Embassies & Business
Can embassies help you sell? You bet! Most American exporters avoid contact with U.S. embassies until they are way over their heads with problems, and then they want the embassy to magically sort it out in an instant. Big mistake. I assume this is part of our American individualism and a deep distrust of government.
My former colleagues and competitors in other countries’ embassies, though, tell me they see the same thing. So perhaps it is merely a lack of knowledge of what an embassy can or can’t do to help a company in international business. We’ll get to that.
First, what’s the popular Hollywood concept of an embassy and how does it compare to reality? In the average film, an embassy is a grandiose building with surprisingly few people, staffed by a gruff ambassador and a few attachés, who seem to spend their time either drinking at receptions or dashing about on secret missions in the dark. They apparently do little work in the daytime. Oh, and in American embassies, they all work for the State Department or an intelligence agency. That’s the perception. No wonder businesses don’t go there.
New U.S. Embassy in London © KieranTimberlake/studio amd
The buildings can be grandiose; it depends on when they were acquired and what the budget was like at the time. A country always wants to project an image and that takes money. Some embassies are purpose built, some use existing buildings. The winning design for the new U.S. embassy in London was announced yesterday. The American embassy in Vienna is housed in a former palace that was Austria’s diplomatic training academy. But the former U.S. embassy in Bonn was previously a mental hospital. Some view that as appropriate, but it was what was available at the time. (Incidentally, the building we speak of as an embassy is actually the chancery. The actual embassy is the house in which the ambassador lives. But I quibble.)
Embassy staffs vary enormously, depending on where the embassy is located and what functions are needed there. The new embassy is London is designed to accommodate a staff of 1,000. The American embassy in the Marshall Islands is considerably smaller. The staff in some places, such as the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, may be larger than you might expect because people are positioned thereto cover entire regions, providing support, say, for the smaller embassies throughout eastern Europe and central Asia.
They won’t all be from the State Department. State Department employees are only a plurality in most American embassies. You will see people from Defense, Commerce, Agriculture, sometimes Treasury, Justice, FAA or most any other agency in Washington that has an international mission. And, yes, the intelligence agencies will be there, too. Most of their people are known to the host government and are there for liaison work with local intelligence agencies. Not all these people are “diplomats”. That epithet is reserved for members of the Foreign Service (what other countries call a diplomatic corps), which can include officers from State, Commerce or Agriculture. And much of the staff is support personnel, the admin specialists, communications and IT experts, a few secretaries (increasingly few), cooks, drivers, cleaning crews and other folks who keep things humming.
An embassy staff is not all American (insert your own country here). Many of the staff members, often the most valuable, are local employees – called Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs) in U.S. embassy jargon. They range from menial labor to some of the highest paid employees. There have been cases of senior FSNs getting paid more than the ambassador. It’s the FSNs who have the deep local knowledge that can be critical to your business success. They often are personal friends of the top government or corporate officers that your company needs to get to. In one country I served in, I had no trouble getting to see the finance minister on short notice; one of my FSNs used to date him. The local knowledge of the American officers, while often quite good, cannot be as deep as that of the senior FSNs. Most of the Americans are in place for three or four year tours, then off to a new assignments. It’s generally a good combination. Fresh thinking coming in, while saving the deep local knowledge.
The Hollywood concept is that embassies have no organization. Everybody reports to the ambassador, clearly an unreasonable assumption, but one that leads many companies to insist on speaking to the ambassador, even on trivial issues. The ambassador, or his or her deputy, the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM), is a manager as well as being a representative for the country, and most of the work of an embassy is delegated down – just as any company would do it. An embassy, by the way, is an interesting management proposition. Yes, the reps of all those agencies report to the ambassador, but they also have their own bosses in Washington, which can lead to conflicts when their home agency and the State Department disagree. My toughest negotiations have been between agencies rather than with other countries.
The United States uses both career (from the Foreign Service) and political appointee ambassadors. I had good ones and bad ones of both stripes. Just as the relationship between a CEO and a COO is critical for any corporation, the same is true of how an ambassador and the DCM work together. The DCM is the Chief Operating Officer and that role becomes even more crucial if the ambassador is political and doesn’t know how to work the system.
Tomorrow, I’ll plan to look at how an embassy is structured and get into which parts of an embassy a business needs to know. And I’ll let you know what those diplomatic receptions are really like.
