Podcast | The power of inclusion
Diverse Diplomacy Leaders Speaker Series with Mirembe Nantongo
On March 4th, 2021, ISD Rusk Fellow Heera Kamboj welcomed Mirembe Nantongo, recently retired Foreign Service Officer and a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Global Talent Management, as part of our Diverse Diplomacy Leader Speaker Series.
With a distinguished 25-year career as a Foreign Service generalist of Ugandan and Dutch parentage, Mirembe worked and lived in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Washington DC. She also served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
Heera Kamboj: Hi Mirembe.
Mirembe Nantongo: Good morning, Heera. Good morning, everyone. It’s terrific to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation.
Heera Kamboj: One of our favorite questions that I wanna get started with this morning is, you know you’ve had a very unique and very successful career trajectory. What initially attracted you to diplomacy, and what steps or what process led you to decide on this as your career? What is your origin story?
Mirembe Nantongo: Let me just quickly, as you say, give you the origin story. So let’s see, my father is Ugandan, and my mother is Dutch. I spent most of my childhood in Uganda, and traveled between Uganda and Holland, visiting my mom’s relatives. And then I went to primary school, high school, and university in England as well. Coming out of that, I returned to Uganda looking for work, wanting to contribute and ended up working at the U.S. embassy, which is where I spent a year as a locally engaged staff member. It was a tremendous period in my life. I really enjoyed it. And then I followed my husband to the United States as an EFM [Eligible Family Member — the relative of a Foreign Service Officer who works at a U.S. embassy]. After my son was born, we then went to Panama. While working there, I actually did a stint as a contractor. So as well as locally engaged staff EFM, I do have a background working as a contractor for the State Department. And to your question, I got to the point where you know, how as an EFM, you go to cocktail parties, you’re always among people who are working in one capacity or another with the embassy. And there was always this question: What do you do? And I always had to say, “well, you know my husband and well, you know my husband.” Eventually, I got tired of having that same response, and that’s when I started getting interested in the Foreign Service exam process. I took the exam and got in, and joined the Foreign Service as a as a generalist in 1995. It was not planned. There was nothing deliberate about it, but it’s been a fantastic career. I’m so glad it worked out that way.
Heera Kamboj: Thank you so much for sharing, you know, all of the different ways you’ve worked for the State Department. I think that’s really great for students who are in this virtual event today to see that there’s many ways to serve and work with the Department of State. So following on that, how do you see yourself, and how do you think others see you within the foreign affairs world? What ways do you identify, and how do you think that has shaped your approach to your work and others’ approach to you?
Mirembe Nantongo: You’re right to make sort of distinction between “How do I see myself?” and “How do I think others see me?” They’re closely related, but they’re not necessarily the same thing. I think a key thing for me, and this applies to the Foreign Service and sort of in life in-general, is that I feel that I’ve always been kind of at the intersection with my dual parentage and the two very different cultures that are mixed in me. In both Uganda and Holland, there is a very clear majority population, and you kind of never really fit in with either in any way, not that anything was negative about that, but there was always that sense of being different. And then as a Foreign Service employee and the different categories, you always felt that there’s a different universe there. So I think being on the intersection and always being aware that the perspective that you bring to the table is obviously not necessarily the only one, but the ability to see both or many different perspectives and not to sort of question their validity, their authenticity, and to accept that you have to walk this line. You have to find yourself and be able to contribute the same time even as you’re working along this kind of intersectionality. One of the really interesting elements of my experience as an immigrant was coming into the United States with that sense of having one side of my background and this is the other. And I love them both and they’re great, but I don’t really fit in. But coming here to the United States where people coalesce around ideals, where the nation is very much around principles and more abstract things, I remember this very distinctly that sort of feeling of relief of how many different elements, cultural, and heritage go into making up America. You know, the Americans look like everybody, right? Anybody in the world. I said that was a huge relief. And I think that it is something that really has served me in my career. Another thing about coming to the United States is that you coalesce around the ideals and that’s really attractive. When you come in though from the outside and you weren’t born in that country, you don’t have the history and you have to play a certain amount of catch-up in terms of the people, the geography, the physical-ness of that country, all the different cultures that go in, and that’s been a lifelong journey for me. You go overseas and you try to understand countries and cultures overseas, and there is a huge amount of work in that regard to do here as well. It’s an ongoing process, and it’s never going to end, but I’ve loved it and I feel that I’ve expanded as a person. I’ve just become more useful in general because that is sort of learning curve that I had to go through as an immigrant.
