Leaving Government Service: What You’re Actually Good At
Every September, New York fills up with people who have somewhere more important to be. Heads of state, foreign ministers, their delegations, and a few hundred Americans who’ve flown up from Washington for the two weeks of it. In 2014 my job was to make all of that work.
The title was UNGA Coordinator. UNGA is the United Nations General Assembly, and most people picture it as the brief time in September when presidents give speeches and the motorcades shut down Midtown. It’s actually a year-round job of planning. Mine was at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, reporting to the Deputy Permanent Representative, sitting somewhere in the middle of four Ambassadors, the agencies back in Washington, the White House, the UN Secretariat, and every single person who believed their piece of the agenda was the one that mattered.
The team was over two hundred people. Six retired Ambassadors, six junior reporting officers, six administrative staff, and a long tail of everyone Washington sent up for the duration. Almost none of them worked for me in any way an organizational chart would recognize.
Here’s what the job actually turned out to be.
I made sure the housing was right. I worked with human resources so the entry-level officers arriving in New York had somewhere decent to live, got assignments worth having, and met the Ambassador and her deputies instead of spending three months wondering who ran the place.
I pulled the Washington agencies together months early, which everybody thought was premature in June and nobody thought was premature in September.
And I built panels. We had a Mission full of ambassadors with thirty years each behind them, and twenty entry-level officers and interns with no structured way to get at any of it. So I made one. Brown bag lunches, mostly. Bidding for your next assignment, negotiation, career paths, what working in Washington is really like. It was the first structured mentoring program the Mission had and it cost almost nothing to run.
Then for the two weeks themselves I ran the reporting operation covering 193 speeches by heads of state and foreign ministers, which consisted in large part of telling a great many very smart people, kindly and repeatedly, to make it shorter.
I’ve been thinking about that year a lot lately, and this is why.
When you leave government, nearly all the advice you get is about translation. Take your position description, strip the acronyms out, find the private-sector word for the thing you did. There are offices for this. Seminars. An enormous amount of material online, almost all of it written by institutions, and most of it perfectly sensible as far as it goes. It’s just answering a much smaller question than the one you’re standing in front of.
Because UNGA Coordinator doesn’t translate. There’s no civilian equivalent and no sense pretending there is. What that year actually was, underneath the title, was a room full of people who didn’t report to me, several of whom outranked me, all of them with competing agendas and a hard deadline, and my job was to get them pointed the same direction and keep them comfortable enough to do good work. The line in my file says it took adaptability, prioritization, organizational capacity and a good sense of humor. That’s about right. It’s also four things that will do you absolutely no good on a résumé.
Nobody teaches it as a skill. There isn’t really a word for it. The closest one is hosting, which sounds like it’s about napkins.
I host things now. A table in Napa over the weekend (which we just finished and more coming on that coming soon), a podcast I make with Nina Berube, a house in Italy when that comes together, a dinner that either works or it doesn’t. People are sometimes gentle about it, like it’s a soft second act after a serious first one. It’s the same job. Just the stakes were higher and the napkins were worse back then.
So if you’re three months out, sitting there with your position description open in one window and a résumé template in the other, here’s the only advice I’d actually stand behind. Stop looking for the translation of your title. Go and find the thing you were doing when the title didn’t matter. Mine was in the housing assignments and the pet shipments and the brown bag lunches, all the parts I’d have told you at the time were the least of it.
If you’re somewhere in the first year of leaving government service, I wrote down the honest version of mine. It’s free. → Get the Field Guide
—Cynthia