bring a regional diplomatic identity to the national identities. And I think in some ways that’s a relatively easy task for Federica Mogherini and her colleagues. The hard task is in a bilateral setting where in fact you can recognise the national interests much more quickly because you know what the national priorities are. It’s very hard to recognise your international obligations when you’re in a bilateral posting. I’m now an academic. I have been at the University of Southern California, the Australian National University and now at DePaul University at the Gray School of Applied Diplomacy. Delighted to be here with the director of the school, David Wellman. The case study that I wanted to mention, I just put on the table because I want your feedback. It was when I was in Hanoi, I was a second secretary. I had not been a second secretary for long so I was very inexperienced and I was charge d’affaires because we travelled from Hanoi to Bangkok often and that meant the ambassador travelled to Bangkok a lot which meant I was the charge. And being a charge d’affaires in an important country like Vietnam, important for Australia, was really quite a shock to the system. What was my point here? It was that I had not been trained to be an acting leader. I had not been trained to be charge d’affaires. I remember being at a reception where the German ambassador very kindly, and I was there because the ambassador was away, I was there as charge, he introduced me as the charge d’affaires of Australia and you can imagine I became six foot tall. But it was really kind of fascinating because the ambassador was being very generous to me of course but he made the point that you are now in a leadership role and that sort of hit me really quite dramatically. So the point that I wanted to raise for you is basically have things changed since my time in Hanoi? Are you now training for people to be acting leaders? I know that there are some people in the audience who have been number two, DCM, you know serious, much more experienced perhaps than I was, but for so many countries that are small countries this is a very big deal. You’re going to be charge d’affaires a lot in such circumstances. But my question is are you being trained for this acting leadership role that will hit a lot of people and in my case a lot earlier than you actually are? Thank you so much.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you very much. So now as the panellists have already understood we are going to do one speech with introduction and presentation. So that’s how the flow is going. So I leave the floor to Dr. Koba, Centre for Education and Training at the Ministry, oh no, sorry. Okay, so I leave the floor to Director Le Bret, Director of the French Diplomatic Academy, please take the floor.
Didier Le Bret: Good morning, everybody. To make it short, I had mainly four throughout 30 years diplomatic career, three main blocks of competences. First, I was a specialist of former Soviet Union, then Russia, then I became all of a sudden a specialist of ODA question and development. Third, I became a specialist of crisis management and security issues. That’s the main three blocks. And then I discovered that I could be as well a specialist in private sector as I worked for five years. And I met some, I didn’t manage to become a member of parliament but I tried at least. That is a good experience if you want to be sure that there are not only monsters among politicians. I had few key experiences of leadership and they were quite different and I would say first that you might make, you should make a difference between leadership in peacetime and leadership in crisis. Those are absolutely different things. When I was posted in Port-au-Prince in Haiti as a French ambassador, it was three months after the earthquake, 300,000 people died, as many were injured. So you came to a country to be part of some diplomatic adventure and all of a sudden you realized you have to change everything from what you thought was your mission. I got people, teams coming from Paris. At the end of the day, I had almost 1,000 people working in the embassy, for the embassy, doctors, people from police and so on and so forth. And to come back to what you just said, I think if I could try and capture the very essence of being a good manager in leadership, a good leader in crisis, I would say I hope you will find yourself knowing a little bit who you are because that’s the key issue. If you don’t know which are your true skills, your competences and your attitude, in French we have three similar words, we say savoir for knowledge. savoir-faire for skills, and savoir-être for attitude. So that means it’s all interlinked. Why the Greek have this expression, gnoti seoton, know yourself? And really, that’s a key issue. Because if you don’t know what kind of manager you are, you’ll be in big troubles once the crisis started. So what really saved me when I was in this situation first was that I had a fantastic team, and I relied on them. And be sure that if you have a deputy head of mission, for instance, who is very good at writing, but might be a poor crisis manager, then spare him. Put him in the other place than the hierarchic place where he’s supposed to be, and find the right person for the right places. The crisis organigram is absolutely different when you are in crisis or in peacetime. Then you said communication. It is of paramount importance. When I was in Haiti, we couldn’t communicate with Paris. So I found a very easy way to get in touch with my government, TV, radio, broadcast, direct TV. So every day, I organised with 100 journalists who were on the premises of the embassy. And on the morning and on the evening, I made the point where we stand, how many people we are going to evacuate, and so on and so forth. And it really helped. It really helped, first, to get the right message and to be sure that everybody, you said vision. So the vision is extremely deeply linked with your capacity to communicate the right messages. So three main lessons for this kind of management. Trust your team. Know yourself. Be sure that you have a good, strong, robust communication. And basically, that’s it. That’s in period of crisis. But you have other ways to manage people and to be a good leader, otherwise in crisis, hopefully. And I think that’s what I went through when I started first designing the new French Diplomatic Academy, then heading it. I spent six months listening to people. I was designing the next step. So it was easy for me. I was not in charge. But it helped me a lot, just spending so many