From Analyst to Ambassador: A Conversation with Linda Taglialatela

Diplomacy in the Caribbean rarely dominates headlines, yet it sits at the intersection of U.S. security, economic interests, and regional resilience. In this episode, retired U.S. Ambassador Linda Taglialatela reflects on a four-decade career in government service that culminated in leading the U.S. diplomatic mission responsible for relations with seven nations across the Eastern Caribbean. The conversation explores leadership and decision-making in complex organizations, the evolution of opportunities for women in public service, and the strategic importance of the Caribbean—where small island states navigate climate change, economic development, and growing engagement from global competitors. Drawing on decades of experience in management, personnel policy, and diplomacy, the discussion offers practical insights into building consensus, developing teams, and sustaining productive international partnerships. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Rising to positions of significant responsibility in government has often required navigating institutions through resilience, credibility, sustained performance, and personal sacrifice. At the same time, diplomacy in the Caribbean reflects a unique strategic environment where small island states confront challenges ranging from climate vulnerability to economic transformation while remaining closely tied to the interests of the United States. This episode explores the intersection of effective decision making and the enduring importance of productive relationships in the Caribbean region. Welcome to Brungart Law's Lanya, where we provide a little extra perspective through conversations with individuals from across the spectrum of society. I'm Maurice Brungart, your host. I enjoy engaging with experienced, knowledgeable, and passionate people for the opportunity it affords to enrich our understanding of the world through their eyes. The more we learn, the more likely we can become better versions of ourselves and guide others towards the same. Today's guest is retired U.S. Ambassador Linda Taglialatella, who served from 2016 to 2023 as U.S. Ambassador to Barbados and concurrently to six other Eastern Caribbean nations. Over a career spanning four decades in government, she has served in senior State Department management roles and after beginning her career at the Government Accountability Office. Welcome to the program, Ambassador Taglia Latella.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Maurice. I think that what you're doing is exciting and exceptional. And I think it's a good thing for whoever your listeners are to get a perspective on different leaders in the from the federal government but also from the private sector.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

I appreciate that. Why don't you take us uh back to, you know, a little uh road trip through history here from Vestal, New York to the U.S. Foreign Service. How to get started?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

I went to undergraduate work, I did my undergraduate work at the State University of New York at Oneanta. And when I graduated, the job market had more or less crashed, so I started applying to graduate schools. So my older brother had gone to Virginia Tech. Um, and I decided I actually thought it was going to be warmer and sunnier. I didn't realize it was in the Blue Ridge Mountains and that it was going to be cold and snowy, just like Oneanta. But off I went and I did a two-year master's program at Virginia Tech. And from there I was recruited to the government accountability office. Um, I spent six years there as a management analyst. And during my last two years, I was part of the international group. And a number of my colleagues, we had two field offices, one in Bangkok and one in Germany and Frankfurt. And I was working with them on several projects, but as the projects progressed, a couple of them left and went to the State Department Inspector General's office. And then all of a sudden, they realized that they needed some diversity, and they started looking at how do we get females and minorities to come work in the IG's office. So they called me up and suggested I apply. And I was very fortunate to be one of two people selected to come to the IG. I spent five years there, four years wandering the world inspecting embassy operations, and here in Washington I looked at bureaus and what their functions were and how they were performing and how they were implementing foreign policy from Washington. From there, I went to be an officer, a management officer in a bureau that was just forming. It was called the Bureau of Information Policy, Communication and Information Policy. And from four people, we expanded to 57 people. After I got that done, it was time to go overseas. And I also had gotten married, and my husband was in telecommunications, so he wanted to go to Geneva where I could work at the ITU. And every time I said Geneva, they said something else, which was kind of interesting. They said Cairo, they said, you know, Bangkok. I said, want to go to Geneva. Well, to make a long story short, all of a sudden there was a job in Bern, Switzerland, a management, the management counselor job. And off I went and did three years in Bairn as the management officer. And I came back to Washington and went to work in a in the Bureau of Human Resources. And I ended up in an office as the deputy director, which was called Resource Management and Organizational Analysis. And again, it was the analytical branch of the Bureau of Human Resources. And we did a lot of sort of forecasting. We forecasted promotion numbers. We looked at how you assign people, how many people you needed any one particular embassy, and how you divvyed up what resources we had. We put priorities on things. We also looked at civil service personnel management and how do we implement the programs that OPM was putting out. And I stayed there for probably 10 years. And then I was asked to be a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Human Resources. And I was responsible for civil service personnel grievances, retirement, organ, the Bureau, the office I came from, resource management and organizational analysis. And from there, um, after 14 years doing that, I asked my senior um man the senior Foreign Service officer who was the under-secretary for management to help me get another job. I sort of had done that, been there. I assumed he was going to offer me another deputy assistant secretary job, and instead he offered me the list of embassies that were available after negotiations with the White House to determine which embassies they wanted to put their people in. I put down my three choices and I went through the process, and I have no idea how, but I became the uh Department of State and White House choice to be the ambassador to Barbados in the Eastern Caribbean. Um and so I went through that entire process, which included Senate confirmation and again final White House approval, and off I went. I have to say that it was probably one of the most interesting and also one of the most challenging. I think a lot of times when you look at things, you don't, you sort of think you know what you're getting into until you actually get your feet on the ground. And when I got my feet on the ground and realized that there were actually seven independent countries, all of whom wanted a relationship with the United States but wanted different things from the United States. And then, of course, I knew what we wanted as foreign policy. A lot of it had to do with getting them to vote with us at the UN and the OAS, the Organization for American States, and also working with them on developing their economies, working with them on climate change, and also then providing them military support, developing their small military combined police forces. And towards the end of it, we got very involved in cybersecurity because one of the countries actually got hacked and someone was asking for$50 million to walk away. So we spent a lot of time working with seven different countries. But it was interesting in the sense that I never expected to be there eight years. Ambassadors usually stay no more than three. But I was an Obama appointee. I went through the Trump administration and then I went through the first year and a half of the Biden administration. So I also had three different administrations to work with to figure out as our foreign policy goals shifted and how do we implement those policies and continue to build our relationship in the Caribbean. So yes, I have to say I had a very privileged career. Um that I never ever expected as a little girl growing up in Vestal, New York. Um, for those who don't know, Vestal, New York is on the border of the Pennsylvania-New York border. It um is part of what they call the Triple Cities. And Maurice, this is a question for you. Um the Triple Cities was Johnson City, Endicott, and Binghamton. And then there were little towns that came along like Vestal. So tell me, what is Endicott, New York, famous for?

