Diplomacy Happens Between the Headlines

Jon Clifton:
[0:08] Today, I am with the businesswoman, the professor, and the diplomat, and the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Culture and Educational Affairs, Marie Royce.

Marie Royce:
[0:20] Thank you so much.

Jon Clifton:
[0:21] Marie, it's great to have you here.

Marie Royce:
[0:22] Thanks, Jon. Great to see you.

Jon Clifton:
[0:24] Marie, you have been a huge user of CliftonStrengths. Of your top five, what ones did you use the most throughout your life?

Marie Royce:
[0:33] Well, it's very hard to make a decision on which one I used the most. But what came to mind right away was Self-Assurance. And I remember when I was a child feeling pretty clear on what I felt I wanted to do. And I really trusted myself. Now, this is before I was tested. But this is probably about the age of 9. I was very curious. I wanted to learn about different professions. And my dad was a businessman. And I decided right then, probably at age 9, that's what I wanted to do. Also, at a later age, at 18, my father had a real estate company. He had four offices. He was a broker. And I said to him that I would not only go into business in undergrad, but I would go to real estate school, which I did. So I took all the classes in the summer after I graduated. And when I finished, I told my dad, I'm not going to go to become a real estate agent or a broker. I'm not going to take my test. He said, what do you mean by that? And I said, well, I've really thought about it. And what I would like to do is do international.

And international means that I will go around the world. I'll go to school for that. I'll get into companies. I'll maybe even be an exchange person, maybe a delegate. And it really won't allow me to stay here locally in Southern California to do the business. And I think my dad was a little shocked by that. His father was a broker, and I really thought I would do that. But going back to having that kind of internal compass and thinking about it, I felt pretty confident that that was something that I wanted to do. So I would say that really comes to mind.

And then there are the others. You know, I've always used Strategic, which is my number five. Of course, I'm very strong on my priorities as far as working very hard and trying to really drive every day so that I could achieve. And I'm, you know, really it's an Achiever. So I, every day I'm an Achiever and I kind of start with zero every day and see how much I can do. Another thing is since I've had really large teams and I've been a leader in several nonprofits, I try to be a Maximizer. I've worked really hard to try to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute. And so the other thing I'd just say is, you know, just trying to ensure that those are the key things that kind of pop out in my mind in my top strengths.

Jon Clifton:
[3:29] Now, can you talk a little bit about your strengths journey, how you got in touch with CliftonStrengths and when you first discovered them?

Marie Royce:
[3:35] Well, it's a really kind of interesting story because I actually got exposed to it in the late 90s. I worked for a major Fortune 500 company, and I had heard about the strengths from various executives. In fact, I even went for a position, and the person that was hiring said he only wanted people with certain strengths to be on the team because he was trying to put a team together with different strengths, and I had strengths that he felt that he didn't need. Needless to say, I didn't get the position, and he hired someone who ended up quitting after four weeks. But actually from reading, and I even have my old book here StrengthsFinder, and actually knowing all about strengths, no strength is better or worse than any other. All 34 are really, really valuable and everyone is unique and distinct. So consequently I think that's really helped me kind of create a foundation to say, when you think about things like maximizing or an Arranger.

I even did that at U.S. Department of State. I did a program where I had an actual conductor here in Washington. He's one of the top conductors. And I taught everybody how important it was to ensure that ... All the musicians are experts. They all know their piece and how exciting it is when the conductor comes in. And we actually had everybody watch videos of top conductors. But what the. Excuse me. Yeah, the top conductors. But what happens is the conductor brings everybody in at the right time based on how the composer wanted the piece to be done. So consequently, isn't that really amazing? It's not like they can't play on their own. They can. However, the conductor brings everybody together. So it goes back to even the person, let's say maybe they're just with the little blocks or the triangle, but you won't be able to perform the piece unless you have everybody in there. So really, that's what kind of an Arranger and a Maximizer kind of basically does. And what I tried to really impart was how important it was for every single person to contribute and that every single strength is important. So that's what I would just say. And I think that having those top five strengths helped me be a better leader.

Jon Clifton:
[6:13] Now, you and I have talked about how you've helped bring out the best in others. Obviously, that's something that Maximizers do a great deal. But can you talk a little bit about how you've brought out the strengths of others?

Marie Royce:
[6:25] Well, I would just say here's an example. Since I went there 25 years ago and took it at that major company, I moved into a different industry in the area of telecommunications. And we actually had a small team because I wasn't at a headquarter point in telecom. And I had everybody take the test. We also had young interns who were in college, and I had them tested as well. Well, one of my young directors, I'd say she was in her late 20s, was very outgoing. And she constantly wanted to be networking. And I learned a lot because what I learned is that she was a Woo. And a Woo is a person that really gets their energy from going around and talking with people and learning from them. And so consequently, it's very kind of unique most of the time in business to see Woos. But we talked a little bit about this. Your father's a Woo. And I think he's a perfect example of a Woo. The first thing you do when you meet with Jim is he'll ask you all about yourself. And he's sincere about it because he really wants to learn. And he's so interested. And I think it's so interesting and positive. And so that really helped me have a better understanding of her. And also the rest of us really understood how she was motivated. So we could actually say to her, like, go to this event and find information. And she was very excited to do it.