months listening to people. And then to embark them to a new project, it was quite easy because it was their project. So this kind of leadership, it’s closely linked to what we heard yesterday, being a good listener. And being a good listener means you instill trust among your team, among your colleagues. And that is quite helpful for the next steps. And I would say, as it was said yesterday, you remember we were talking about being a good diplomat. It’s being optimistic. And I would say being optimistic is really closely linked, as well, to action. And that’s exactly what our governments expect from us, to have a difference between an optimistic and a pessimistic. People say it’s a matter of level of information. No, you can be well-informed, knowing that the situation is tragic. But nevertheless, you’ll keep being optimistic because you know that for action, if there is no optimism, there will be nothing. Nobody will follow you if you don’t show the vision. And the vision needs to be back to a form of optimism. So the optimism and action are very well together. And if you allow me, I will just end up with a quote. Yesterday, I was extremely happy, and it gave me some strength, to see that we share the same difficulties. And at one point, I heard somebody said, we are small structures. I mean, roughly, I guess, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it’s less than 1% of the overall national budget, peanuts. And I think one of our key missions should be to call up our governments all together to say, what we are doing, training people, being smart and efficient diplomats. It’s part of the overall job of our diplomatic ministry. But we should remind that if we don’t have the political support, if we don’t have the money, if we don’t have the people, I mean, training will be viewed as a kind of desperate approach to compensate a little bit the fact that we are not taken seriously. And I think this is a message all together with our authorities. We have an excellent, I’ve been working in the private sector, we have an excellent return of investment. Our Ministry of Foreign Affairs are among those who make big profits to our government in hard power, sometimes, in soft power, more often. So this is something, I think, throughout this federation of diplomats. I think that we could work together and try to convince all governments that diplomats need to be recognized for what they do, try and achieve peace in troubled times as we have now. And we have a big added value in what we can do for our countries all together. Thank you.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you. So thank you very much. Sorry, I just have a problem with my throat. Dr. Jovicevic, please take the floor.
Marina JoviÄeviÄ: Good day. I’m very happy to be in Budva because somehow I feel it is my second home. I was posted here, and this is the case I will talk about today. I’m Ambassador Marina Jovicevic. I’ve been a career diplomat for now maybe 22, 23 years. I primarily dealt with regional cooperation and EU integration. Twice, I was Assistant Minister for European Integration. And that also brought me on a number of occasions here to Montenegro before my posting. And when it comes to postings abroad, I was posted in Denmark. As the colleague mentioned, it was my very first posting. And I went there as a charge d’affaires after one and a half year of working for the ministry. It was a very strange case. But this is where you build really your not only personality but leadership because you have to deal with different issues. I was also, as I said, Consul General in this coastal part of Montenegro in Boca Cotor Bay, the most beautiful bay that I’ve ever seen. And last but not least, I was Ambassador of Serbia in Brussels, covering Belgium and Luxembourg. As I have mentioned, I was thinking, you know, what to talk about when it comes to leadership. And for me, if, you know, with all due respect for all other postings, I think this posting in Montenegro where I came as the first Consul General will be the most outstanding posting I’ve ever had. Not because I love the country, I love the people, but it always reflects your idea and vision that you have before you take the posting. As we opened it in 2011, somewhere springtime, I came and you realize that people are approaching you for different reasons. And many of them, of course, want to collaborate with you and to have some kind of support from you. And it’s not easy. You know, we are not the country like US, for example, that do things, you know, years in advance. Budget for that year was closed. So I had really to deal with different levels of cooperation at that point of time. First and foremost, with my home country, to explain that you really have certain ideas and vision and you want to do because they had it before coming here. It was not easy when it comes to steering your career. It was not easy to come from the position of Assistant Minister to be Consul General because your career diplomat’s colleague thinks that you should go somewhere for the Ambassador’s posting, not to take something that’s maybe a lower rank in their hands. In my head, this was the best posting I could have had. So I had to explain to my home state why I need some money. You have to deal with different actors in the field, local, different cities, with different associations, cultural institutions, et cetera. You also have to deal with your team that’s new. And we all came as a completely new team as it was newly opened Consulate General. So for me, I found myself that you have a certain goal. Of course, you have a certain vision. But you found yourself that you cannot fulfill the goal that you set yourself. And when it comes to the goal, I had, first and foremost, the pressure to do it. presence, that visible presence of the newly opened consulate general, then of course visibility and presenting Serbian culture as a tool of public diplomacy, and of course last but not least building partnership and cooperation. The problem that I had was that actually I had zero financing for that kind of support, cultural support, at the very beginning. So I had to act first and foremost towards Serbian institutions and to our embassy in Podgorica to explain, you know, how we can, how I can act with different projects. This approach had to be really persuasive and very steady. So you have to be boring person, right, to be all the time approaching people, and at one point of time I think they were fed up with me, and I think there was a kind of test. So I had a call from the secretary general who told me, like, okay, you