SPEAKER_00 9:08

I would say a lot of snow.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

That's true, there was a lot of snow, but it was the home of IBM. The first manufacturing plants of IBM were in Endicott, New York.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Out of curiosity, and this goes into my question about how experiences shaped your entry in uh decision making in uh public service. Did your parents work for IBM or did you have neighbors that worked for IBM?

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Um, we were an IBM family. Um my dad actually started at Indicott Johnson Shoes, but then when the opportunity came, he moved to IBM. My older brother, when he graduated from Virginia Tech, got hired by IBM. I had two uncles and three cousins who worked for IBM. But when I went to look for a job at IBM, there was no jobs because of the job market had crashed, and basically I could have been a bank teller. But during my high school experience, I during my senior year I was a co-op student at IBM. And then during the summers, I worked at IBM in different jobs. And I have to tell you, I don't know whether it's planned, but during high school I worked as a cashier in a grocery store. Um, I was intrigued by the job of my co-op job because I worked with people who were doing programming, and back then they had stacks of cards that they would key punch, and then you'd have to take the cards down to the computer room to get someone to run them. And it was very interesting because at the time my father was the head of the computer room, um, and they always thought I could make a deal with my dad to get their cards at the front of the line. It didn't work, Maurice. Um my dad was sort of grumpy and he got mad when they sent me down there with the deck of cards asking for a favor. But anyway, um, yes, I thought I wanted to go to work for IBM, and even when I was in graduate school, I interviewed with IBM, and the jobs that they had available were not interesting to me. So I actually interviewed with GAO. It sounded intriguing. Again, somebody walks in and tells you that you are, you know, part of the Congress, you do um re analytical work, investigations, and go report and brief Congress. Um, it sounded very interesting what we did, but I never got to go up on the hill and brief anybody, but I did a lot of analytical work and it honed in on my analytical skills. It also showed me the value of teamwork and working with people and basically learning how to take what I was doing and collaborate with my colleagues.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

For context, when you entered uh the government at that time, who is president?

SPEAKER_01 12:15

That's not fair, Maurice. Well, I heard I I entered the federal government in 1973. Who was the president?

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Oh, well, at that time it would have been uh Nixon.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

It could be yes. Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Okay. The reason I ask is because, again, understanding what the climate was at the time, you know, for our society, you know, where we were thinking, and how all that shaped uh sort of the influencing factors on you and how you saw government, uh, and then to be able to extrapolate that and apply it to today. Uh, I mean, what was what was your impression of government at the time and and the role of the United States and the world uh as a young woman entering Uncle Sam's service?

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Well, I will tell you when I first entered the government um as a brand new hire to GAO, the government accountability office, they obviously were going out and looking first at EEO statistics across the government. And it was very clear at the time because people were looking for what would be a diverse workforce, but also is the government hiring particularly women and minorities. So when I got to GAO, it was very clear that GAO looked at themselves and decided they were a very white male organization, so they thought it would be good to hire women, but they hired enough women because they had audit sites across the federal government, but they hired enough women that you could put one here, one there, where one whatever. And I ended up, I know you'll like this, I ended up going to the government printing office as my first assignment. And I walked in, and yes, there was a group of white males, and they were doing a project looking at recycled how much recycled product the United States government bought from the G the GPO bought. Were they printing books and pamphlets and directives from recycled paper? Where were they getting it? How much was out there? So when I walked in, these gentlemen looked at me. They asked me where I came from, what I did. I told them a little bit about myself, and they gave me a 23 column worksheet. And they told me to take the information in this book and put it in for line by line each item, put it in the spreadsheet of 23 columns. And when I asked what it was for, they said, well, we're going to use it as sort of our, you know, like one of our papers that justify our findings. I said, but you have a book that has all that information in it, and you could just use that book. Um, I did that for about three weeks and became very discouraged with the federal government given what I thought GAO did and what I was doing. So, and on top of that, I went over, I it was very clear they didn't know what to do with me. They would sit around, um, either bring their lunch or go out to lunch, but never invited me. I always brought my lunch and ate by myself. And then one day they invited me to go to lunch, and it was very clear lunch was very stifled because they didn't know what to say to me, what to do. Um, and it became very clear to me that they had no idea what to do with me because I was a woman, not because I wasn't competent, but because I was a woman. How do you deal with her? Um, so I went back over to the headquarters and told them that I was thinking about resigning, that this wasn't my thing. And they immediately reassigned me to a different group. I will tell you that as time went on and the projects I worked on, they did become very important. Um, one of the big I ended up in the Federal Personnel and Compensation Division, and there was a congressional request to look at the all-volunteer force back in 76-77. They were very concerned that not enough people were volunteering, and why was that, and what could someone do to make it better? I also then did sort of a subsection of that looking at opportunities for women in the military. And it became very clear that even though there was a shortage of men wanting to join the military, there obviously was a large number of young women who wanted to join the military, but there wasn't enough opportunity within the military for them to um join. So we were looking at how do you extend the number of occupational series women could be in. And we went and interviewed people, and I won't bore you with all the stories, but I went to one place where I talked to a colonel and asked him the very question why can't there be more occupational series open to women? Because obviously that would help the old volunteer force. And his response was, which was mind-boggling to me, but he said to me, just as an example, there is a ravine and there's a log across the ravine, and the so the male soldiers go over the over the putting one foot in front of the other. Women sidestep. I mean, really? They sidestep across the log. And I looked at him and I said, but they all got over over the ravine. What difference did it make how they did it? And he just looked at me like, well, they're supposed everybody's supposed to do it the same way. And it became clear to me that they either didn't want women or they were confused because women did it differently and got to a different result. And I will tell you, all through my career, it was very clear to me that women and men don't necessarily think alike. And I'm sure that amongst all of us we think differently. But we all somehow can come to a reasonable practical conclusion to whatever we're doing, and we just do it differently. When I left GAO, I obviously went to work for the inspector general, and I got to see a lot of different management opportunities in and the way people handled things. And there were people who overseas who obviously needed counseling and how to supervise or how to deal with employees. Um, some of them, yes, had problems. They were males dealing with females, or they were white people dealing with black people, but they were confused because again, the inspector general, the Foreign Service was a very white male organization when I first joined. And getting people to understand that even though you're not a white male, you're very capable of doing things, and you just need to understand they may not do it the way you do it. Um, but again, they get to the same conclusion, they get to the same recommendations, or sometimes they come up with different recommendations, but they're valid options to consider as far as recommendations. I think this sort of helped me be a better supervisor because as I went through my career, I mentally took a piece of paper and drew a line and said, these are really good attributes of supervisors, and these are things I hope nobody ever does again. And hopefully, if I do them, I hit myself upside the head because they're not appropriate. I um also learned that when after I left the inspector general or well, after I left the inspector general's office, I did this job, went overseas, um, and I was in the Foreign Service during this whole time. Because I got married to someone who was not in the Foreign Service, it was very clear they weren't going with me anymore to any more places. He was able to go every day on the train from Bern to Geneva and work at the ITU, but that was not always going to be an option for him to have a job when a professional job when we went overseas. So I converted to civil service and went to work for an office, the the Office of Resource Management and Organizational Analysis. There was the office director and the two division chiefs who were male.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Uh allow me to interrupt you briefly, and that is you made the decision to convert uh or to uh stay in the civil service, better stated. Um was that decision driven by the fact your spouse at the time did not want to go overseas? And that was sort of the first sacrifice you made in your own professional career? I mean, i if it were not for him, let me phrase it this way, do you think you would have continued overseas?