Heera Kamboj: Yes, and my own A-100, we had somebody who was maybe considered a new American, and it was wonderful to sit right next to her and take that oath together. So thank you for sharing that story. Do you think that the interlocutors and countries that you met, were they very attracted to your story or did they found that interesting? Did that say something about you? Did they seem more receptive? We’d love to hear a little bit about that, if you don’t mind sharing.
Mirembe Nantongo: I think there’s experiences on both sides, people again. As a Foreign Service Officer, you go out and you are the face for the interaction that you’re having. You’re the face of the United States. Very often, you had people who were sort of like, “wow, how could this happen” sort of thing, which could have a negative side, but it also does always have the positive side of sending a very clear message from the United States that we look and sound like many things, and each of those elements are a part of us.
I guess on the more negative side, while I was working at diversity and inclusion at the State Department, is that phenomenon, that syndrome of being an American abroad, who doesn’t look and/or sound like what other people expect. So we call it the “I want to speak to a real American” phenomenon. This was fairly frequent, and you had to figure out how you were going to engage in situations where people second-guess your credibility, because you don’t look or sound like what they thought you should look and sound like. It can be very hurtful and sort of make people feel isolated. So one of the things that we constantly emphasize in these conversations is the importance of connecting with each other (people in the same situation) and make the leadership aware of this phenomenon, which is neither good or bad in itself, but it can have negative consequences for your people. From there, it’s important to come up with collective strategies and mutual support to make it a phenomenon that brings the most positive to the table, because as I said, I think it really does bring a lot of positives to the table in terms of what it is and the messages that we’re trying to convey in throughout the world.
Heera Kamboj: That answer really resonates with me about me wanting to talk to the real American but in and of itself it shows why the importance of having a truly representative Foreign Service is so important. You know, you prove it by being there.
Mirembe Nantongo: Exactly.
Heera Kamboj: Our next question is how has the foreign affairs community approach to a diverse and inclusive workforce changed over the course of the last 25 years in your career?
Mirembe Nantongo: Very much. You know, when I first came on board, it really wasn’t a conversation. I remember when I passed my oral, everybody remembers who’s a generalist after passing the oral, and they tell you that right there and offer you the job. I do remember that I did have a moment with one of the other candidates who didn’t get through, who was like, “oh, you’ve only got in because you are a female minority.” So that was not a great way to start the whole thing. But in general, in terms of a narrative within the State Department, you know, a deliberate focus in the State Department on diversity and inclusion may have been going on, but it’s not something that I was aware of quite a while in my career. It’s only more recently that awareness has built in the State Department as well as in the nation writ-large. And I left in July, so I don’t know what’s been happening since then, but I was so heartened by the speed, the energy, and the hunger that comes from the people to participate and how are we going to make a difference here. There were a couple of things that I saw that I had not seen earlier in my career, which is an understanding that diversity and inclusion has so many different elements that go into it, right? I mean, you cannot if you could write a list all day and still not be done with all the things in the work environment that go into diversity and inclusion. You know, whether you’re talking recruitment, promotion, performance monitoring, whatever you’re talking about, there’s always an element that somehow affects diversity and inclusion. So what I really love to enjoy seeing in the State Department was putting a single lens on all of these processes by bringing everyone together and saying, “This is the lens diversity and inclusion. Let’s look at recruitment; let’s look at promotion; let’s look at performance management.” This is exactly what you need to do. And then another way the narrative has changed is that there has always been a focus on numbers. We’ve all seen this. I mean, this is not just the State Department; it’s all federal agencies. It’s the nation, if you like. The numbers show where you are in terms of representation, a look how terrible these numbers are. What has been going on? And certainly, when you think about how much time there has been to make progress, there hasn’t been as much as any of us would like. But that focus on the numbers really limited the conversation and also limited the field for action. And so one of the things in my last couple of years I saw, and this was really DG Carol Perez’s focus, is an emphasis on the inclusion piece of the dynamic because inclusion is not necessarily about “let’s write a bunch of regulations; let’s generate more numbers.” It’s more about what is the culture? How do people interact with each other? How do they feel their place in the organization? What awareness do they have of their actions and the impact of their daily actions? What are the expectations we need to set for leadership at all levels because we’re all leaders at all levels? How do we shift the culture?