want money, and now you have one hour to provide us with a list of projects. So I sat by the computer, I typed 17 projects that I had already, after the communication I had with different actors, and sent a letter to Belgrade. The result was that there was the rebalance of the budget, I received certain amount of money that was enough for me to start the cooperation in a sense that now you have different actors. So each of us would provide certain amount of money for something, and we would be able to make very important results. Not to be too long, but just to indicate that in less than three years we managed to organize 60 different cultural events, all with local partners from different kind, like concerts, exhibitions, book presentations, folk dances, whatever, theater plays, whatever you could figure out. We turned out to be, as Consulate General, very reliable partner for a number of festivals. We mentioned yesterday Budva festival, and in Kotor, in all the cities you have summer festivals. We also worked with different cultural institutions here, and also with different associations, including also different NGOs, but last but not least the Serbian Orthodox Church. For me, the first step was negotiations that you had to perform with different actors, and in order to be able to connect people and cultures. What was important during the negotiations period is to have a clear position what you want to achieve, to share the interest to have a certain project realized, needs of yourself and also of the other party, and values that we all needed to respect, which was not very easy. Then we might come in a political field that sometimes, you know, if you had the local governance from a political party that was not very keen to, let’s say, Serbian different actors, so it was not so easy to perform it also. The result of those negotiations was win-win, so each of us gained in this process, and I would just maybe would like to outline at the very end that, as my colleague said, you have to have vision, you have to really have trust, not in the partner, but they have to have trust in you, otherwise I would fail, particularly in some of the municipalities that were not, as I said, very open, so never to fail the expectation of the other side or to misuse this opportunity for some other interest. There should be, of course, interest for the cooperation, and as I said, result must be a positive sum, not the negative one. For example, if you have a theater play, you negotiate with the theater in Belgrade, you bring it to one municipality, then when you organize it for them, you know you pay for transportation, the others pay for their fee, then you tell them, like, okay, I will organize it in the other city, but now lower the price, so practically you have to be manager in culture, which I did all the time here. The problem is that you, of course, have risk management that you have to take care to be able to identify the challenges and to act accordingly, because it’s the money of your state and you are the responsible person, but as we said the other day, no risk, no benefit, so, you know, just be seated somewhere and doing nothing maybe is the easiest way to just follow the instructions of your state, but I don’t think this is the way that any head of the mission should act, so on the contrary, you should define the mission and the goal that you want to achieve, shape it, be active, and as I said, to be not only proactive, but to be reactive when you are requested to do so. I’ve chosen this case because this is actually the major leadership I had. I had it in a number of occasions, but for me, after 10 years, when I come to any of the cities, when you meet people and when they still tell you, we remember those times when you organized this or that, for me, this is the major result of me as being the Consul General in this coastal part of Montenegro. So just to wrap it up, thank you, colleagues, for bringing me here and thank you all for listening to my case. Thank you very much.
Maria Edera Spandoni: And now, last but not least, I leave the floor to Dr. Mohamed Kurniadi-Koba, please.
Mohammad Kurniadi Koba: Good morning, everyone, Excellencies, dear colleagues, to our hosts, thank you for having us in the last two days. I appreciate being able to speak here. I’m a career diplomat. I’ve served about 25 years. My first post was to our mission to the EU in Brussels, the second one to our mission to the UN in Geneva, and the last one was in New York, to our mission to the UN. So as you can see, I have no educational experience, except as a student. So you can imagine my headaches when I came home from New York and the minister appointed me as the head for the Center for Education and Training. So I will speak about what I did and what I’m planning to do. So what I did was we developed a human capital development plan based on the results of competency tests of each individual, assess the existing gap competency, and connecting the gap competency analysis and organization vision, mission, and priorities. That took three months, assessing 1,600 diplomats, 300 admin officers, and 200 commission officers. And based on the human capital development plan and the gap competency that we discovered, we developed a curriculum for the center, focuses on attitude, skills, and knowledge in the order. First attitude, because diplomacy is for people, we spoke a lot about it yesterday. And then skill, all the representing, reporting, protecting, and so on. And knowledge is the last one, not because it’s the least important, because I don’t have time to cram all the knowledge that a diplomat needs to know in three or four months. So we have entry-level diplomatic school, we have mid-level diplomatic school, and the senior level. And the level is about six to eight months, depending the budget available on the year. The mid-level is about three months, and senior level is also about three months. So not enough time, so many knowledge to cover. So we opt to use the learning management system. So we use videos where applicable, protocol skills, we use games to arrange the protocol for the entry-level, and so on and so forth. And I really think LMS is the future. Not only it will help put all the materials available, and the students can learn on their own time, but also it will level the level playing field. Before, if you’re an expert in disarmament, is it because your first assignment back home is on the issue? When you send abroad, also dealing with the issue. But what if we â so you sort of have a privilege to have all the information that you need on