SPEAKER_01 21:23

I would have continued doing what I was doing, but yes, I also put my marriage ahead of my career, and I converted to civil service because he at that time was working in the private sector, had a good job, was happy, and we had only been married three and a half years or four years at the time, and I didn't understand the idea. He told me I could go overseas again, and he would come visit, and I could come home, but I didn't think that was the way one wanted to have a marriage. So, yes, I converted to civil service. Um

SPEAKER_00 22:00

How do you think your own personal upbringing? Uh let's let's kick it back a little. You know, your your parents, how they raised you, how much of that do you think uh and the overall environment? Did you go to a private school, a public school?

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Um we all went to the public school. It was a you know, it was a very good high school. It offered a lot of different elective kind of courses. Um we rode a bus to school. It was very easy, but I think I will tell you it probably wasn't till we were older. And my sister, I will tell you, my older brother worked for IBM and retired. My younger brother went on to get a PhD and became a college professor. I went on, obviously, and had a career in the federal government, and my sister started out as a teacher and be and right now is the school superintendent. But one day we were sitting talking to my dad, and he looked at my and it was my sister and I, and he looked to us and he said, I need to understand what your mother and I did wrong. And I said, That you have an interesting look on your face, Mars. And I said, I said, and we both looked at him and said, Because I'm waiting to see where this is gonna go. Well, no, he said, both of my my older brother got married between his junior and senior year of college, and my younger brother got married three days after he and his wife graduated with their BAs. My sister and I, and they both went on and had families. My sister and I, obviously, neither one of us got married until we were in our mid-30s, and they had children, we didn't have children, although that was something that I wanted to do, but I didn't. But it was like, how did I end up with these two incredibly successful professional daughters? And I ended up with sons who, you know, placed their family, having families and all that as much of a priority as their jobs. I mean, where did we go wrong? It was supposed to be the boys that had these incredibly professional jobs, and our daughters who lived in the little White House with the picket fence and had like two or three or four kids and lived happily ever after, or preferably somewhere in near Vestel. Um, and they didn't. And we just looked at him. I mean, I it was interesting because yes, later in life, my father still had this image that his little girls were supposed to be taken care of. Um, and he was very don't get me wrong, he was incredibly proud of his little girls, but he was confused as to why this turned out the way it did. And I didn't have an answer. I couldn't tell him. I said it was just the way things happened.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Hmm. Well, uh, one of the reasons I asked this, it's it's not to go down some rabbit hole of uh crying over uh spilled milk, so to say, and I'm oversimplifying things, but it's more of you know for the audience to understand and you having become an an ambassador, and even previous to that, you were in significant positions of responsibility. That for a woman uh years ago, and who knows to what extent today, no, how much their decision making perhaps has been influenced by precisely these types of situations? Uh, and that maybe at a subconscious level, uh women have maybe restrained themselves in how they affect their decisions and their particular roles once they are uh accomplished leaders. I mean, w what are your observations or thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 26:03

I think um I consider myself to be a couple generations back from people who are running the workforce now. But yes, back when back when I started, there was a big, it was obviously clear to me that there was a big interest, and and some of it was actually women who you know came into the workforce but really wanted to get married and have children and have the second care second job or the second career as opposed and let the husbands shine and sparkle and be the breadwinner. Um, I think today, and I think I think as we as we progress, I think it became different. I think, yes, I think now women want to have a career. And I think in a lot of cases, when I look around at some of the young couples that are live near me, and look at other young couples in the federal government that I know in the federal government, they both have to work because they want to have the big house, they want to have children, and in order to afford all that, they both have to work. But there's always someone who is one step ahead of the other, and that's usually the male.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