Jon Clifton:
[8:04] Well, let's stick on Self-Assurance because the story that you told about you and your dad, when you sort of went against the grain or went exactly opposite of what he was hoping for. You know, we do a lot of research on strengths-based parenting. What advice would you have for a parent if they had a child that had Self-Assurance, that sometimes they went against the grain or said, I'm going against your advice? What advice would you have for that parent?

Marie Royce:
[8:29] Oh, that's wonderful that you're actually saying this. Well, I will give you a plug on one thing before I answer that question. Because I'm such a big believer in strengths, I have a lot of young people that come to me, even high school age, and ask for advice. I'm actually mentoring a young lady in Europe right now who's actually a freshman in college too. I always tell them to do CliftonStrengths for Students. I think it's really important for young people to also understand their strengths. In fact, if I would have only known what I know now at a younger age, it would have been incredibly valuable. I never knew what my strengths were. I would say that that is a very positive thing that their son or daughter really wants to kind of come into their own and think about what they want to do. I think the only caution I would, in fact, you could read this even in your book or your materials, is you want to make sure that you get a lot of different inputs. You know, Self-Assurance doesn't mean you should blindly say, oh, I'm going to do something. But give that person an opportunity. They might actually even evolve to a point where they say, well, I'm not really sure I'm going to do it, but I'm going to explore it.

Jon Clifton:
[9:47] Marie, let's assume that someone had just started their journey with CliftonStrengths and they found they had Self-Assurance in their top five. What advice would you have for them?

Marie Royce:
[9:56] Well, first I would say to them, since I'm a Self-Assurance person, that that's a great strength. I would say that that's really important to trust your moral compass. I, you know, it's sort of an interesting thing. When you're actually pushing your ideas forward, there's a lot of pushback from people. Every organization I've ever worked with, in fact, especially with startups, I've worked in major corporations where I was part of a startup division where people were very, very difficult. Or I had opinions that were different than various other entities in a government organization. But I felt that I had to keep going back to the fact that I had unique, distinct traits and talents. And that I was brought in to be able to contribute.

Jon Clifton:
[10:55] What strengths did you use in order to become so successful in sales?

Marie Royce:
[11:00] Well, that's a great question. You know, you've got different themes like Executing and also Influencing. I'm going to tell you a story and then that will kind of help me explain it. After I was recognized for the top in the country, and it was called Producers Roundtable, there's a person who was, I was in my 20s, and the top real estate company in the area, the owner said, I'd like you to come and speak to all my real estate professionals. And there was like 100. And I was thinking, like, clearly I was the youngest person. You know, they were mostly people with a second career. And they'd just gone on a bus and were, you know, coming back because they were looking at houses. And I remember thinking, wow, I can't believe I even agreed to do this speech. But then I went back to my Self-Assurance, which was I know something that they don't know.

Basically how I was trained was I was actually trained to be very strategic, and I shared my forms with them. I was basically and I still teach people how to do this today. Basically you set a goal and the three tactics to support that overall goal, and then you actually create all these points of things that you need to do because it could be 100 things, and then you rank order them. So then what you have to do is you have to put it into your calendar. So the company gives you blank calendars for the whole year. So, for example, if I'm going to try to sell this major account, I have to have it on my calendar that I'm going to go see that account. It's almost like self-fulfilling prophecy, but I don't have an appointment yet, right? So then I also, I'm a person that's a big strong believer in statistics. And are you familiar with the Pareto Principle?

Jon Clifton:
[13:08] Of course. 80-20.

Marie Royce:
[13:08] 80-20. So I practiced that at a very early age. And I thought, well, how am I going to meet all these key decision-makers? That's the other thing they taught you in sales. Like you have to meet with the key decision-maker. Like the hospital, because I was in healthcare sales, the hospital administrator, the top nurse. I thought, well, how am I going to meet them? You know, I'm never going to get past the front desk.

Jon Clifton:
[13:30] So what did you do?

Marie Royce:
[13:31] I thought, well, it was kind of going back to the watering hole. If you've ever been on a safari, you know, all the animals come at the hottest time of day to go get water. And I thought, where do they all go? And what I found out was that the hospital administrators were in an association. And I had four counties. I had Los Angeles County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and River ... I'm sorry, five counties, San Diego County, and Orange County. And bottom line is, every month they would all get together and have an association meeting. They would come for the dinner and you could be an associate member if you're a company of person. Then the nurses all get together. So I decided that at the very first priority for me was to ensure that I went to the association meeting for ... and then I also sold durable medical equipment products ... so what happened was the products I sold also were retail. And so then I went to the pharmacist association meetings because the pharmacists would get together once a month. And they all had pharmacies that had products in it. So those became my anchor for my planning.