I think one of the most heartening things that I’ve seen is that while it hasn’t moved away from numbers, the focus has expanded to include this as a cultural matter. This is about people to people. This is about how we all behave minute to minute, hour to hour. It’s just making it a much broader thing, making it much more participatory, and much more comprehensive. To get the understanding across that this is not something that you can do. You can’t just say, “we are going to be more diverse and inclusion, put this in the fam.” You know, there’s many, many things that need to go into it, and it’s a slow game. It’s not something that’s gonna happen from one day to the next. It’s not just the State Department because it’s everything that has been happening outside as well including the nation. It’s all kind of coming together in this hunger and this passion to make a change. I found that extremely heartening. And again I say the State Department, but I also mean the nation writ large, but one of the things that worries me a little bit is that, you know, if you think about it, it’s a continuum, right?
On the one hand, people are saying like “we need to do everything, and punish everybody, and throw everyone in jail. And it’s just the only thing that matters is, you know, getting the job done in terms of diversity and inclusion.” On the other end of the continuum, you have people who are more “what is this all about? We’re supposed to be treating everybody equally. Why are we setting?” As such, you have this spread of opinion in the narrative, in this debate. In any debate where you have these kinds of polls, it’s really important to have people on both sides. But where you ended up in terms of policy always has to be some kind a compromise — some kind of a middle ground — that brings everybody in. And one of the things that I worry about not just about State Department but writ-large is, that when the power equation swings to one end of the continuum, then you risk losing the people who are on the further end of it. And so the narrative becomes the kind of narrative that we always have when we were talking to the choir, where the choir is talking to the choir. We make assumptions about what the right thing is, and the way it should be. And then you have people in the room who are don’t necessarily subscribe in the way that we do. And so then, they feel left out and feel unheard. This creates another problem that undermines the whole purpose of being diverse and inclusive. So I do worry about paying attention to the narrative and making sure that as we have these discussions, we’re not making these basic assumptions that are going to drive people away. You know, we’re not voicing basic assumptions that we share with maybe most of the people in the room, but not all of them. And so there’s other people that feel that they can’t say anything, and then go away, and feel unheard. And that becomes a collective problem. But yeah, it feels good to see where we are now. And I look forward to see what’s gonna come next.
Heera Kamboj: Yeah, spoken like a true diplomat. We need to be inclusive and inclusion. So inclusive for that. So thank you for sharing that. One question that I personally am very interested in is can you tell us a little bit about one of your champions or mentors as we call them maybe sponsors going beyond mentorship. How did they influence your career? And have you paid this forward in your own career to those coming up behind you?
Mirembe Nantonge: Oh my goodness, I don’t even really know it start in terms of who the mentors and the champions are. You have so many big names at the State Department. I think of Linda Thomas Greenfield, for example, Ruth Davis, and Carol Perez, the DG for me, is also very much in that field and embodied what I just talked about such as the need to listen, bring people together, and to figure out what is the way in which we can move forward together without dropping people off. But if I can just say one person who kind of the most influential mentor, I won’t name names, but it was an ambassador who I had early on in my career who, in working with me, saw something in me that I was not aware I had myself. I guess you’d just call it potential. And at the time I was like, “Oh my God, oh God, she’s driving me crazy. She’s throwing everything at me and all this kind of stuff, and I’m never gonna be able to do it.”
She knew I could do the things that she asked me to do, and I did them successfully. And then I looked and it was super stressful. But when I look back, I think that she pushed me in a way that made me use the resources that I had that I wasn’t aware that I had, that I was perhaps different about using, and that was very empowering. And so when I think of mentorship myself, to me, that’s always a piece of it. It’s not just “let me help you” or “lemme connect you with that person.” It’s also about drawing out of people what you can see they have, but they don’t necessarily yet know that they have it. Push them forward by not making them miserable and stressed out, but rather holding a high standard, and that brings out what their potential is.
I find that’s a very useful way of framing what mentorship is. And one of the things actually that’s so great about the State Department is that there’s so much mentoring that goes on in terms of formal mentoring programs, and you should you know that you can join, sign up, and enroll. But there is so much that goes on that is not captured in those mechanisms. It’s just people who remember their mentors and their champions, and have the impact that people had. And then they try, as you say, “pay that forward.” That’s always been a big focus for me, which is to encourage other people to reach their full potential, if you like. And it helps you as well, right? It helps you grow as you’re helping other people. So it’s very much a win-win formula.
Heera Kamboj: Yeah, it definitely is not zero sum. I agree with you. So, we have a lot of questions coming in, but before I share those with everybody else and ask them, we just wanna say a lot of people in here are saying hello, and they’re very excited to be here.
Mirembe Nantonge: I know I’m seeing like some very dear people in this chat. Hi Fiona, hey Tatum, Michelle! Look, there’s Eric. Oh yeah, no, this is good. I’m so glad. Thank you for doing this.