Okay. Okay. Well, now let's go back to to your career. And uh you spent a significant amount of time on the human resource side uh in the State Department. Tell us a bit about that, and uh specifically how that influenced your ability to uh be an ambassador uh in the Caribbean.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

I think my career being analytical and looking at programs and policies and being the State Department representative on the Chief Human Capital Officer Committee, which was made up of all the people who do civil service personnel at OP from through OPM. I learned a lot about how to do how to build consensus. How do you get people to talk about what's important? Um, I found when people came to me with a question or a problem, they would ask me something, but I would pursue what they were asking. Because sometimes what they were asking is not really what they wanted the answer to. They just didn't know how to ask the question. So I learned that it was important to dig into the information that was out there and to, if you came to a conclusion, look at what the impact was. I am have always believed in consensus building, I've always believed in developing young people developing your staff and particularly the younger people. And I found that, particularly in the civil service world that I was dealing with, I needed to bring people into the room who had some kind of impact or information or knowledge about whatever we were talking about. And I wanted to give everybody in the room the opportunity to talk. I understood that in the end it was me who made the final recommendation, it was me who made the final decision, but it was bringing people into the room and giving everybody a voice. And I found that people appreciated that, but it also made for a better product because I would sort of go into the room with an idea about how it worked, but people told me different things which sort of influenced the final decision. And there were people who came in who were very adamant about what they thought the decision should be, but I continued to build it to what appeared to what I thought was consensus. When it was done, when the meeting was getting to a closure, I would decide what the what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. And I made it clear at that point when I explained where we were going, what they needed to do, and what everybody's role was in doing it, that when they all walked out the door, we were all on the same page. We did not go out the door and say, well, she didn't like my idea, she didn't do this, but I hoped I showed everybody why we needed to build the plan we had. So when everybody went out, we were on the same page, we were all going in the same direction. And if something was going not the quite the way we planned, we got back in the room and talked about what we needed to do to adjust it. The other thing I learned very quickly was even as an ambassador, a deputy assistant secretary, an office director, I got a lot of praise for the work that was done. And I would always make sure that it was clear that it was a team effort and that I had a team that we worked together and it wasn't just me. If something got messed up, I took responsibility for not going right. I didn't go back and say, well, I have this team that messed up. But what I would do afterwards, I would take full responsibility for what we did. I would call people into the office and say, okay, let's talk about what we did right, what didn't go right, and how do we need to fix it in terms of communication, um, planning, implementation, and how do we do it better? Because I can't fix what always happened. And I think those lessons were very valuable as I moved through my career, um, learning and everybody got to speak, regardless of you know who they were. Um, for example, when we I would go visit one of my seven islands, I had a junior officer or a relatively young new officer responsible for that off that country. They spent, you know, a week a month in their country. They built up context, they knew what was going on. So when I was getting ready to go, I would bring them into the room along with all the other section heads who had something going on there. And I gave everybody a voice, including this young officer, who could tell me a lot about what they saw going on and who we needed to see, what we thought their response was going to be to the things I wanted them to engage in. And I think it developed them and they understood their importance to the process and to the foreign policy implementation. And it was good for people to see that. My predecessor, when he would travel, he traveled by himself. He would take the briefing notebook and go by himself. He'd come back and give them a you know half-hour briefing of what he did, and that was the end of it. But nobody was learning anything from this process. Um, and I obviously have a very different management style. Um, I believe in being inclusive and bringing everybody together. Um, because somebody may know something I need to know before I step into a room and try to talk to somebody.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Uh on that note, uh, and I'm gonna borrow from one of my previous guests, uh Patrick Baxter. Uh, he was a 17-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department. And he talked about uh he was a strong proponent of community policing. And he stated that you know it takes weeks, months, sometimes years to build the rapport and the relationships in a particular neighborhood with people who'll be willing to engage with law enforcement, so then law enforcement can do its job effectively, but it only takes seconds, minutes to effect an arrest. Uh meaning, you know, you you can undermine, you you can really focus on the the crime, uh, the anti-crime tactics, you know, arresting criminals, but the the real strength, uh, the the true effectiveness or in the organization is of the individual's ability to develop relationships. So taking that into what you're doing, that sounds much like uh how you approached uh your organization. The idea is building those relationships because in the long term uh you'll be much more effective. I mean, do you find uh some similarity in that sense?

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Um I was in Barbados during COVID, and for probably three to three to four months the airport was closed, we couldn't go anywhere. Um even with COVID traveling, if you went to some of the countries, you had to um isolate. And I found that because during my first two months there, I went and spent three three weeks, three days on every island, and I met with everybody, and then I kept going back and having, I would always meet with the prime minister, the foreign minister, and key ministers. I would also make sure that the people who were responsible for the military andor police or the combination of them knew I was on island, I would go, and if we were like handing over, sometimes we handed over boats, sometimes we had USAID projects that we were kicking off, I would show up and make those connections. So during COVID, when I couldn't go, it was easy to pick up the phone and call a prime minister. I will tell you, and I'm sure I'll um not to get in trouble with the federal government, but there would be a vote at the UN, and you know, two days before the vote, they would call and say, call your you know, prime minister and ask them to support your vote. Well, we were talking about not one prime minister, we were talking about seven, trying to get seven people on the phone in one day to be able to talk to them about what we were doing at the UN and how we wanted them to support our vote. It really took a lot of energy to do that. But prime ministers would take my call because I had developed those relationships. Sometimes I didn't get to all seven, sometimes my staff would end up calling the foreign minister or someone else who was involved with that particular subject, hoping they could get to the prime minister and influence their decision. But yes, relationships are important. Building trust, building confidence, knowing that you know, sometimes the conversations weren't positive. Sometimes I had to deliver bad news. But they understood and it they appreciated my candor, they appreciated my directness, they appreciated our fact that we had done our research, we came up with what we thought was our way to implement foreign policy based on guidance from Washington, and they understood where we were coming from, even though they may have disagreed with us.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Um what are some lessons that you learned along the way, and we'll we'll keep it sort of limited, um, from someone who was your leader, no, or your supervisor, whether it was this is a great way of doing things uh or that's not a great way of doing things, and also from a subordinate, a lesson that you learned from a subordinate.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