disarmament or on any other topic, climate change. But what if we put those issues on LMS? Everybody can learn it. So you have to be â so to make a name for yourself, you have to be really an expert, because everybody else who has not had the privilege to be assigned the issue in their daily job, they will have access also to this issue. And then â so they have to be really good, because the information is available for everyone. And I will talk about this later when I come to the open bidding process for selecting the â Now let me speak about some issues that are currently on the menu in our learning management system and our curriculum at the center. First, economic diplomacy. It is, I think, every education center now has the same list. But what worries me the most is I need to make sure that what we, what diplomat thinks in our head, what economic diplomacy is the same, what people in the, the one who is doing trade, economic, and so on and so forth. So I invite a lot of CEOs, directors from the line ministries, and not so much about my own ministry, private enterprise, SMEs. We are fortunate to have a representative of Huawei in Jakarta, Google, Boeing, Airbus. Airbus was easy after I mentioned Boeing, and then he’s immediately, oh, when, when I’ll be able to speak in your, in your center. Second is, on the menu is regionalism. We heard a lot about European experience yesterday. Now let me offer you something different about ASEAN experience, not European attitude, but ASEAN attitude. Before I speak about that, let me put things in perspective. There are so many potential conflicts in the South China Sea, fishing rights, maritime boundaries, piracy, you name it. In Indonesia, we haven’t finished our negotiation about maritime boundaries with our own ASEAN neighbors. My colleague from Malaysia, Singapore, can testify to this one. But nevertheless, since the inception of ASEAN, none of those potential conflicts has erupted into open conflicts, which is more than we can say for any other regional organization. So maybe you know a thing or two about CBM, about patient, about, you know, dealing with crisis, about negotiation, and so on and so forth. And then current global issue, of course, climate change, sea level rise. Some experts say that in the South we lose 30 percent of our islands. What happens is we lose our outermost island. We lose the impact on our exclusive economic zone, to our continental shelf, and so on and so forth. So we need, our diplomats need to know about this. Artificial intelligence, of course, or coming back to ASEAN, we wish we can offer regionalism as an alternative, but as a complementary to multilateralism, because we are strongly for multilateralism. This is, I think, we think the only way that the rich and the powerful do not always win. Well, they will win most of the time, but not all the time. And then peace and conflict studies. The world is not getting any safer anytime soon, and a lot of sanctions going on in the world. Some country would like to buy a plane for our state-owned enterprise. We produce some plane cooperating with other country, but we cannot sell it because that particular country is under sanction. Our state-owned oil company cannot accept money from some country because that particular country is also under sanction. This is unilateral sanction. I mean, I’m not even talking about under WTO or Security Council. So we need to know about this sanction regime. Will it affect our national development? And then I will talk about the corporate university. We base the corp on the Lombardo’s work, the 70, 20, and 10 model. Ten percent of learnings begin through formal training and education. So whatever we do at the center, it will only contribute ten percent. Seventy percent are from daily activities at the office. So it makes sense that we also make sure that when they work at the office, they are also learning something. So we are developing this corporate university at the center now. Now for the succession planning, our ministry has also developed tools in preparing the succession planning. Because from my personal experience, I’m not sure they have any plan at all. Because when I was in New York, I was the DPR, and then suddenly they want my PR back home for the G20, to be the co-CERPA, and then suddenly I was the SACE. And the next day, Myanmar happened. I wasn’t prepared to be, you know, to be leading a mission in New York. I mean, I knew the routine and so on and so forth, but nothing prepared you for getting texts from your minister at midnight. Because Jakarta and New York is exactly 12 hours different. So when she wakes up, she gets to the office, usually at about 8 or 9 o’clock, it was 9 p.m. in New York. And then back and forth, what does the creditor community think about this accreditation and so on and so forth. So it’s a bit difficult if you’re not prepared to lead. And then we have this nine box, how should I put this, assessment. So during the training, we are supposed to assess the student from their performance and their potential. And then we put them in the right boxes accordingly. So incorporating the nine boxes into the evaluation and development of diplomats, I think it’s an effective strategy because then you can see, you know, you can see the right person for the right assignment. So we only have, you know, number one, number two, number three, which one is the best and so on and so forth. But with this, we can help the ministry to, is it for me? Yes, it’s for you. To help, you know, to help to spot talents when there is one. I mean, ministers like Minister Wira Yudha, or Minister Ratnam Marsudi, or Martina Naragawa, these extraordinary people, they always land on their feet. But we need a system that can, you know, for the rest of us, mere mortal, mere human, we need to have a system that, you know, can spot talent when there is talent. When there is a, I would like to use an example like, these talents, they do not play in Champions League, they do not play in Serie A, but this is a good player, they can play soccer very well. Just because they don’t play in Champions League or Serie A doesn’t mean they cannot play football. So we need to be able to spot that when there is people like that. So thank you.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Okay, so let’s see if I regain my voice. Yes, I think I can talk. Thank you very much to the panelists. Very interesting speeches, and also interesting experiences from your side. So, I’d like to know, okay, there is already a question. Can somebody give the microphone to the public? So we have, over there.