Heera Kamboj: People from GTM, Executive Women at State, which is a very popular affinity group at the department. So a lot of people here are very passionate about this issue and about hearing from you today. I wanna remind our audience, please put your affiliation and where you’re writing from so that as we ask the question, we can raise that. So we have one question from somebody at the Department named Kip, and he’s asking what your advice is for people who are afraid to speak out against wrongdoing. I think that’s relevant to many organizations and many workplaces. We would love to hear your thoughts on that, Mirembe.
Mirembe Nantonge: So this is a super, super important question, and it is one that I recall in my time at the State Department in the context of diversity and inclusion and we really did focus on it. Because you have, I mean, remember that “I wanna speak to a real American” phenomenon, for example? We recently had cases overseas where people were struggling with this and felt that they were disadvantaged because of this and did not necessarily have the sort of support or the connections on the ground that would have helped them navigate the situation perhaps more helpfully. A lot of it does come down, as you say, to the fear of speaking out. And again, this is one of the themes that the DG has been emphasizing, which is the importance of speaking out. So there are several pieces of this. First of all, you have to make sure that the leadership is the clear framework. In this case, I mean leadership at every level (I’m not just talking about the secretary or the DG) Like everyone, every manager and even with your little team, or if you have a small team, you have to set that expectation that we want people to be able to speak out, and they should feel supported in the process as they speak out. That’s a clear element: making sure that the leadership understands and what their role is in creating that climate. But then, there’s sort of the counterpoint to that, which is that people have to speak out in order to get something done.
I actually recall a pretty searing experience when I was overseas. I think it was in my first DCMship where we had a group of entry-level officers, who I felt, had great communication and talking a lot. It turned out subsequently that one of them had been working with a boss who created a hostile work environment. When I understood what she had been going through and had never brought to me, that was kind of a “bring me to tears” sort of a moment where you feel like, “how could this happen on my watch?” Had she told me, I hope I was the sort of leader who would have taken very quick action to make sure that she felt better. But because she didn’t speak out, there was no osmosis on this. The leader cannot know necessarily that something is going on. So there are two pieces: making sure that the leadership and the process mechanisms are very clear. And then the people concerned also have a role to play, and it’s one that takes courage. It’s not always easy to speak out, but making that a point of self-awareness, and the personal calculus that “I don’t think this is right” and “I don’t accept this and I’m gonna speak out.” There are many different ways of speaking out too, because we need to make sure that people understand the ways to speak out. You could get up in a meeting and throw you pen at somebody to express your sense of “I don’t accept this.” But you can also go and talk to peers. You can triangulate with your peers. “This is what I’m feeling. This is what it looks like to you.” You can talk to immediate supervisors. I mean, there are many ways, very civil and very respectful ways to raise concerns. So make sure that people have the understanding of the tools that are available to them for speaking out. But it’s not an easy dilemma. If it was, we would have solved it long ago, but it is something that we need to keep emphasizing and message the importance of encouraging people to speak out because that’s the first step in fixing any kind of problem we have.
Heera Kamboj: Thank you so much. I love this next question from Sheery at the career development office at the department. She wants to know the following: “You undertook a broad diversity of assignments. To what extent did that contribute to your professional satisfaction and success?” She also says that there might even be a conal caste system. Do you agree with that? What can we do to bring all voices to the table in this regard? And you’re uniquely set up to answer this because you’ve served in all five cones.