When I was at um GL and I had was working on the impact of having a uh uh all volunteer force and women in the military, I had an incredible supervisor who really wanted to develop people. And I tell you, I he when we went to interview military people, he and I would go, and we would be sitting in front of a desk with someone sitting, some military officer sitting behind us, and he would introduce us and he would say, Linda's going to conduct the interview and ask the questions, and we would start. And what he would do is push his chair back behind me so that I was the one sitting straight in front of the desk. And it was interesting because I would ask the question and the guy would look directly at him to give the answer. And then he would say, Linda, do you have a follow-up question? And but it taught me that he was trying to develop me to give me credentials, to make me, because I was an integral part of this thing, it was important for me to learn how to do the interviews, to be able to get people to answer. And it was an interesting experience. It was somewhat humorous, but I did learn that taking people who subordinates, as I say, that's why I would take subordinates with me when I traveled and get them to participate in meetings because I knew my career was sort of over in the sense that I had reached the place where there was no place else to go. At this, well, it was time to retire basically after I left Barbados. But these people were gonna be there and they needed to learn, they needed to be developed, I needed to bring them along. I also had, you know, talking to watching, I had well, I had an experience where one employee came to see me, and they were talking about their supervisor. Actually, it was probably a second or third level supervisor, but the individual yelled all the time, and he actually threw things at people, nothing serious, but he'd throw pencils, he'd throw, you know, he actually threw a stapler at somebody. But the point being is this it was like, how do you deal with that? They asked me, what do you do about it? And I said, first of all, I'd pick up something and throw it back, but I would also explain to them that that was not the way we behaved and you did not appreciate it. And to be very honest, the individual was count counseled on his super on his um supervisory skills um and told that it was inappropriate. It didn't stop him necessarily, but it made him think before he did it. Um, but yeah, I you know, supervising people and people coming to you and saying, How do I deal with this? And I truly believe that raising your voice um you lose control and you lose control of the people in the room because they just shut down if you start yelling. And I, to be honest, I never yelled. Um, my mother was a very interesting woman, she was Italian, and she very seldom yelled, but she could drop you dead with one of her sarcastic singers. And I have to tell you, my sister, my sister and I are pretty good at it. So you just have to throw out one of those things that kind of like catches everybody and stops them for a moment to think, and then you move on. Um, and it's not nasty, it's just trying to get people to calm down and think about what we're talking about. And I'm very clear that we don't yell in meetings, that we respect everybody, you treat everybody with professional courtesy, and we don't interrupt people, we let everybody talk, and everybody gets a chance to talk, so be calm. Um I listen, I'm very careful to listen to some of my subordinates, and this was very important when I was in Barbados and had all these officers being responsible for a country. And it was very clear they would come in and say, you know, sort of tell me what the environment was like and who was going to be difficult, and you know, even suggest ways to get them to deal with us without, you know, even though we're not gonna deliver a positive note. But I listened to them because number one, they knew better than I did, these individuals. They knew better what their issues were and what their views on the United States was, and I think that helped me to do a better job listening to my subordinates.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Um, having worked again so many years uh on the personnel side uh and being, you know, a an analytical person and you dealt with data and forecasting, what are some sort of uh high-altitude observations you developed over time that the State Department was doing well and not well in regarding uh its placement of individuals and its uh request for additional positions and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

You know, I think that every organization has its own informal process. And I do believe that and and um not to be critical, but I do believe that yes, when when when What happens in the Foreign Service jobs go out on a bid list, and we look at all right, we have X number of jobs that are vacant, we have X number of people, so some of the bureaus are gonna have to not are gonna have to take positions and put them aside because you can't fill them, there's not anybody to fill them. And obviously, yes, there's sometimes when they know the exact person they want to put in a particular job because that person had either been in a hardship post, had done something extraordinary, was the choice of the ambassador. But in the long run, we would, you know, look at what was out there, look at the skill sets of people, and try to make sure that you were able to find a job that you were qualified to do. And I think the process worked because the bureaus themselves knew what jobs were most important to them because they obviously looked at them. We also knew what the priorities were for the government or for the State Department and foreign policy as a whole. So obviously, filling jobs during the Iraq and Afghan conflicts was filling our jobs in those posts. And those were the ones that would be filled first, and those are the ones that we probably would fill at least to 90%. And then again, we go back and look at people and their skill sets, and how do you make that work? You had people who volunteered to do the hardship posts, you had people who wanted nothing to do with them, but you tried to balance that out. We had also then looked at the promotion precepts. How do you encourage people to do things they may not want to do? And we looked at, you know, hardship posts should have big bigger differentials than posts that weren't hard. Um, I was fascinated, Barbados had a hardship post uh hardship differential of 5% because we were living on an island. I looked at the island we were living on and I thought, why do we need 5%? We're living in heaven. But because you were isolated on an island. I wasn't isolated because I traveled a lot, but there were people in the embassy who never left the islands, so I understood that 5% was good for Barbados, but 30% or 35% for something like Afghanistan or Iraq, um, someplace that is very difficult, a hardship was important. So we kind of also looked at how do you balance that out and then encourage people to do hard work, and that goes back to developing promotion precepts. Um, in order to go over the threshold to go from being the equivalent of a GS-15 or an 01 Foreign Service Officer, in order to go into the senior foreign service, you had to do a hardship post, you had to do certain things, you had to punch your ticket, as well as do an exceptional job in the places you were at. So I think analytically, we looked at how do we move people through the system. Um, sometimes when we had hiring freezes and we had gaps, big gaps in the Foreign Service because it's an up or out system, everybody starts at the bottom and moves up. We looked at creating mid-level higher programs, and again, looking at people who actually could compete in the process and be an O, you know, come in at the mid-level and be able to compete to go up. Um, we developed, you know, programs for the civil service. Again, looking at what was needed, and it was kind of interesting. The Foreign Service, many of the people were in the civil service because they wanted to be involved in foreign policy, but they didn't want to move every three years like the Foreign Service did. And then you found people who would like to have done an excursion tour, many of whom would have liked to go to Europe as opposed to anywhere else. Um, but how do you give them opportunity to do that? So we created a program that allowed when the bid cycle was over and there were jobs still unfilled, we opened them up and let civil service people apply for them. And people got to do what we called an excursion tour. Um, some later wanted to convert to the Foreign Service, some were very happy with the experience and learned a lot about the Foreign Service, but wanted to go back to where they came from. So looking at what was important and how do we continue to promote overall goals of the department and how do we best use those resources was it was an interesting challenge, and it also gave us gave us opportunities, like I say, to create new programs and new ways of doing what we were doing.