And then I would ask face-to-face the hospital administrators for an appointment. And my goal was to get five appointments every time I went. So I would say I'm ... and the other thing I would do is ask a lot of questions. And I'm new. I really don't understand exactly what I'm doing. Can you help me? If you were me, how would you, let's see, sell your hospital? And then you listen. And then the other thing I did was I really focused in on the communication style of the person at their visual, audio, or sensory. Sometimes people are very visual and you bring in your calculator and you show them the data. Sometimes they're very audio and you'd say, well, imagine if you were using this, how would you, or even kinesthetic, like the feeling, how would you feel? And you have to really make sure you're keying into the language of that person.

Jon Clifton:
[15:40] The blend of your top six and what you just described in your approach to strengths-based selling, which is your Strategic and Achiever basically created a strategy. You used Achiever to create daily tasks to make sure that you're achieving each one of those. Your number six, you used your Learner in terms of asking a lot of questions to your prospects and clients to really understand what their needs were. And then, of course, you used your Self-Assurance to ask those bold questions. And then lastly, you talk about being able to be in a city at a particular time if your client is there, which is really your Arranger coming out. It's really an amazing sort of blend to hear all those strengths at play, talking about your approach to sales. Talk a little bit about your day-to-day with your Achiever in diplomacy at the State Department. How do you use that? When you get up every day, you've got your list of tasks. What does that look like in a diplomacy context?

Marie Royce:
[16:36] Well, that's a good question. I think one of the things I would do I guess goes back to a little bit of the Strategic too, is ... In the role that I had with close to 700 people, you also have different people managing your calendar. You also do not have visibility on everything. The reason you don't is you have to be willing to delegate. You have to make it clear to people what types of meetings you want to have so they are very clear. For example, I had a role that any ambassador that wanted to see me, a U.S. Ambassador or a foreign ambassador, I always would try to see them if I could. So they all knew that. The other thing I did was I created another program where I felt that my bureau should really understand what's happening in the rest of the agency. And so we actually had a program once a month where we actually would have speakers from different parts of the State Department come and speak on a topic and present. It was really important because my people got trained, and then too, they got to have visibility on who we were because I didn't want our bureau to be kind of in a silo. So that was really important.

But going back to how did I do everything, we instituted a meeting where once a week, the schedulers and my number two, my deputy assistant secretary, we would go in and my adviser and we would review everything for the week. We would talk about the week and what was going to happen. And then we would obviously be totally prepared for the week. We'd also talk about that day. We kind of talked about the day. So I think that was really important, just ensuring that we were always able to do that. And then there were certain things that, again, that were priorities. We worked with the communications people. Sometimes if there was a big, like, obviously, if the secretary needed me, the deputy, or if there was a big media thing happening, we got to make sure that the secretary would always be aware of any issue. I also, having comms training, felt it was really important to have what we call reactive, excuse me, reactive statements, meaning instead of being proactive when the press contacted you, you would have statements ready in case anything ever needed to be explained that you're always prepared. So I think that was really important. I think just kind of, you know, I did a lot kind of walking around trying to say like, well, what do you do? What are you working on? And also understanding what people's portfolios were.

One other thing, which I can attribute to my team, because I felt like we had too many meetings. And I said, let's figure out what kind of meetings we should be having. And they came up with a great idea for a meeting and I love this meeting. And we instituted it and it was that the entire bureau was invited and that anyone that wanted to present, they could present what they're working on. And they would have to be limited between three and five minutes to present. I had a functional bureau strategy with goals for the bureau, which map to the national security strategy. And what everybody worked on had to also cascade from that. So what you had to do is talk about how your program or project was supporting the strategy for the bureau. And you get to present it. And it was self-selecting. And so they would sit at the big table, and everybody else would sit on the outer table listening. And everybody, we'd post who was going to be presenting. There'd be like 15 people, but it was all self-selecting. So if you wanted to be a presenter, and we had parts of my bureau that you never knew what they were really doing. We'd have people, I was always incredibly amazed. Like they would be presenting what they were, their project. So everyone would sit on the outside ring or the outer rings, and especially the leadership, and then we'd have a phone in there so everybody could call in. So I felt that was a great meeting. I really, really enjoyed it because I felt like they were really driving the meeting. It goes back to kind of maximizing, arranging, all those things, but everybody contributing. And I didn't feel like people, we should pick who should talk. I think people should be allowed to decide if they wanted to talk. And people were nervous sometimes. But, you know, I was really proud of them for telling our bureau what they're working on.

Jon Clifton:
[21:47] You know, every leader has had some kind of major obstacle that they've had to overcome. When you were at the State Department, things got so difficult, you even had a superior that said to you, I thought you were gonna resign. Can you talk a little bit about what it is that you had to overcome and what strengths you look to in order to overcome that obstacle?

Marie Royce:
[22:07] Well, thanks for asking that question. It was actually a person that was my number two. But it was a relationship to COVID. So here I am with all the exchange programs with 350,000 people a year going through exchanges and we went into COVID. So March, I remember very well, March 11, 2020, State Department went to level four, which means do not travel. So every person inbound in the United States that was on an exchange program, we had to get back to their countries. And we had many people all around the world, thousands of people that were outbound that I had to bring back. But I never wanted to resign and never even entered my mind.

I put together my own task force of people who actually decided that they would be part of it. And I worked on it night and day to try to, and so I knew every single way to get them back. I worked with charter airlines. I worked with, I'll probably talk to at least 60 ambassadors. I basically made it a priority for every assistant secretary inside of the agency. And we basically had a plan for every person. I had Excel spreadsheets. You know, basically some people would have to take different routes. And I worked with the doctors. They had op-med flights where sometimes they would make a delivery of operations and medication. And I would get students on a plane. I also would have to get landing rights from the ambassador if I got a charter plane. And then I knew where all the students were.

I had one person that had won a major award in the United States. And this person, we needed to bring them back to the Middle East, and I asked another ambassador if they were willing to take the person into their country and give them a short visa so they could go into their country and then go in a car over the border. So logistically, we had every person, we had a plan for every person. And I'm very proud of what we were able to accomplish. So that's just an example that we were very successful. And I made sure, since I had all these students, that everybody knew how many we had from each country. And that they would always know that this is an important priority.

The high school students, they live with people for a year. They go to school. And then back in March of 2020, 43 states went to outside of the classroom and where people were actually working online. So you now imagine you are, you know, in the yearbook program and the football team and you're from another country and you're here. Now all of a sudden you're here with the mother and father that you're living with and the other kids sitting in the living room starting in March in 43 states. That wasn't the experience that you had planned. And so what I really did was I thought, well, what can I do to help ensure that I can bring them back with their families? So that's really what I worked on. And I was very successful. And I won't say it was just me. It was a lot of people working with me. It was all the team that I had, my bureau, and I'm very proud of them. It's also all those ambassadors and diplomats from all these countries that were active. And we also worked with airlines. We had companies, CEOs were incredible, where they had planes where they would help us. We listed their support. They were willing to actually sell tickets on a charter plane. We actually had hotels where they would quarantine. I know it's kind of incredible, isn't it, when you think back?

But, anyway, the other thing was, we had to pivot. So we had all these exchange programs we moved to that were actually, before they were live, but things didn't stop. So one of the programs was the International Visitor Leadership Program, and that's been over 80 years. You know, 80 years was in 2020. So people like Margaret Thatcher, they'd come to the U.S. as a young parliamentarian, and they would go to four to six cities. Well, we did the same thing. Here I was on a Zoom with the ambassador for Côte d'Ivoire for the United States, and I was on, and then we had a delegation of about 12 people or 10 people, and they were all on screen. And I said hello to them and I welcomed them and they actually went to four to six cities and met with mayors. They did all of this virtually around the area of their focus. So we continued to do all those things. We just did it in a different way.

And then that's when they again the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs really, that was a real good pivot because we started in 2019. But then we could do all that virtually so we moved cohorts to virtual ... and then remember we had the online training and then mentors ... so what we had to do just figure out how can we do it. And then you know some of our program was so unbelievable. We teach English at State around the world, and we started having webinars with over a million people on wanting to learn English. Isn't that incredible? So, I mean, I saw it as this incredible opportunity, especially in the area of the arts with films. And we did a kickoff, which I'm so appreciative of, of Hamilton back in July of 2020.

Now the United States is going to have the 250th anniversary in 2026. And every 4th of July, our embassies have a big 4th of July party. So my team said, should we go to Bob Iger and Lin-Manuel Miranda and see if we can get codes for Hamilton, which is coming out July 3rd, 2020, and we can give it to the embassies and they could have civil society leaders. They could be socially distanced or if the embassy chooses, people could actually stay at home and watch it. And so we picked which countries, and we probably ended up having 70. But what I'm saying is here's an example of how we pivoted during COVID and have an incredible Independence Day weekend. And we felt it was actually a really great kickoff to the 2026, which is the semi-sequentennial, which is going to be happening because everybody knows the bicentennial. But the State Department is basically the lead on that, where we are engaging countries around the world to help celebrate with us. But again, we had to be creative of what we could do.

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