Mirembe Nantonge: Yeah, and again, this is a matter of how everybody has their own personal philosophy. If you’re a generalist, you do have sort of five career options. Many people deliberately say “I love consular work” and “I love public diplomacy work.” This is what I wanna do. You kind of have to accept that if you want to focus in specialized to the extent that meshes with your personal life that you are going to in some way, be giving up prospects for advancement, not necessarily, but the partner system writ-large does reward diversity of assignment and diverse generalism, if you like. So, it’s perfectly fine if your personal choice is, “I love this work. This is what I wanna do and I understand what the consequences are.” And of course, now we’re just talking about Foreign Service generalists. The system is so much broader than that. The State Department has 75,000 employees, locally engaged staff, and civil service. And this is just about foreign service generalist, but the system does tend to reward generalism. You can build expertise for sure, but we’re more kind of a mile-wide and an inch-deep than we are very specialized. A lot of people do specialize which of course is perfectly fine. And for me, it has always been very rewarding to kind of switch around and chop and change because I like the challenge. I like the new fields. I like the different experiences that you have in the same cone but in a different place; the same place, but a different cone. I’ve done that too. I did two assignments: one as PIO and one is DCM in the same place. And it was just completely different. It was like a different place because of what I was doing in it. I guess this is one of the key things that I would always emphasize to everybody: it is self-awareness. It is understanding yourself and being clear about what your values are and what you feel is important. There’s your family, there’s your career, and there are balancing acts that need to take place. Be clear about yourself personally, where you fall down and then working from there as opposed to saying, “oh, the system wants this” and then trying to make yourself fit into that. Figure out what you want and then take it from that. And you know, just have fun; just enjoy it. I don’t think there are any bad assignments. There’s only the attitude that you bring to your assignment. It’s possible to serve in the same place, have a car in the same position, and have completely different experiences as well. But if I could just return to that point that I was making a little bit earlier about generalists, I think they are something like 8% of the total population, so it sits a very small. This is one of the things that it took me a while to get to in my career at the State Department, which is its size and scope of the population in the State Department. It wasn’t just about me as a Foreign Service generalist. There’s so many other different considerations. So to your point or your question, I don’t think it’s unique to the State Department, but the fact is that there are always different kind of groupings, if you like. So, you have civil service, foreign service, EFMs, contractors, locally engaged staff, Foreign Service within the Foreign Service, generalists, and specialists. Within the generalist category, you have political people, Colonel, consular, economic. So every time you turn around, there’s some kind of a grouping that sort of feeds into this. And again, this is something that we all need to pay attention to from a human resources perspective. What are the rules that are in place, and how do we make sure that we have rules, even though we can’t have an exact similarity between all the groups? But let’s think about equity across all the different groups and then to return to my point about conversations and speaking, make sure that we are connecting with each other in the workplace where people can say, “hey, you know, civil service, foreign service.” I remember we had one of these open conversations, which was fascinating. It’s about understanding each other’s experience. I mean, you’re not gonna have a conversation and resolve whatever inequities people might perceive or live in the experience. But to the extent that you talk to each other, share perspectives, and understand more about each other, you are likely to be cohesive as a team. And so by not pretending that there is no gorilla in the room (very often there is a gorilla in the room), it could be a specialist versus generalist. It could be civil service, foreign service — whatever it is. Could be an American who doesn’t look like an American to the local people? And then the Americans who does look, I mean, there’s all these different kinds of groups. In other words, just being aware as leaders, but also as individuals ourselves. If you are in this situation, think about pulling together a conversation. It helps so much just to speak and share things, and understand that other people are having similar experiences. How have they navigated it? What does that strength in getting through these? What are their strategies? So just making a habit of connecting and having conversations. I think if everybody did that all the time I think we would solve all our problems. That’s just me.
Heera Kamboj: You kind of answered it, but there is a little bit difference here in this question. We have a question from Robert in Ankara. He says he looks like a “real American”. How can he and others do better at helping those in the other categories who don’t look like the typical Americans?
Mirembe Nantongo: Yeah, again, this is a sort of an area that we focused on a lot at the State Department while I was there in the wake of George Floyd and everything that happened around that area where you had this sort of sense of national crisis, which became part of our State Department moment as well, where there was a need to come together. There was a need to have conversations, but at the same time, you didn’t want to be putting people on the spot. In this case, people who may have had a bad experience in whatever regard and are not necessarily ready to speak about it. They should not have to educate other people about whatever that experience is. You also had people who were not necessarily as part of the group that has had these negative experiences who are looking from the outside and want to help, but they don’t want to presume and don’t want to offend people. They don’t want to say the wrong thing. So you end up with people just saying, “I’m not gonna; it’s just safer if I don’t approach this.” So to your question Robert, I can see that it might be hard for somebody who looks like a “real American,” as you say. And I think I know who this Robert is to say, “okay come on, let’s all have a conversation about this.” Because here, you do have the possible risk of people proceeding that negative.
So again, this is all about conversations and criss-crossing. Talk to the people on the team. Be sensitive and be open. Ask if this is an issue at this post. And if it is, how do we configure the connection and the conversation, but don’t just say, “I might offend someone. I might get it wrong,” and then do nothing because you were afraid to get it wrong in some way. It takes courage. It takes a level of risk as well on all sides, I think. But to the extent that we feel that connection is important and building our understanding of each other is important. I think we do need to take those risks. We do need to build that courage in ourselves. Thanks for that question; it’s a good one.