SPEAKER_00 48:48

I'm gonna ask a two-part question. So the first part is how do you go about forecasting appropriately for an organization like the State Department, which for our audience, it was the first cabinet-level agency created uh when the US government uh was founded. So it's obviously been recognized from the very beginning uh as an essential entity. Um but how do you forecast when our foreign policy is driven by politics, right? And so, you know, as an organization over years, and the people that have been career servants, uh they say, hey, we need more people who speak X language, or we need to uh shore up our presence in this particular region, or it could be policy-oriented, say on cybersecurity or AI or whatnot, trade. But the the unknown is what administration is going to come in four years, eight years from now, and then this will be the second part. What should people in the White House, and I'm not referencing specifically the the current presence, but what people when they occupy the White House need to know as they're uh modifying or implementing new foreign policy, you know, can the department keep up with it because of the way they forecasted positions in years past?

SPEAKER_01 50:27

You know, I think that what has happened is if all of a sudden we need to move people to a new place, um, we try to we try to project that into the rotate the the actual bid cycle so that people can bid on jobs, for example, in the summer, because that's when most people transfer. We also then look at the language requirements and we encourage people and we had language incentive pay for people to take specific languages that would be needed, and we would do that. I I assume the department would do that again. I think there's always a chance that yes, there's going to be something that the department's going to have to respond to quickly. And forecasting doesn't take, I mean, we we can't forecast that's going to happen, but there are mechanisms that can be developed to accomplish that. Whether you look for volunteers who want to go like leave their current jobs and go do this, how do you or you look for people who have specific language skills that you can move quickly? Um, and then you adjust all the rules. So, for example, if you're looking for someone who can go to China tomorrow who speaks Chinese, but he's right now in Pickle Post, Barbados, for example, and he has a family and he has kids in school. Well, we would let the family stay there until the school year was over, we would not disrupt their life, and this person would just go to China and do the job. Um, but yes, it sometimes things get messed up, and you have to figure out how do you adjust things quickly. And that's where not necessarily people that worked for me, but people in the front office of HR, the people who worked in the career development assignments office that would move people, they would start figuring out how we move people. I could come up with a list of Chinese speakers or Russian speakers or Iranian speakers and hand it over to them, whatever it was they wanted. I could look for people who have they have an inventory of their skill sets out there that you can pull from and again look for people who had certain skill sets you could hone in on them and see how you get people to move. And yes, making having those people move creates a deficit at the post they were at or where they were in Washington. Um, but yes, there's only a finite number of people that you have, and again, you could use civil service employees if they have the skill set that's needed, but it's responding quickly. But one would rely on the NSC, the National Security Council, and the State Department seventh floor, which is the secretary and the under-secretaries, to determine what those priorities are, what happens if we do have an emergency, and how do we deal with it? And then people like HR and everyone else gets involved in how do you make that happen?

SPEAKER_00 53:35

Um you left me kind of thinking here. Um what what suggestions would you have for any administration? You know, if if you had the ear, you know, of the White House, you know, what should they keep in mind and how they can make the most effective use of the Department of State? Because everybody has their own idea of how you know we should uh you know carry out our foreign policy and what that foreign policy should be.

SPEAKER_01 54:11

I think it goes back to having some discussions like within the cabinet, having some discussions with the people that you've um individual conversations with people that you pick, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary of Justice, military people, what are the priorities there, and what are the priorities, and how does everybody identify those and then figure out how to implement them? Because if you look around, hopefully the people who are in the cabinet positions know what is going on worldwide and where the importance of things are, what is important to the State Department in line with the policies that have been enumerated by the White House. And then the State Department has to go back and figure out how do we implement them and how do we provide the need the information and data necessary for the for the White House to make decisions. Um, but yes, a lot of this goes from the basic structure of what the administration has decided are those priorities, and that obviously is a group effort, and those are enunciated, and then everyone goes back and creates their strategy as to how to implement them. And again, like you say, that's the framework. It can change in five minutes based on something that may have happened globally, and everything has to shift, and so priorities have to be rearranged, as well as resources and implementation.

SPEAKER_00 55:49

Speaking as someone who served a substantial amount of time in the civil service and then a substantial amount of time as a foreign service leader, um, do you think the State Department uh appreciates its civil service personnel sufficiently?

