I’m pleased to have the chance to contribute to this “arms control boot camp,” and it’s great for someone like me to see bright folks so eager to move into the arena in which I’ve spent a good portion of my life.  With the caveat, of course, that these are just my personal opinions and don’t necessarily represent the views of anyone else, I’m thus happy to offer some thoughts in response to the questions the organizers have asked me to address.  To that end, I’d like to discuss:

• How working-level staff can most effectively shape senior-level decision-making in arms control and national security; and 

• How rising professionals can prepare themselves for the transition from staffer to mid-level or senior leadership. 

Let me take each of those in turn.  But I should start with a word about the somewhat odd type of senior leader that I myself represented when in government.

The Peculiarity of the “Political”

I thought I would frame my contribution this afternoon from the perspective of a political appointee.  Though I’ve worked in four State Department roles and on the National Security Council staff, that’s actually the only type of role I’ve ever had as an Executive Branch employee – first as a “Schedule C” appointee, and then as a Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary who was later lucky enough to be delegated the responsibilities of an Under Secretary.

There may be some differences, and perhaps even significant ones, between what I’ll try to describe here and what might work best in staffing a career civil servant – e.g., a senior Senior Executive Service (SES) employee.  We “politicals,” after all, are not career officials, not creatures of the permanent bureaucracy; instead, we are a strange sort of powerful, highly-idiosyncratic, and short-lived beast that is essentially unique to the Executive Branch in the United States. 

If you’ve ever perused the so-called “Plum Book” – so called because it lists “plum” positions, or perhaps because of the purple cover it traditionally had – you’ll know that there are several thousand positions listed therein.  By the standards of a parliamentary system such as in the United Kingdom, that’s an insanely large number.  Especially if you include the non-confirmed Schedule C cadre on top of the Senate-confirmed seniors, our system has a vastly thicker layer of “politicals” at its top by comparison to other forms of government.  (And that’s even before the current administration began trying to impose political loyalty requirements on an even broader swathe of formerly nonpartisan senior civil servants!)  From the perspective of career staffers like many of you, however, that means you really do need to understand and work tolerably well with the political ranks: there are a lot of them, and some of them will be your bosses.

So this advice today, for whatever it’s worth, will be tuned to the peculiarities of staffing such politicals. 

You should also be aware that in part because I have been only a political appointee in the Executive Branch, I am to some extent improvising here.  Just as a part of the normal career development path for senior leaders, SES officials in the regular civil service are likely to have accumulated a lot of on-the-job training in their particular agency, and probably have some official career development training curricula under their belts to boot. 

By contrast, I’d imagine that relatively few politicals come into office with a strong philosophy of organizational management, much less one  tailored to the particular bureaucracy they’re joining.  Some may have experience in relatively senior levels in private sector management, but that’s often not the case, and in any event their highest priority is not likely to be “good management” but rather producing policy results.

For we politicals have a different incentive structure and time horizon than senior leaders in the career civil service.  We’re not there for a career: we drop in in short intervals, usually only in two-to-four-year stretches, and we’re not there to be good managerial stewards of the bureaucratic machinery.  We’re creatures of political “teams” and we’re only in a Schedule C or Senate-confirmed position at all because our team has just won an election.  We’re there only temporarily, we have precisely zero job security, and our premium is upon policy results – and generally policy change – rather than upon making things run smoothly.  It’s nice if you’re a good manager, but that’s not at the top of the priority deck. 

There may the occasional political who just wants to phone it in, lazily enjoying the fancy title, photo ops and press availability moments, and frequent flier miles.  (I find such appointees contemptible – an insult to both the American voter and the American taxpayer – but they certainly happen.)

But for the most part – for good or for ill – I think politicals more commonly want to move fast, alter things, and build a policy-change legacy for our team (and for ourselves personally) before the political clock strikes midnight and our Cinderella chariot turns back into a pumpkin and we leave government again.  That can makes staffing us somewhat idiosyncratic, for we’re not much like the regular SES professionals you’re probably more used to seeing. 

So with that context, what would I recommend to you?

A Word on Trust

As a preliminary note, I would encourage professional staff and politicals to allow a bit of figurative space for reciprocal trust-building when they first start to work with each other.  The relationship between a political appointee and his or her staff can sometimes go badly off the rails.  I appreciate that career staffs are likely nervous about what they’re going to get when appointees come on board, just as politicals are not crazy to fear at least the possibility that a staff that disagrees with their politics will work in various subtle ways to thwart their agenda.

Nevertheless, the relationship doesn’t have to be a mess.  Having things go bad is a choice that staff and political appointees, in effect, make together.  And it’s a choice that they can refrain from making if they want to. 

As a senior political official, I’ve found that even staffers who profoundly disagree with me can often be outstanding national security professionals who both do what I need them to do and do it really well.  Not invariably, perhaps, but much more often that we politicals sometimes assume, especially in today’s polarized environment. 