Heera Kamboj: I feel like you’re predicting the questions we’re getting because we have a similar question here. I do want to get to it because it’s a little bit different. It’s a question from Eric who is at the Foreign Service Institute. He wants to know how you encourage and engage on controversial subjects at the Department of State. How do you remove that fear? You know, that concept of fear, how do we get to that point?
Mirembe Nantongo: This is not easy. Like I said, I don’t know how it’s being handled now. While I was there, we tried to model open conversations. These are some ground rules to bear in mind if you want to have an open conversation. We do have trained facilitators that are happy to come and help you with your conversation, which I think is good and an important start. There is a school that says, “you can’t have these conversations without having clinically qualified expert people to have these conversations.” I see that, but the trouble is that when you have such a large population — the State Department and the nation frankly — and you’re waiting for the clinically qualified person every time before you have a conversation, how many conversations can you practically have? So again, this is a question of courage, risk, and leadership. And again, it’s not just the leaders and the managers with a clear role to play, but it also has to be the people who are on the line and in the trenches who also have to say “I feel that this would be a helpful thing to talk about, and I’m gonna see what resources are there to support me. I’m gonna talk to my leadership and I’m gonna try and make something happen.” It’s not easy, and I hope that we find our way forward. By the way, I think this is particularly true of the State Department is that we’re very mission-focused. Traditionally, this is not just the State Department, but don’t bring your personal life to work is a thing, right? You check your personal life at the door and when you come in and you’re focused on the mission — whatever the mission is. I’m not sure that works nowadays. We have younger folks coming into the workplace who have much higher expectations of all of the inclusion, the connection with each other, diversity, and trying to shut off personal experiences from the workplace. I don’t think it’s going to cut it anymore. I mean, if we want to be recruiting the best and the brightest, along with incoming generations, we have to open that up a bit more and understand that everybody brings their personal experience into the workplace anyway whether they talk about it or not. They bring it with them and they act from it. That’s how we’re made. And so saying it that it cannot be part of the mission or part of the workplace is a misconstruction of what personal experience really means. If you get sort of connection and understanding between personal experiences, then you enhance the mission. In that, you improve teamwork; you improve a mutual understanding; you improve the quality of your team if they are connected at a different level that goes beyond the pure external mission level. So that’s what I think anyway.
Heera Kamboj: Excellent answers. So we have a question from an aspiring or incoming diplomat. His name is Mujib, and he is a 2019 Rangel Fellow currently at the Harvard Kennedy School. He said that there’s this new chief diversity and inclusion officer position that came about after you’d already departed. He wants to know what are the main things that this person could undertake to address retention and attrition, which is an excellent question.
Mirembe Nantongo: I don’t know, have they announced it? Ff they have, that’s fantastic because that’s definitely one of the things that, when I was there, we had a very clear sense that this needed to happen. It goes back to what I said at the beginning about having a single lens — the diversity and inclusion lens — and putting it across the operations across processes and looking at each different area through this particular lens. The State Department is very decentralized. We have all these different bureaus they have different levels of power, and they have different levels of control, different cultures and so forth. You also see differences in climate and culture across the bureaus. Having somebody who’s a Chief Diversity Officer who is reporting to the seventh floor gives you the authority, and the way, and the means to ensure that everybody is equally focused and they may do things differently according to the culture in their bureau. Some bureaus are civil service heavy; some bureaus have a ton of elite stuff. Others have none, so you can’t say “it’s gonna be a cookie cutter approach and everybody has to do the same thing.” But there have to be certain baseline minimums. There has to be a level of tracking. There has to be a level of reporting. There has to be after action. There has to be “what does the data show, and what are you doing about it” kind of thing. There has to be somebody who can pull everybody together in a unified whole, even as it recognizes the cultural differences between the different pieces of the State Department. To go back to Mujib’s question, such a person would obviously be looking at things like recruitment, attrition, promotion, and employee development. Those would be elements in part of an overall diversity and inclusion strategic plan, which I don’t know who of my former team is on the call, but we put a lot of work into that. The idea was to bring all these things together in one place and have the single lens with tracking, accountability, and so forth.
Heera Pamboj: Thank you so much for that thorough response. We actually have a wonderful question from a young student from the 11th grade: Sahara. And she’s asking: “How would you advise a student such as yourself to navigate the foreign policy space?” She currently describes herself as a young black girl. So how should she navigate the foreign policy space and what mindset helped you, Mirembe, to continue in your line of work for so long, despite the obstacles or challenges along the way.