SPEAKER_01 56:14

When I came to the State Department, um, and that was a long time ago, um there was an underlying tone that civil service were the locally employed staff in Washington, which they equated to having Foreign Service officers in an embassy and a locally employed staff, which were host govern host government or host country citizens, and that we had we were not involved in high-level decisions, high-level policy, or even high-level implementation. We were there to support whatever they all decided to do. I think with time and with the fact that many of the civil service people, particularly at the mid-level grades of the civil service, became involved in policy. They became the experts in particular areas, and that they were now important because they had information and data that was needed to make policy decisions. And slowly but surely, civil service have become a partner to the Foreign Service, and it's very impressive to see the balance between civil service and foreign service. We actually had a couple civil service senior executive people become assistant secretaries. We had, you know, many of them were rising to be deputy assistant secretaries. All of that obviously took into consideration that there were people there who had the knowledge and expertise to lead teams to get things done and to provide advice to the um senior leaders of the department.

SPEAKER_00 58:04

Turning outward, your time as ambassador uh in the Caribbean and dedicating some focus to that. What were your impressions and what do you think the audience should know about your counterparts in these small Caribbean nations? Uh I mean, again, the focus is on you know larger countries and regions, Europe, Russia, China, so on and so forth. But you know what's being overlooked? So let's start with your counterparts. What struck you in terms of their level of uh professionalism?

SPEAKER_01 58:45

You know, I think my counterparts obviously had a smaller focus. Um, some of them had never left their islands. Um, some of our prime ministers, some of the prime ministers were actually educated in the United States, um, who had a real understanding of the United States and how it functions and works. I think these islands were more focused on focused internally as opposed to externally. They were small islands. Barbados has 287,000 people, all the way down to St. Kits and Nevis, that has 56,000 people. Um and they were focused on how do you how do you build an economy, how do you deal with climate change, how do you deal with you know developing a police force, a military force, and not big ones, but ones that could support and protect their countries. And they were looking to the United States to help them because they wanted to be, they wanted the things we had, they wanted our training, our expertise. As time went on, their focus, their focus was always on a peaceful, stable Caribbean. Um, they didn't want anything that was going on. They also, in building their economies, they needed money. And unfortunately, we did not provide money, but the Chinese were able to come in, offer money, build things for them. Um, they built a deep water port, they built um stadiums, they built hotels, they did all sorts of things that were needed in that country. So they they just they started to have a relationship with the Chinese, and for you know, our goal was to try to minimize the impact of China and Russia in the Caribbean. And the Russians were were somewhat in the background, they weren't there, but the last two years I was there, they actually created a second prime minister of ambassador who spent more time in the Caribbean and started to influence the Caribbean. What I found what was happening was they wanted to, you know, anybody who was helping them, they wanted to be friends with. It became more difficult for me to encourage people to vote with us, like at the UN, because they didn't want to annoy the Chinese, they didn't want to annoy the Russians, and more importantly, they had relationships with Venezuela and Cuba, and obviously were against any policies that the United States had. So anytime there was a vote that impacted any of those things, they either didn't vote or they vote, well, they basically didn't vote or abstained. They just they wanted to keep all their relationships stable. So it made it a little bit more difficult for us. I think from the standpoint of technology, um, they wanted whatever we had. They wanted our military to train their police forces and um military. They USAID did a number of projects. So they wanted what we had, but it was internal to them being safe and secure. That's what was most important to them was the internal protection of all the things that are within that country.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:21

What do you think we're missing uh in terms of uh foreign policy in the Caribbean? So Western Hemisphere obviously very important. Uh the Caribbean a subset of that. Uh what would you want any administration to know uh about the Caribbean?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:48

These countries want to be a friend of the United States, but for that friendship we have to give back. And as I said, they want our military training, they want our technology, they want us to continue with some of the developmental programs we had going. They really want us to participate in global warming, climate change. Um I was startled. I just came back from Barbados. It was my first trip back since I left, and I was surprised that some of the beaches have become very narrow. There is obviously an issue with rising waters in the Caribbean. And the question is, how do you how do they deal with it? And they're looking for people who will deal with climate change and global warming. How do we deal with it and what can we do? And I think we need to focus on those issues to help them. Um it was very interesting to me that there was somebody who was from, I think it was a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, but they were looking at how do you archive what is in something like a Barbados that is built on limestone and coral that one day may not be there because of rising water. How do you deal with that? And how do you archive and say it once was there and this is what it was, and all of that? And I found that very interesting, but it kind of scared me when I was in Barbados that the water was actually rising to the point that yes, some of the beaches were going away. Um, the other islands are all built on from volcanoes, and they obviously have a different problem, but rising waters is impacting them. So I guess what I'm saying is that we need to identify what those issues are and how do we help them?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:44

Um, on that point, some might say, well, that sounds like a humanitarian issue, and you know, we can't be focused there, you know, when it comes to any type of humanitarian activity, we should be focused inward. How would you respond to that?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:04

Again, it goes back to these little islands are in our backyard. They're right there. And what do we want as far as their view of the United States? Do we want them to focus more on China and Russia and lean towards the West, or do we want the East, or do we want them to focus on us? And I think that from a strategic point, we need to have the Caribbean at least neutral to all of these countries as opposed to side with one or the other. Um the Chinese built a deep water port in Antigua, and the the point of it was that big larger cruise ships can come into the port. And that's true, they can, and they are. But they can also bring submarines into the port now that they. Have deep water ports. Anybody could bring a submarine into the port. And you know, one has to be fearful of what that means to the United States security. Um, and whatever else we have going on at that moment. So I think that we have to remain cognizant of our relationships. But yes, humanitarian efforts are important regardless whether it's internal to the United States or whether it's external to other countries.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:29

Economically speaking, uh, what opportunities uh exist in the Caribbean for US enterprises, large and small?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:43