Nabil Ayad: Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, hello everybody. I’m Nabil Ayad, Professor of Diplomacy at University of Europe for Applied Sciences and also Glasgow Caledonian University. When looking at the title, Building Future Leaders, I hope we are not talking about political leaders who lack credibility, because the essence of diplomacy is credibility, as you know. Yesterday, we were talking about competencies and assessment, performance assessment was not mentioned at all yesterday. Luckily, the Indonesian ambassador has just mentioned performance assessment, which is good. We talked about diplomacy, unclear and unknown environment. When diplomacy started in the 16th, 17th century, what were the skills and knowledge of diplomat at that time? A modern diplomat, he should have been a trained theologian. Unfortunately, there was no she at that time. Well-versed in Aristotle and Plato, an expert in mathematics and physics, an expert in civil law, able to speak and write Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, and German, and preferably had a taste for poetry. I mean, the role of ambassadors at that time, as we know in Holbein, ambassadors to ambassadors, their main role was to go around Europe looking for husbands and wives for the members of the nobility. I mean, obviously, we call it today matrimonial diplomacy. But diplomacy has changed since then. Sir Peter Marshall, who wrote the book Positive Diplomacy, he said, diplomacy is a child of its times, or rather a child of changing times. So today we speak about science diplomacy. What is the impact of science diplomacy on public health and the environment? And then we speak about the role of the diplomat has changed. I remember in 1980, I tried to introduce a course in London on diplomacy practice procedures and dynamics. And the local educational authority at that time refused to fund that course. And they said to me, why are you trying to train diplomats? Diplomats are lazy. They lead an extravagant life, alternating between protocol and alcohol, and they suffer too much from cholesterol. So today we introduced a new course on innovation called design thinking. How would you design a product or how would you design a public service? Obviously, diplomacy has survived as a concept and an institution, but it will keep changing. Diplomats today have become managers for globalization. They are managers of globalization. So when diplomacy started in the 80s, in the 80s it used to be a minor branch of international relations. Today it is a discipline unto itself, and that’s why we are here today. It is a case in point. Thank you very much.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Okay, thank you. Let’s get a couple of questions so then the panelists can answer. Yes. Can we have the microphone, please? Over here, thank you. Will you raise the hand? Sorry, apologies.
Audience: Hello, my name is Jolanda Spies. I direct the diplomatic studies program at the University of Oxford, and I would like to offer a comment and perhaps invite some counter-comments on that. It occurred to me, and I’m also a person who served as a diplomat for 18 years before I entered academia. When we train diplomats, we do not own those people. We are not assembling cars, and we are not going to have them necessarily forever. And if you come from a country such as my own, South Africa, where we really treasure our resources, we do not have an abundance of highly trained resources, it’s very difficult to hold on to those trained resources. Because sometimes you put so much effort into training these people into elite operatives, just to lose them to the corporate sector, to other government ministries, to other departments. And then it helps to have a more holistic approach to diplomats and keeping them and getting them. And I wanted to give an example, if Director Alhor will forgive me, of Qatar. That happened just last year in our program. We had two representatives from Qatar in our diplomatic studies program. And the one person I want to mention did not represent the government of Qatar. She was in a different career. And she came into the program absolutely convinced that she did not want to be a diplomat working for a government, even if that was her own government. And then we invited the ambassador of Qatar to do a guest lecture to our students. And after that guest lecture, she was so inspired that she decided there and then and started the process of joining the foreign service of Qatar. So all the time we are training people, there are also people outside our organizations that are actually potentially leaders within our organization. And we should have that flexibility to know that we are going to lose people, but we are also going to gain people. And the element that really keeps people is that symbolism, that representation, that sense of working for a bigger something, that motivation. And that element of representation is intangible. It’s very difficult to train for that, but when we have that, we should really treasure it.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you very much. Any other questions, suggestions? Oh yeah, absolutely. We just gather all the information, all the questions, and then we let you talk. So if there are no other questions, I just leave the floor to the panelists.
Didier Le Bret: As you mentioned mobility, I mean the fact that you can have another opportunity, we encourage in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs this type of attitude. For instance, when I came back from the private sector, I’m fully dedicated to l’intérêt général. This is my main engine. But nevertheless, if you talk about, for instance, economic diplomacy, without knowing the true day-to-day life of entrepreneurs, I mean you miss something. You have to speak the same language at one point if you want to be reliable or credible. So we encourage people to get out of the box of our ministry. But the key point is that we must be sure that once we tell them, get out of NGOs, civil society, whatever, private sector, we must be consequent and be sure that after a period of time, we can welcome them again. That’s the key, that’s really what is at stake for us right now, to be sure that once they come back, we welcome them and we optimize their potential, which is not an easy task. For me, a final note here. My concern that we are transferring our institutions to schools again, with the competencies, with the curriculum, with the assessment, with all of these procedures, reminds me of the very traditional schools. Do we want to do this? Do we really want to do this? Our diplomats are living in the real world, in a very complex world. We have diplomats working in difficult zones, facing issues, and things that are not faced in other multilateral, bilateral, a lot of different issues than what is taught in traditional schools. Competencies will take you in a very detailed, structured, rigid path, different than the capability-based development, which will open the door for you to adopt themes that can really utilize the interrelated skills and knowledge and attitudes that you need to think about. This is an exercise that I’m doing in my institute. I’m rethinking the competency framework approach as a whole and trying to find new and alternative ways. Thank you very much.
Maria Edera Spandoni: One of the participants in the mid-level diplomatic school, on one-on-one session, in the coaching and mentoring session, the coach asked him, where do you see yourself in 15 or 20 years? And then the answer was, I might not be doing this. I might leave the ministry. And then she changed strategy and started to shorten the timeline. So what do you do after the training? And then he answered and so on and so forth. And then where do you want to be posted after this, if you can choose? Because in our system we cannot choose where do you want to be posted. And then after 30 minutes, he outlined his dreams and then he said, okay, maybe I can be a diplomat in that country in 15 years. So the power of coaching and mentoring is we can use that to retain people. Because I have also friends who left the service, and most of them said, I wanted to come back, but our system is not designed to accept people who want to stay and leave the service and then we cannot come back.