Mirembe Nantongo: So if you’re still in high school, you definitely wanna be checking out the State Department’s recruitment website. There are many different sort of internships and ways that you could possibly have an interaction with the State Department at this level. You might wanna check in with the hometown diplomats and have them send somebody to your school to talk about what foreign policy is. And then obviously, folks like you right here at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, there’s plenty of non-government entities that are interested in this area. So, doing the research; doing the reading; finding out who’s giving this talk; who’s giving that talk and then showing up; and understanding who the personalities and issues are understanding what speaks to you. You know, where you might want to focus yourself in the future. As you know, there are a whole array of different possibilities and ways that you can enter the State Department. I spoke about the Foreign Service exam but that is one element in a very wide range of possibilities. So figuring out what those things are. Are you interested in foreign service, specialist, generalists, civil service, internships, contractor? I mean, there are many different ways to enter the foreign policy space. I guess do your research and then follow the breadcrumbs that speak to you — the ones that you feel have a resonance for me. With regard to me, I think I explained that I kind of fell into this, so I didn’t have a big plan about it. But having fallen into it, I had a thrilling 25 years with the State Department and I really loved it. It was the honor of my life, you know, as an immigrant to come in and take the oath of office and serve by being a public servant for 25 years in such a fascinating field with fascinating assignments, terrific teammates, and just be a part of a place that is so full of hope and so future-oriented, and “we’re gonna get the job done kind of a thing.” So best of luck to you. I hope that things work out for you, for sure.
Heera Kamboj: Yes, and to Sahara, please check out careers@state.gov. And also the rest of the videos in this wonderful series, which they think there’s a link in the chat box too. We have almost la follow-on question from a current graduate student here at Georgetown University, Kiva. And they are basically asking how your previous nationality or citizenship impacted your policy, work ethic, or cultural lens as an FSO. And I think the more important part of the question is, what advice would you have for an aspiring FSOs with strong immigrant backgrounds?
Mirembe Nantongo: Yeah, and again, this is going to be, I think a very individual decision for everyone to make. For me as I explained, I kind of have that dual background and they don’t necessarily have too much in common in terms of foreign policy. I mean, Uganda and the Netherlands. I certainly brought a lot from both in terms of who I am and the way I am in the world. But I never tried to go back for example, to Uganda. That was just me. I never bid on any of the assignments. I never tried to go to the Netherlands either. Now I think about it, I’m not quite sure why I didn’t. I mean, there were so many other different opportunities you know, so many other different ways of learning and being engaged with the world. I just never went there. And I don’t know to what degree that would have been me trying to go back to a country of origin would have had an impact on my assignment. I know in some cases, it does. But I never went there. And I didn’t come in with a particular awareness of the situation in Uganda and the situation in the Netherlands and if I can somehow engage with that in my professional work. That just wasn’t something that to me was it was a path that called to me. So I think everybody’s gonna make their own particular decisions in that regard. One of the key things I think as an immigrant, which I said earlier, is this challenge that you have to learn the country. Having to understand the people, the physical, the geography, the cultural, the literary, the movies. I mean, there’s so much to learn about this terrific nation that I’m not sure that we all — and I could say this about myself — I’m not sure that we put all the time that we should into that. But it’s certainly a huge, it’s certainly a huge area. And I hope that nobody is daunted by it because you know of bringing in an immigrant background. I wish this was a conversation because I would really have liked to sort of hear the thoughts, the question on this. But anyway, maybe for another time.
Heera Kamboj: Yeah, maybe when we’re out of the virtual element, we can have more back and forth. Thank you. So we have a question from somebody from blast from the past, Tatum, who’s currently at the American Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar. This shows that we have a really a global audience for this. They asked some people have talked about a mid-career entry pathway to the Foreign Service. Would the department consider this, and why would this help with diversity and inclusion work? I know a lot of people have debated this and discuss this in recent months.
Mirembe Nantongo: Yeah, and I’m assuming again we’re talking about Foreign Service generalists here, right? I think it’s much easier to come in as a specialist at the sort of the mid career. The mechanisms are there. It’s harder for the generalist, because as everybody knows, it takes 20 years or so to build a senior Foreign Service Officer career. You can’t just come in and be an 01. It’s a lot harder in terms of culture, what you learn coming up through the system, the disadvantage when it comes to promotions. In this case, you just don’t have that sort of a background. I know that there has been a lot of congressional interest and I know that the State Department has been working on responding with an idea forward. But I have to say that I don’t know where that is right now. Speaking as a private citizen, I always thought that it was a dangerous way to go because you bring people in at relatively senior ranks. When they compete with all their peers, it’s just unfair. These are generalists. It’s unfair in my book to expect people to be able to compete with people who have been in the system for 10 or 15 years. And then you’re gonna come in as an 01. So yeah, I don’t know where it is. I would be cautious about it, but I’m also very interested to see where they end up because there is a lot of interest in it as you’ve noticed.