And I hope that they’ve found me to be a thoughtful and serious boss despite our disagreements.  Truth be told, if government is to work for the best interests of the American people, politicals and career staff need each other.  Both sides should remember this.  Accordingly, I would recommend that staffers and their bosses give each other the benefit of the doubt, at least at the start.  Professionalism may be a rebuttable presumption, but governance will probably work better for our collective good if it is at least initially presumed.

Shaping Senior-Level Decision-making

As it turns out, I probably illustrate my own point about politicals often not having much by way of a pre-existing philosophy of bureaucratic management.  I think I turned out to be a pretty good boss – though you should take my former staffers’ word on that before you take my own – but if I was, it was largely by instinct.  I must confess that until now, I never really had the chance or inclination really to spell out what I thought about such question.  So thanks for giving me the opportunity to try think things through more explicitly.

Anyway, how would I answer the question about being an effective staffer?  Well, with the caveat that I really am trying to express these points for the first time, I would say that a staffer’s effectiveness in supporting a senior leader in arms control and nonproliferation policy involves at least four main factors.  In no necessary order, I refer to the staffer’s ability to provide and apply:

(1) institutional knowledge;

(2) technical knowledge;

(3) deftness and discretion; and

(4) what, for the lack of a better term, I’ll call “forward lean.” 

Let’s take each of those in turn.

Institutional Knowledge

Especially when staffing political appointees, the institutional knowledge that professional career staff can provide is essential to making governance work.  Career staffers are the human repositories of information about what has been tried before, which approaches worked (or didn’t) and why, the identities and characteristics of key diplomatic interlocutors, and all the rest of the “inside-baseball” details that often aren’t available to outsiders even when those outsiders are real experts.  Professional staff thus provide their bosses with crucial context for (and assistance in) evaluating alternative courses of action, anticipating counterparty reactions, framing complex problems, and anticipating second- and third-order consequences. 

If you’re lucky, a political boss will have good prior substantive experience in the field, but even then, he or she likely won’t have the window into the day-to-day goings on in diplomacy, intramural department or agency politics, or interagency engagement that you will.  (We politicals will also likely have less of this background information at our mental fingertips, if you will, than a good career SES.)  Accordingly, we rely on you to provide it.

To be sure, we need to be wise and self-aware enough to know to ask for such context, and to learn from it when you offer it – and some politicals probably aren’t, or don’t care to be.  Nevertheless, we can’t listen unless you have something to impart.  So the good staffer should always work to maximize his or her added value in being a master of such “behind-the-curtain” detail.  We are unlikely to get it any other way.

                  Technical knowledge

Especially in technology-heavy arenas like nonproliferation, arms control, and disarmament policy, moreover, providing technical knowledge is also essential.  The regular staffer doesn’t necessarily have to be a truly deep expert, for we can call upon hard-core specialists whenever needed, such as from the U.S. national laboratories or Federally-Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs); that’s what those institutions are for.  Nevertheless, where policy issues concern things such as weapons of mass destruction, technical intelligence collection, and missile defense, most political appointees will neither have much technical background nor have the time and bandwidth to focus intently on such details anyway.  Professional staff expertise can thus also be essential here, and even modest degree of “fluency” in both technical information and in policy detail can take a good staffer a long way. 

                  Deftness and Discretion 

An effective staffer needs to be prepared to provide brutal honesty in giving advice to his or her political appointee boss – that is to say, “inward” within the organization – but at the same time to show great discretion “outward.”  What do I mean by that?

The independent judgment of professional experts is critical to making governance work, and history is littered with examples of institutional failure and incompetence where leaders convince themselves to ignore expertise and distrust the people who actually know what they’re doing in complicated organizational, technical, and policy arenas.  Your job as a professional staffer is to help keep that from happening.

But the career staffer also needs to say “onside” in a policy-political sense, working diligently for the success of his or her seniors in the political ranks whatever he or she thinks of their objectives.  Whether you like it or not, that boss is there because his or her team won the last election, and it’s therefore their job to set the agenda and yours to help them implement it.  If you can’t live with that agenda, it’s time to quit.

So how to square these two commandments?  How can you provide honest expertise in speaking competence to power while at the same time not being disloyal?   

Maybe it’s just because of my legal training, but I think of this issue a bit like I think about lawyering.  I like to distinguish, for example, between what I call “no lawyers” and “yes lawyers.” 

The “no lawyers” act as if it is the main point of their job to get in the way of policymaking, as if saying “no” were the objective rather than merely an unfortunate occasional necessity dictated by the fact that ours is a form of government that is – or at least should be – governed by laws. 

By contrast, “yes lawyers” don’t mindlessly rubber-stamp what their bosses want to do – for that would be not really to be a lawyer at all, but merely a toady and a hack.  Attorneys have a professional ethical responsibility to be zealous advocates for their client, but at the same time they have a responsibility to the legal system.  They need to square these obligations.

To this end, the attorneys I think of a “yes lawyers” consider it their job to get the boss as close to his or her goal as is possible consistent with legality.  They’re the psychological opposite of the “no lawyers” in that within the ambit of their necessary fidelity to the law, they aim to be facilitators rather than barriers.  They understand that their job is to aid mission-accomplishment by finding a legally viable way to “yes” there if there is one. 

So I think the good professional staffer in the policy realm should have an attitude similar to that of the “yes lawyer.”  The good staffer, as a national security professional, supports achievement of the objectives of the team whose leadership won the last election, while at the same time also honestly and clearly – though (let me stress!) candidly and not publicly – warning the boss of pitfalls, drawbacks, likely problems, and what to expect by way of consequences from alternative courses of action being considered. 

And this kind of cautionary feedback is perhaps especially important if the boss really likes one of those approaches, lest affection for it make his or her critical judgment less acute.  It’s the political appointees’ prerogative to make policy choices, but it’s your job to make sure they make them with their eyes open and fully-informed as to the potential implications.

It’s actually good for the political bosses to hear such candid feedback from you, for it makes them better at their job and helps them make more of the kind of real and sustained policy impact that it is presumably their mission, as a political appointee, to try to have.

Not all politicals will necessarily see it this way, of course, and I don’t pretend that that’s always easy to pull this off.  But that’s why I refer to deftness and discretion as key attributes of a good staffer.  You need to figure out a way to deliver messages that are sometimes quite challenging in a way that doesn’t tank your relationship with the boss and produce a toxic relationship of distrust.  You may sometimes need to be rather the diplomat here. 

Nevertheless, doing this is essential.  And your input is important to how well political appointees are able to translate their – and their team’s – policy vision into reality in the face of real-world complications.  That’s why I say this is a bit like “yes lawyering.”  It’s your job to make achieving the boss’ objectives as workable as possible in light of the realities of a complex world.

Forward Lean

Finally, I think it’s vital for staffers to bring a lot of forward-leaning “energy” to the equation.  An experienced career staffer may have worked for many political appointees of varying abilities and perspectives – and have worked in pushing policy at various points in potentially contradictory directions.  It might be understandable for such a staffer to feel a bit jaded about having to do so yet again.

Moreover, in order to safeguard against errors, maximize opportunities for feedback from the operational environment, and permit more by way of mid-trajectory course corrections, the typical career professional may also incline toward relatively cautious and gradualist approaches.  Nevertheless, to be an effective staffer for a political boss, one needs to keep the energy level up anyway – and to be willing to forego some of that prudential caution. 

As I noted at the outset, politicals are only in office only for a short time; they are generally hired specifically in order to effect some kind of change; they are subject to dismissal on a whim; and their tenure will end with the conclusion of the administration then in power in any event.  They thus are generally inclined to try to move fast.  And if “fast” is the agenda, it’s your job as the career professional to help them do it as effectively as possible.

I doubt there’s any magic recipe for how exactly to weave together these various attributes together into being a “perfect” staffer, but it’s easy enough to tell success in these regards when it occurs.  To borrow a phrase from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous concurrence in the 1964 pornography case Jacobellis v. Ohio, you know it when you see it.

Preparing for Leadership

It can take a sometimes surprising of mental agility to shift from being an expert supporting staffer into the more generalist role of a senior leader.  Those two roles are very different, and they demand different mindsets.

Especially in the civil-service-heavy parts of the State Department in which I worked – and one can perhaps make a partial exception here for Foreign Service Officers, who tend to be rotating generalists – the expert career staffer tends to be an expert, a specialist.  After transitioning to a senior leadership role, however, he or she is now less likely to be the best-informed person in the room on the immediate topic at hand because the field of play for a senior leader tends to be much broader.  Leaders previously accustomed to being the expert staffer will thus now find they need to rely on others as experts, and that they don’t have the bandwidth to inhabit the arcana of their subject matter as they did before.

Staffers spend much of their careers being responsible for bringing specific issues or equities to the decision-making table, and a lot of time working to ensure that those factors are properly considered.  It’s part a staffer’s job to represent such issues clearly and strongly to leadership, so that important things don’t get ignored and leaders make decisions with eyes fully open to their context and consequences.

But a person having made the shift into leadership often has to be more of an equity-balancer between counterpoised values than an advocate for any one of them.  As a senior leader, in other words, a promoted staffer will now tend increasingly be in the business of adjudicating between values and agenda items that exist in tension, not all of which can ever be fully vindicated.  Leaders need to make trade-offs between competing agenda items that are all important but that can’t be optimized; much of leadership is about struggling with prioritization and compromise. 

This practicing “the art of the possible” in a complex world of competing values can require a very different mindset, which longtime staffers can sometimes struggle to acquire when they become a leader. 

Conclusion

I hope these somewhat tentative thoughts are helpful for you.  There’s much of being a good staffer for senior leaders and exercising a constructive influence upon policymaking that that is idiosyncratic, so the successful recipe will be highly dependent upon the personalities involved and the circumstances of the moment. 

So don’t take these comments as Gospel, by any means, but do at least consider them.  The American people still need the government to have a good bench of expert professional staffers in the arms control and nonproliferation arena, and perhaps this advice will help you meet this need.

I look forward to your questions.

—Christopher Ford