Geoffrey Wiseman: I want to echo the points of my colleagues on this. I opened my remarks earlier by saying that try not to think of diplomacy or diplomatic career as a lifelong one in the foreign ministry. That was the point that I was trying to argue. And what I found in the Australian case was that people who went to work for the United Nations, for example, when they came back or when they were away, they were seen as something that was a little alien. They had left the fold. And I think this is a terrible mistake that foreign ministries make. If people go into the private sector, work with a civil society organization, go to a regional headquarters, to the United Nations, do a master’s, do a PhD, any of these things, they are going to come back with added value. And I say to all foreign ministries, welcome those people back because they are a national resource.
Marina JoviÄeviÄ: I think when it comes to the colleague from Oxford that we should also reflect what diplomacy is nowadays because we are seeing as diplomats it cannot be compared to the period of 20 plus years, not to mention two or three centuries. Everything turned out to be a bit more superficial. It’s important what’s been happening in the public. And only in some situations when you really have a crisis management and when you have to deal with real issues, then you can see maybe who is what type of the diplomat, whether you can stand it or not. Which brings me to another point, that’s the recruitment of people. So what you get to shape into the diplomat, future diplomat. So you know you can train people but we have the situation that we recruit less and less people because of the financial resources. You have to have approval from the government. And it happens that when you recruit 15 people, for example, within a few months time or a year time, at least two will leave ministry because they had a better offer from the private sector. And I doubt that in our case they will come back. So that kind of mobility in our case is one-way mobility. And what we did, for example, maybe it’s not that bad, we have a cooperation with 15 faculties in Serbia, signed protocols so that they nominate 10 best students from the last year of bachelor or master studies. And then they spend three months working for the ministry. Full-time, eight hours from different parts of Serbia. For them, I think it’s a great professional orientation, meaning that out of those 15 people, for example, 13 were interns in the meantime. And they really get the clear picture of what this job is. Because the perspective of a diplomat, we discuss, it’s completely different in the heads of ordinary people to what we really do. So they think we are just finding dining, traveling, enjoying. For nothing, which is not at all to be compared with multi-task diplomacy that particularly small countries have to cope on a daily basis. So it’s really a challenge. And I think we also should think about those terms, not only the leadership, but you can make leader of someone who has the capacity, but not from all the people you get. And there is the tendency of some of the states, including my state, to centralize this process of recruitment. So they have national office that’s dealing with those issues, jointly with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but it’s not only us. So they actually put you in the box before you are able to come to become a diplomat. So whether you know Excel, who cares? We will teach you later at the Diplomatic Academy for all IT skills that you need to have. So it’s a very complex issue, but not maybe for this session, I’m sorry.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you very much. I just want to add a quick personal note about that. Because I think it’s really important you talk about competences. And from my point of view, the competences that you have as diplomats are for sure integrity, empathy is absolutely critical, emotional intelligence is absolutely critical. Also, well, of course, cultural intelligence. Not to talk about negotiations. So the competences that you need to have are really competences that also a leader has to have. So that’s what you have in common, because, of course, you need to manage so many challenging affairs, and also communicate well with so many actors, which give you really lots of responsibilities on your back. So, yes. Can I have the microphone, please?
Audience: Thank you. I’m Barbara Bodine, and I do not work for the U.S. government anymore. But I will admit that I still talk about the State Department as we. It’s just something about us we don’t quite leave. I just wanted to address the two issues that were coming up. And they came up yesterday in the exercise. And one of them is retention. And then the other one is refreshing and revitalizing. And we face this problem, I think, like every foreign ministry does. Particularly your star diplomats. You know, the better you are, the more difficult and the higher position you get. And there’s always this great risk of just burnout. And then there’s also this need to bring in people who have a broader experience in NGOs and civil society and state and local government, not to mention health, cyber, and everything. And the two things that we do that I think are designed to address both of these is that we have a very active kind of mid-career the 10 to 15 year mark where the really high riser is just about to burn out. But about the 10 to 15 year mark, you can take a year, sometimes two, and you can be a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. You can get a master’s at Princeton or Fletcher. You can work at a state and local government. And we also have them with corporations. So you’re understanding better, particularly our economic officers, the world of the entrepreneur and the world of globalization. And so they get the opportunity to get out, get away, clear their brain, see something else from a different point of view. But they also get exposure to all these various different worlds. What does humanitarian assistance look like if you’re working for Mercy Corps or Doctors Without Borders? So we’ve got this refresh, rethink, revitalize at that level. And the reason that we put it in is that we were losing too many of our really good officers because they were just exhausted and just wanted a break. And if given a choice between being exhausted and leaving, they sometimes left, often with regrets later. But if it was exhausted time out, productive time out, it’s hard on diplomatic corps because we all tend to be very small. We don’t have a lot of surplus officers, particularly of that quality and that rank. But it really came down to if we provide ways for them to refresh, revitalize, rethink, they would come back as a better officer. So the option was not, what do I do about not having them around for a year? The alternative was I wasn’t going to have them around at all. And so it works. The other thing that we’re just starting to do, so we don’t know if it’s going to work or not, is really recruiting for kind of a subcategory of people coming in with a background for health diplomacy, with a background in cyber, with a background in all of these emerging issues that we are trying to recruit, train, and get experience from. for our diplomats, but we need to backfill a little bit in the meantime, and then hope that once they kind of see it, they will also go, oh, this is cool. So we’re kind of trying to bring some of the outside more in, but then also giving our diplomats more of an opportunity to get out away and then come back. And so trying to get away from the either or ultimate loss or part-time, and that’s one of the ways that we’ve tried to do this. It does build, I think, also leadership skills, because you have to go out and do something different. So you can’t, if you were in a rut and you suddenly dropped in Mercy Corps or Doctors Without Borders, you have to unwrap yourself a little bit, and that’s usually a very healthy thing to do.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you very much. Excuse me. OK.