Heera Kamboj: Yes, thank you for your response to that one too. Love this question from Violetta, which will be our second to last question. Violetta is actually an EFM working as an HR assistant overseas. She wants to know about team-building strategies to stimulate inclusion and diversity and how important they are to improve quality of communication between colleagues — something you spoke about earlier Mirembe — and those of diverse cultural backgrounds, making them feel open and ready to participate and contribute. Could you share some experiences and team building from your time overseas?
Mirembe Nantongo: Sure, and this is an important area, and I hope the questioner is in touch with GTM and the folks who are involved in diversity and inclusion because they have a whole kind of a playbook of the ways in which to bring people together and the ideas ideas that you can think of. One of the very useful tools is the Fed survey, which is not so relevant for overseas emissions because it tends to be Washington-focused. But the idea of sounding out your team, your audience and so forth, and figuring out what are the things that we are concerned about here, and then proposing. Do you have a lot of people who suffer from the “I wanna speak to a real American syndrome” or, you know, you have a lot of junior entry-level offices who have certain questions about certain things. Do we have issues about the policy in this country? You know, what are the particular concerns about your posts, from your posts? Do you have EFMs who don’t feel integrated into the community? How did the locally engaged staff feel about being integrated? There’s so many different questions that you can ask, and ways that you can bring people together around a topic of mutual interest. But I think that there is no kind of one-size-fits-all, as it’s going to depend on the particular environment that you’re working in. But I would encourage you to reach out to the diversity and inclusion folks at the State Department because the wheels have been invented. There’s no point in reinventing wheels just to figure out what’s already out there. What will be useful for you and what wheel if you need to invent it, you should invent.
Heera Kamboj: Yes, I mean, there’s a community dashboard actually for people who are interested in diversity, inclusion and then having those conversations. So I agree that some excellent resources exist. So I wanna ask you to include anything that you wanna share with the audience that maybe we didn’t get to toda. But I also to weave in this final question we have. which is what role does kindness play in being a diplomat?
Mirembe Nantongo: Kindness in a general way or kindness to each other? Well again, I don’t this is a question that refers only to diplomacy. One of the things that I always say to my two sons — and they get sick and tired of me saying it — is that whatever else you do in life, I want you to be two things. I want you to be brave, and I want you to be kind. Now, brave is a huge word, kind is a huge word, so what does it mean? Sometimes, kindness is tougher than it is at other times. So, you need to be clear in your own head about what kindness means. I think it’s very important in human relations generally to start from a basis of what is kindness in this situation, even if you are in what feels like a kind of a defensive, threatening situation. Again, this is the importance of self-awareness and being able to understand. And I mean, I think this is a key thing that when people are nasty, unpleasant, abrasive, or whatever, they’re almost always driven by some kind of a fear. There’s always some fear at the bottom of whatever. And we ourselves are also very driven by our particular fears, whatever they may be. And so building an awareness as you could build your own self-awareness and having an understanding of what fear is driving who and when. In order to be brave, you have to understand that you’re afraid. So being clear about what is it that I’m afraid of, but also when you’re dealing with somebody difficult, being able to see the fear that is driving them and to connect with that and not letting them off the hook nor lower standards in any way or whatever. Just to steady yourself really grounds yourself. If you are aware that there is some kind of a fear driving, and you’re seeking to address that fear, you get much more positive and productive interactions than if you just ping off each other. You know, fear of fear. So kindness, I think is very important. And we each need to think about it individually. Like, what does it mean in practice? How do I implement this?
Heera Kamboj: Well, Mirembe, you definitely exude kindness, and I regret not having had the chance to work with you directly when you were at the department, but I really wanna thank you for your time today. I wanna thank the audience for these excellent questions spanning the gamut, especially from high school all the way to current FSOs. So really appreciate the wonderful questions today. I wanna remind everybody who’s here today that you can learn more about Diverse Diplomacy at diversediplomacy.com, where you can see all of our prior videos in this series and also sign up to receive notifications about future videos, events, and interviews. Thank you everyone. We appreciate your time and especially thank you, Mirembe. Excellent conversation and I learned a lot from you. Thank you.
Mirembe Nantongo: Thank you. Thank you everyone. And best of luck to all of you. It’s gonna be a bright future, I know it.
Read another conversation from our Diverse Diplomacy series:
