Sent overseas? Do this first
What happened after I was picked to be Ambassador to Vietnam
This week: what to do in the critical window between appointment and departure. A new feature, This Week in Diplomacy. And 3 rules for succeeding in Asia.
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The language and the “pre”
After opening an email with the title “Recruitment interview: Ambassador to Vietnam”, holding my breath and reading “Congratulations”, I walked across the park, bought a glossy DK Travel book, and booked a table at Mekong, my local Vietnamese restaurant in Pimlico.
It was the job of my dreams.
The UK was running a £50 million / year aid programme, and I was convinced there was scope to lean in harder than we were, beyond aid, through diplomacy.
I wrote in the Gazette of 16 April how the Foreign Secretary challenged my appointment with one surprise question, and how the office tried to hold off from announcing it. Then suddenly wanted me to get on the next plane out there.
It can go like that in a government bureaucracy.
I was delighted to be starting early, and less delighted to be cutting language training.
You don’t need me to tell you what a language can do, both for communicating locally and for understanding how people really think.
The UK Foreign Office (FCDO) now allocates substantial funding for it. After I returned from Hanoi they reopened a language school in the basement of the HQ in Whitehall.
On my recommendation HR made a commitment that every future Head of Mission in Vietnam should benefit from uncompressed language training to reach fluent Vietnamese.
At the urging of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the ministry then set a target that ALL ambassadors should do similar.
But that was all in the future. And despite progress, with some ambassadors doing the business in their host’s language, some still can’t.
I started studying Vietnamese as soon as I was offered the job, cycling every day across London to classes in the City.
I wasn’t good at it, discovering how frustratingly different Vietnamese is from the Asian languages I’d studied, Thai and Korean. But on a compacted schedule I passed the first exam.
This was during the period known in the diplomatic services as “Pre-posting”. That can vary from over two years - not uncommon when it includes full language training for the hardest languages - to “get on the next plane”.
I’d ended up near the short end of that spectrum. But whatever the length, it’s a critical time for anyone about work overseas.
Some make this mistake: they focus only on courses, formal calls, bureaucracy and family/personal admin.
Many ambassador designates don’t know their potential client base very well. When I asked the Finance Ministry (“Treasury”) to see me before a European ambassadorial posting in an economic crisis, they said they’d never been asked before.
Pushing through the pre-posting programme, I got a call from the Foreign Office. They had bad news that changed everything: the aid programme had been 100% cut.
I began the story of becoming Ambassador to Vietnam earlier in the Gazette. More to come on handling the decision to cut £50m of aid, and on the realities of life as a British diplomat in Hanoi.
Goodbye, London (across from the Foreign Office)
Before you leave
The pre-posting period fills itself. Courses, briefings, medical clearances, shipping decisions, schools research, family logistics. All necessary but not sufficient.
You have to be deliberate about what else goes in.
Map who can get value from your position, access and expertise
Before you go anywhere, identify who stands to gain from what you’re about to do, form having you working as a representative of your government (or business, NGO, medium or institution) and consider what value you can give them.
Your bosses at HQ, the part of your organisation you’ll report to, and other departments with thematic interests (like economics, rights or security) are just one part of a giant web.
This applies whether you’re going out as a diplomat, a corporate representative, or an NGO lead.
One instinct is to focus inward: your own organisation, your own brief. That’s vital. But the better instinct is outward: who are your stakeholders, how can you help them, have you met them and listened?
Example: preparing for a European posting, I asked the Finance Ministry to see me before I left. They told me they could not recall a British diplomat asking before.
Don’t neglect diaspora communities. Before working on South Asia, I learned from UK Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other communities that altogether make up several million voters. Their MPs, and Ministers, have them in mind.
Conversations with interest groups, parliamentary groups and lobby groups will expand your understanding. Before my ambassadorial postings I organised roundtables of think-tank experts and academics, and learned things that didn’t appear in any briefing document.