Didier Le Bret: It is so true that I’m trying right now to organize something which might be old, but it’s not mandatory. But if you have the choice between two excellent candidates, I would recommend my administration to choose the one who makes exactly what you said, get some fresh air outside. So I can’t make it mandatory, but I strongly recommend my colleagues to come, for instance, in the French Academy for one year. And then in the curricula, if you have to choose between two guys, you say, oh, this one, he spent one year transmitting, teaching, learning. And I even asked that the top of the 10 best diplomats would spend one year as a fellow researcher in the think tank. I said, guys, are you serious? I said, yes, because they will learn the best job for the rest of their career. They will make a network of international experts. They will know how to organize different things. And I think that’s part of the training. Not only train people, but give them opportunity to live the true life of other. You said, Médecin Sans Frontières, I’ve been a member of the board of Action Contre la Fin for three years. You don’t need training, then, to understand the true reality of a big NGO. But that means that the administration should work along with the training department and give you the backing in all your initiatives, which is not easy.
Audience: I’m Liliana Popescu, Director General of the Romanian Diplomatic Institute. And I would like to pick on a different issue that was presented here by our colleague from France, Didier Lebret. Towards the end of your presentation, you mentioned this idea that diplomats and the activity of diplomats is not well known. Then Professor Nabil mentioned this idea that there is this public image about diplomats that they are from protocol to alcohol. And there’s this image that diplomats live a glamorous life. And then, to be honest, I talked with several of our colleagues in the ministry. I, myself, was in the ministry for a long time ago, but for a short time. And I know what diplomatic activity means. This is not shown, actually. So my question is to you and to all of our colleagues, if you know any resources, like articles, materials, or if you have any idea in which we could actually put on the table and discuss maybe with and present to our governance and to our public, because we also face issues of budgeting as well. So I think that diplomatic activity actually has fantastic results, but I don’t think they are really seen as such. So that’s my question. Thank you.
Didier Le Bret: I can give you two short answers. First, when I was the French president as a special advisor for intelligence services, at that time, we were recruiting like hell for our secret service. Why? Because they made a fantastic movie, a series, Le Bureau des Gendarmes. For the next 10 years, we are sure we’ll get the best people in this very service because of that. That’s called soft power. So first recommendation, think about the best way to target those that you need. And the second that’s part of my new functions, I will make my best efforts to talk to French people because we diplomats live overseas, work overseas. We know the world, but we poorly know our own country. So I will spend half of my time talking to French people through the media, to the university, to schools. And even in the process, I’m recruiting an army of diplomats to talk. And outside of diplomat, we set up what we call a citizen reserve. I don’t know what’s the right word in English. The army does. You mean you want to serve your country? You don’t have to be diplomat or civil servant. Wherever you are, you can do something for your country. So I ask those people to be part of our efforts to talk to French people. And once French people or whatever people, they know what you do, I mean, members of parliament will defend your budget. They will protect you against adversity, which is the common rule of our life. So this is, to me, key. We have to talk to politicians. We have to talk to ordinary people. We have to justify what we are doing and say that what we’re doing is a great benefit for the country and overall, as it was said yesterday, for the international relations.
Maria Edera Spandoni: So then we go back to communication and how to communicate with people, communicate with the members of the parliaments, for example, and try to make a great picture about what you want to do. So then you get the funds and you get support. That’s really in a few words. I had another question there, and then we go back with. Yes, please.
Audience: Thank you very much. My name is Najman Oteibi. I’m the director of the qualifying program at Prince Saud Al-Faisal Institute for Development Studies in Saudi Arabia. Let us be realistic here. Ambassador Abdulaziz talked about the competency framework and its limitation, especially in identifying a leader or training them. And I can’t agree anymore. Human beings are, humans are complex. We are, we have emotions. We have psychology. We have cognitive behavior. We cannot quantify that on terms of scales. It’s very difficult. Yes, you can take it as an indicator, but not as a reference point that, OK, if that kind of list of competency, then he or she is a leader. That’s a kind of risk that should be, I think, considered during the process of selection to the right leader. I don’t know what’s the creative approach here. Maybe Dr. Abdulaziz’s unconventional way of identifying leaders and training them. But probably if that creativity is away from the traditional way of competencies framework, something that is in real environment scenarios, whether role-based or whatever, the creativity in that sense. So, yes, leaders are important from, whether in ministries or elsewhere, but the challenge is how to identify them, because it’s not easy. I need someone to elaborate on that a little bit more. I would appreciate it. Thank you.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you for your deep understanding of what I’m coming from. Now, we are talking about experiential learning. We are talking about simulations. We are talking about scenario planning. We are talking about on-job training. We’re talking about the coaching and mentorship. We are talking about real experience, putting these leaders in real experiences in terms of crisis management, complex zone management. Those third secretary, one overnight becomes the acting ambassador because of whatever circumstances happened. Competencies will not help you that much in these cases. It will only produce a prototype, typical diplomats. It’s good to start with, but I don’t think it’s good for… leadership. This is what I’m really talking about.