When I got there, there was um one little company that was building parts for COVID. I can't remember what the thing was, but um there was a little manufacturing company, there were several call centers there. Um there were some American entrepreneurs had small hotels. When you look at what opportunities are there, you know, one of the things that's really interesting is that there's been some exploration on different of not in Barbados because they don't have volcanoes, but in the other six islands there are volcanoes, which means there's obviously some geothermal capacity. Um, St. Kitts and Nevis on the island of Nevis apparently the initial exploration said that Nevis's volcano could produce all sorts of geothermal energy. So the question becomes: how do you encourage people to go there when you know they want to come, they want to work with the government, but they want the government to put the money up front, which the government doesn't have, unfortunately. They're again, we're talking about small islands that can't come up with money to do this. So they're looking for ways to get incentivized companies to go there. Um, one of the other things that's sort of important is that the cost of labor is high in the islands. Um, the islands are somewhat affluent, they do have low low and middle class people, but you have to figure out how do you help and incentivize people to go there. Um, there's obviously potential, there's obviously interest. Um, I will tell you, one of the things that we were working on for a bit was um developing a hospital on one of the islands where it was specialized. Um, each of the islands have very good hospitals if you're talking about first responders and routine basic surgeries and treatments. What they needed was somebody who had specialists. So you, if you could build the hospital, they could have specialists actually work at the hospital, and then people could go there rather than have to try to go to the United States for complicated, more complex surgery. Um, it was all going along fine until they got the Seven Islands got into a fight about which island the hospital would be put on, and the whole thing just fell apart. I think that you also have to incentivize these islands to work together and again look at what is the best place to put these things or if we're going to do them, you know, incentivize. There are other things that we've tried to do is encourage specialists out of hospitals in Miami to spend one or two days a month going to hospitals there. There is a veterinarian school and a medical school, Ross University, which is actually owned by a company out of Chicago. Um, these doctors, you know, they do their residencies in the United States. They do their training in the United States from Ross University. They don't train at hospitals that are local. Again, incentivizing people to want to do things and stay and work with people. So I think it's it really is a conundrum. I think it needs to be explored, and there needs to be some kind of interest in the United States to encourage this. Um, but I don't I see it being a very difficult proposition.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:22

In a previous interview that that I had uh with the one of the former U.S. ambassadors to Jamaica, um it was the Caribbean was framed as the United States' third border. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:39

Do I and and like I said, because of their proximity, they're in our back, I call it our backyard, but yes, they're our third border. Um, but we don't treat them like our third border. We don't, we don't have the same kinds of relationships that we do with Canada and Mexico. And and it's because they're small little islands. We need, again, we're not paying enough attention to it to get them to believe that you know we have a serious bilateral relationship with each one of them. They are, they do have an organization, several of them. One is the organization of eastern Caribbean States, which is all of them, plus Guyana, and then they also have CARICOM, which is the Caribbean community. And we really need to engage in those organizations to build that third border.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:31

Um suggestions or recommendations you would have to say uh businesses uh in the United States or to state and municipal governments, you know, if you know the United States at the national level is not going to invest for whatever reason uh in the Caribbean, uh, that there's an opportunity for them to do so.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:01

There's a there's a big opportunity for anybody interested in hospitality because that is sort of the bread and butter of the Caribbean.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:08

Um but I take it those in the Caribbean would like to move somewhat away from hospitality because you know it's a it's a very uh volatile type of industry.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:19

During COVID, all the hotels closed down, people lost their jobs, and it's taken them a long time to come, it took them a long time to come back. But in that interim, when there was a large number of unemployed people, people who needed support and help, um, and you know, basically tourism went just fell apart. So I think that yes, hospitality is something that you can't count on all the time, but there's opportunities for technology, there's opportunities for development of businesses in Barbados. They're working on um their solar panel, you know, things that do with energy, very important. Opportunities, again, with geothermal capabilities and building energy plants. I think that anything to do with cybersecurity, anything to do with developmental projects, I mean, there's a lot of work that could be done to help educational institutions. Um it's just exploring what's there and what is it that you can do to help a little island develop into a particular sector. Um call centers are call centers would be amazing. Putting call centers on the island, um, putting people who have technical expertise who can advise and consult would be, you know, obviously opportunities.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:53

As we turn the corner and uh come to a close, what guidance would you give for anyone who's gonna serve in a position of leadership? And for an organization, uh considering your your experience on the analytical side, what should organizations keep in mind uh and be an effective on a macro level? So those in positions of leadership and what organizations need to do to be effective uh when it comes to their workforce.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:29

I think for leadership to be effective, they have to make sure that they have a foundation and an understanding of the specific issues and opportunities in any particular area or country. They need to understand what our foreign policy is, what it is as the goals and objectives, and how then do we take what information we have about each of these countries or regions, and how do we develop a strategy and an implementation plan to get that done? And we have to recognize the people that do that so that they feel like they're contributing to a goal and that they too can provide the necessary information. I think senior leaders need to have the information they need. I will tell you a little story, I'm sure you have to go, but Colin Powell, when he came to the State Department, he was making a trip to a country and he wanted a briefing on that country, and in walked the assistant secretary and the deputy assistant secretary responsible for that area. And Colin Powell was asking questions, and the third time somebody said, We don't know the specific answer, we'll get back to you. Colin Powell said, Well, who knows the answer? And they said, Well, the desk officer, and they said, Would you please go out, call, and invite the desk officer to the meeting? Because if he can answer the questions now, I don't have to wait for the answer. And that that became very clear that there are people who have expertise, and we have to recognize that in people, and we have to use it to get where we want to go because we want leadership to have the full picture and the full understanding of what's going on in a specific place so that they can take that and combine it with the strategic plan of foreign policy to implement it. And that's true of any organization, relying on those people that will help you get what you need.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:41

Well, Linda, I appreciate this time, and so do our listeners. Uh, and speaking of our listeners, thank you for joining us uh on Burn Gart Laws Lanyat, where we provide a little extra perspective because the devil is always in the details. So please invite others to listen, give us your suggestions. Linda, again, thank you. Gratitude.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:03

Thank you.