Every trade and service has a particular currency. For a tailor, it is their ability to design and manufacture clothing. A hawker sells food. A farmer produces food and drink items (milk is a drink, right?
So what is the currency of a diplomat? I have always believed that there were two main items which formed the backbone of the trade that is diplomacy – information and influence.
On a day-to-day basis, a diplomat works to promote closer relations between his home country and his host country. For those serving in a multilateral setting, the goal is to ensure that the proceedings in the various meetings that take place do not result in anything negative for your home country’s interest.
The preceding paragraph applies to political officers. For those in the other functions, such as consular, administrative, trade, economic, defence, etc – there is greater specialisation in your work, but the basic guiding principle remains the same – serve your home country and protect its interests.
Information is one of the key ingredients to meet your objectives. Diplomats are essentially traffickers in information. You must be able to gather the information from a variety of sources, including mainstream media and social media. But more importantly, you must create and cultivate your own sources of information on say, the host country’s key preoccupations, the leading political and economic personalities, even a little bit of gossip.
However, it is important to remember that YOU ARE NOT A SPY. Actually, I think all diplomats know this even before they get on that plane. But not everybody outside of the service understands this. Intelligence officers operate on a different field and I would daresay a different wavelength from foreign service officers. There might be overlap from time to time and the prime objective largely remains the same.
So how do you get this information you need to be an effective diplomat? That’s where the second pillar currency comes in – influence. To be an effective diplomat, you must be able to command a certain degree of influence among your counterparts in other diplomatic missions, among officials in the bureaucracy of your host country – frankly, among people in general. This is not to say that you need to be an extrovert, or that only extroverted folks can make good diplomats. While extroverts may have an advantage, many of the best diplomats I met struck me more as introverted.
They all had one thing in common though – when they spoke, every word had weight. Either they were sharing something worth listening to, or they were asking you an important question.
What do you do with the information when you have obtained it? Information for the sake of information is meaningless – you must be able to analyse that information then package and present it for the consumption of the key stakeholders back home.
For example, say you heard a piece of information which has not been published to the media yet about a new law for companies from a contact in the Economic Ministry of Boratstan. Your next step should be to sound out if anyone has heard similar news, so maybe you ask a couple of your counterparts whom you know are reliable and would be monitoring this kind of news. Once you have that verification, you need to draft a report (or cable) back for home.
In drafting your report, you have to think about what home needs to know, how does it impact on home’s interest, and most importantly of all – how can you make sure they read what you write? This is what I mean by packaging of information – it’s no good if no one is going to read it, or they will read it but they might not get it.
All of this is part of the process of trafficking information.
So remember, if you’re a political officer about to go out on that first posting – brush up on your information management skills, and think about how you can build influence for yourself.
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