Geoffrey Wiseman: I think I would make an important conceptual distinction. First of all, it’s very difficult. The conceptual challenge about the leadership concept is that politicians are meant to lead and diplomats are meant to follow. That’s the basic distinction. That’s the basic binary. The issue is, of course, that it’s much more complicated and interesting than that. And I would basically advise everyone to ignore that distinction. But nonetheless, I think there is a… where I disagree with your assumption is that we should not be trying to identify leaders because there are such things as situational leaders. Like the jury foreman at a criminal trial. That is a situational leader. The second secretary who’s all of a sudden acting as charge is a situational leader. That person hasn’t been identified through a competency framework. This sort of thing happens. And I apply this situational thing to states. Small states in particular. Which small state do you know of that is currently running for one of the non-permanent positions on the Security Council? It’s a situational leadership. You don’t have to be a leader all the time. You can come and go. And I think that’s okay. That’s how I would sort of answer it. And I think there’s some similarities here without thinking on that. But that’s my take.
Maria Edera Spandoni: Thank you very much. Last reflection, suggestion. I’ll try to bring this up to something beyond the 17th century. I’m going to disagree with you, Jeff. Good friend. I highly respect you. But, comma however, I think that there’s a situational element to all leadership. That’s true. Some are born to it. Some have it thrusted upon them or something like that. But, developing leaders is a little bit like developing an athlete or an artist or a musician. There are people who have some of the innate skills, the judgment, the initiative, the empathy, and probably most importantly the vision. And then what you can do in a corporation or a diplomatic academy in a diplomatic corps is put people in situations as they are developing from junior to middle to senior where they both can work. They deal with crises, small crises, big crises, so that when it is a real crisis or it is a moment for real leadership, they have the innate skills and they have the experience and they’ve been given the confidence and the support that you are. I think we’ve all also dealt with people who are highly competent managers. Highly competent managers. And lord knows we need highly competent managers. But being a very competent manager of resources, people, even issues to a certain extent is not the same thing as having the vision and the drive and the ability to recruit people to follow you. The basic element of being a leader is somebody has to want to follow you. Those can be developed, refined, encouraged, supported, and then promoted. But they can’t be created. And so part of building future leaders is also identifying future leaders and then giving them the skills and the experience that they can do it. I would never say that, you know, I know that I would never say that politicians lead and diplomats simply follow. There are leaders within politicians and there are leaders within diplomacy, business, and everything else. So this is a skill and a talent that can be developed, identified, worked on. As I said, I think in a lot of ways, in this particular case, diplomatic academies are like a good coaching staff. And you spot talent. We talked about this in my team yesterday. That part of doing mid-level training is to do talent spotting. Who has those basic skills? And then like a good coach, how do I help you get better and better and better? So that when you’re thrown into something, you suddenly become charge at a second secretary. You know what you, you know yourself, you know the issues, you’ve been given the opportunity, and you can step forward. And I’ve had cases where the number two was the leader in an embassy and the number one went to the parties. And that was fine with the number two because they don’t want to go to all those stupid parties anyway. So real leadership is not a question of title. Real leadership is a function of character, characteristics, and experience put together. Thank you very much. If I can add something. I’m converting myself into a panelist, but this is so interesting. Exactly what you said. Being a leader doesn’t mean having the role of a leader, okay? Some people just have these leadership skills and they have because, you know, they’re natural for them. And maybe they’re not in a leadership role but they do have these leadership skills. So what you said, it’s really important. And then another thing I also believe is important is that you can learn to be a leader but you need to know yourself a lot. You need to know your potential strengths, your limitations, your natural strengths. So it’s also a journey within yourself and say, okay, what can you do? If I have some limitations, I delegate because I can also delegate and delegation is so important. I believe for everybody, not just for diplomats. So if I have limitations, I delegate if I can. If I need to manage conflicts, I will try to know myself and understand how, which is the best way to manage conflicts and also if I can improve in my leadership journey, I can do that. It’s not a role. Some people are natural leaders. Some other people have to be trained because of course we need training. But I personally believe it’s a great journey and I personally believe it’s important also to train leadership because when you go out from university at least that’s what happened to me. Nobody tells you how to be a leader or how to manage a team. They tell you thousands of stuff. You go out and you’re like, you know, you know everything about your subject. My subject was the languages and German language. So you know everything about that. But don’t tell you how to be, how to manage people, which is, I believe, one of the most challenging things I ever experienced. So that was just another reflection of mine. Thank you very much. I thank you, the panelists. I thank you, the public. That was so engaging. I really wish you a great day. It was great for me to be a moderator for this panel. Thank you very much to everybody. Dear colleagues, just one logistic note. Can I have your attention please?
