Diplomats take a leaf out of the corporate sector

By Della Bradshaw

Published: July 23 2006 17:37 |

Last updated: July 23 2006 17:37

One of the footnotes to last week’s UK television coverage of the Israeli attacks on the Lebanon were the vocal complaints by British citizens that the local embassy had been slow to evacuate them from an area that was rapidly becoming a war zone.

It was the sort of nightmare diplomatic scenario that has the potential to become increasingly common as tension hots up around the globe. Just one week earlier, for example, there were terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Mumbai, potentially involving British citizens.

For Sir Michael Jay, who is retiring this month as permanent secretary at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and head of the diplomatic service, it is clear that the environment in which diplomats operate is changing rapidly.

“A lot of people have become a lot less safe; safety is a much bigger issue. It is a very complex operation, which is often dangerous and difficult,” he says.

Following the terrorist attacks in Istanbul, in November 2003, in which three Britons were killed, Sir Michael says he realised that the FCO bore many similarities to a multinational company. “I often feel I have more in common with the head of a global corporation than a government department,” he says. In his charge are 16,000 people in 240 posts around the world.

These issues, along with the government imperative to make the civil service more professional, have led to a growing realisation in the FCO that management skills are of equal value to traditional diplomatic skills.

“The presumption used to be that if you could do the negotiating and policy advice to government, that would get you to the top. Now it’s not enough,” says Sir Michael. “Over the past 10 years we have increasingly recognised the crucial importance of management...Issues such as IT, HR issues, staff management – these are not an add-on.”

Sir Michael believes the FCO is managed far better than it was a decade ago, although the transformation is not yet complete. “We have not yet got the internal communications right in a widely dispersed organisation at a time of change,” he says. Communication issues were central to the complaints in Beirut last week.

Government departments in the UK are not the only ones to recognise the value of management training. In the US it has been a growing trend over recent years and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation now sends employees on such a customised programme, at the Kellogg school at Northwestern University.

Although the FCO, like other government departments, has access to in-house management training through the National School of Government, Sir Michael says it became clear quite quickly that they needed outside help to effect the changes they needed.

In 1999 the FCO turned to Ashridge in the UK to train swaths of its middle managers. To date more than 600 of these “leaders of the future”, as Sir Michael calls them, have gone through the programme. The FCO is also using Ashridge to train its more senior diplomats.

Over the seven years of the scheme, attitudes of people on the programmes have changed dramatically, says Valerie Wark, client director for the FCO development programme at Ashridge. “In 1999 there were high levels of cynicism about management training. The attitude of the Foreign Office participants was that they didn’t want to be there. It took two to three days for them to realise there was something in it. With other clients we would have got to that point by Monday lunchtime.” Now, she says, the programme has a waiting list.

One past participant of the Ashridge programme is Vicki Treadell, deputy high commissioner in Mumbai. Earlier this month she had to bring all her management skills to bear when just after six o’clock on a Tuesday evening seven terrorist bombs exploded on commuter trains travelling to the northern suburbs of the city, where 160 of her staff live. “It brought it all into sharp focus,” she says.

While staff had to continue with the traditional consular services such as dealing with visa applications, an emergency plan had to be put into place, hospitals had to be checked for British citizens among the 200 dead and up to 800 injured, and staff concerns about family and friends needed to be dealt with. Over the critical 36-hour period it was communications skills that made all the difference, says Ms Treadell.

“A lot of it is about getting you to look at yourself and take stock of yourself,” she says. “The people you lead and manage need to know how you are going to inspire and motivate them...If you get the internal thing right you have a much better chance of getting the external thing right.”

The sort of people who attend the programmes these days are very different from those who pioneered the process, says Ms Wark. In the 1990s the career diplomat still held sway, but these days course participants are likely to have spent some time in industry, either on secondment or in previous jobs, or be specialists in information technology or human resources.

Ms Treadell is perhaps typical. Before going out to India she lived in Lancashire in northern England, working with local companies. The experiences of employees like her have now led the FCO to look for additional skills when recruiting staff. Linguistic ability is just one of several talents needed.

When Ashridge began working for the FCO it conducted an analysis of training needs, which fed into a review of skills. Both exercises informed changes to the recruitment process, says Gerry Reffo, head of learning and development at the FCO.

More change is afoot. Ashridge has spent the past 18 months developing a senior programme for diplomats who will be sent out as head of mission. It is centred on traditional leadership skills – the sort of training more familiar to a chief executive. As part of the package, each new embassy head gets a series of coaching sessions. More than 60 have been on the evolving programme.

The FCO has also decided to take training in lower-level management skills to the masses, organising courses locally for recruits in the embassies.

Along with all the talk of “customers” and “competencies”, one of the most significant pieces of management jargon the FCO has learnt is “feedback”. Diplomats who have completed the head-of-mission programme at Ashridge are hugely positive, says Sir Michael. But the accolade he perhaps holds most dear is accreditation by Investors in People, which provides a framework for improving business performance through good human-resource practices.

Sir Michael says: “Three years ago we wouldn’t have got it and we wouldn’t have deserved it.”

Looking at the FCO as an outsider, Ms Wark says the government department has undergone huge cultural change. “It’s hard to imagine that you could get such a shift in five to six years.”