[WW]The good diplomat
Redi Jodikku
We are in a changing world and at this point a lot of important things are happening. Now is when the diplomats and high representatives of different countries are meeting and talking about what to do and how to do it. You won’t probably see them, as the nature of their job is obscure, but they are there, working for you and your country. The question I would like to address here is, are they doing what’s best for your country? Are they good diplomats?
There are a lot of different characteristics that make a diplomat a good one. Personally, I'm someone who prefers to judge the practices more than the outcome. With this I mean, I'm not analyzing someone's results only based on the final position but I tend to look at if he always followed the best practices possible, sometimes things that are not possible to be predicted could happen and influence the result, in a good or in a bad direction, but in the long run what matters is if the diplomat is addressing things as he or she should do it.
This being said, the first characteristic I would want to see in a diplomat is the ability to speak, dialogue and in a final stage negotiate the best possible outcome. He or she has to be open to speak always. Sometimes the diplomat will need to speak with his or her worst enemy, putting his feelings apart and being able to start a conversation and closing it with a good deal for his country or business is a very valuable and necessary ability.
It's also very important to know when to act and how to do it, being creative and finding solutions a narrow minded person would not find is very important as the scenarios where they are performing are not always "normal" or "common". Once he or she knows where to act, it's important to be patient and wait for the perfect place and moment and perseverant. The best deal will not always appear in the first meeting with the other party, having the ability to continue with the talks and don't give up, trusting that he is doing the right thing, which will be the right thing if he is skilled enough, and getting stick with it. Also having the creativity, as said before, to find new ways when perseverance alone is not enough.
This can be a good representative sometimes, but let's not get too simplistic
We have been talking about speaking, negotiating, dialoguing... a lot of situations where having a good credibility is crucial. Maybe having credibility is more a matter of a status than an ability itself, but it's definitely a characteristic a diplomat needs. If he is not able to have a good credibility because of others behaviours, he might at least look honest enough personally, because when there's no trust between the parties it's really hard to reach agreements.
The last but not least, a diplomat should be able to sell his treaties and ideas to his President and to the people he is actually working for. Being carried out is a necessary condition for a plan to be good enough. Otherwise you might have great ideas that won’t see the light because you have not been able to either convince your people if you are in a democracy or to convince your President or boss if you are not the ultimate decision-taker.
Also, selling your ideas to the other party is important. I don’t consider telling lies a good practice in the long run. It can work in a concrete situation, but it only harms your credibility and in some aspects your country’s one also, so knowing when and how to lie is also a good skill, but a very dangerous tool.
This one is a dangerous characteristic, because if he is good at doing this, but not good at the rest of things, he might be leading you to a not desired outcome.
This is obviously an opinion article, we are not talking about science, I would love if you wanted to share different opinions in the comments as we are all going to get benefits from new perspectives
Also, this was an essay I had to do for a course and not all the ideas are originally mine. I adapted it a bit to eRep as I saw it relevant to the current moment we are living. I hope you have enjoyed it, I did enjoy writing it.
Also, I want to use this article in contest: https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/special-edition-vice-president-announces-writing-contest-2605653/1/20
Comments
TL😉R 😛
Pos te mato
Speak english is important too 😛
No boobs 🙁
Voted, good article mate!
"Personally, I'm someone who prefers to judge the practices more than the outcome".
I totally agree with you at this point.
V + S
"Personally, I'm someone who prefers to judge the practices more than the outcome."
All that matters is the outcome. It's like with this Euro cup. Portugal isn't playing a nice football, but is in the semi finals. That's all that matters, showing results.
What good is it for a country to have a polite diplomat that doesn't get anything done?
Obviously the best is a nice mix between practices and outcome, but in my view the outcame should, always, be the priority.
But I agree with the rest of your article. 😛
I can't disagree more. With good practices the outcome will came on it's own. WIth good practices I don't mean being nice and funny, if you have to backstabb, you can do it, if you have to kill someone, you can do it. I haven't adressed everything on this article as you can make a whole book on the topic.
The thing is, in the long run, with large numbers of negotiations, you can look at the outcomes and assume he knows his stuff. But in one month, if you only judge the outcome, you are missing everything. You can do what was needed to do but a spaceship destroyed your main capital. Have you been a bad president? Looking at the outcome, sure, your main city is destroyed, you are shitty president. Looking at the practices, we don't know, maybe you could not know a spaceship was coming, no one did, it was not possible, so it's not your fault.
This is an extreme case obv. The thing is that there are exogenous factors we can't neither control nor predict (black swans) and that largely affect our outcome. Therefore, basing our analysis solely on outcomes does not work.
If you judge his practices and you conclude that they are the good ones, don't worry, results will come.
Thought we were talking about eRepublik, not Hollywood movies. Nevermind me then.
Anyway, imagine your country is at war, and is losing.
Who would you rather have in charge of the peace negotiations? The polite guy who never gets anything done, but is as polite as humanly possible; or the guy who is able to get a good peace deal negotiated and signed on both sides in a matter of days, regardless of being polite or not?
I know I would rather have the latter take care of negotiations if my country was losing a war. What good does it do to me to have a polite guy take care of business if at the end we continue losing?
That is specially effective when talking about erepublik. If you base your decision only in results, good luck with your country. By statistics some of those results will come from good decisions, others will have come by chance, luck.
The same happens the other way around. If you take the good decisions, sometimes unpredictable factors will appear or you will just not be lucky and the results won't be bad. But there won't always be those unpredictable factors taking part.
If you want to let your country to the luck and chance of external factors, good luck with it, i prefer to pick the guy who knows what to do even though not always has the good results.
Why are you all the time talking about politness? The guy who reaches good deals all the time is a good negotiator, which is the first characteristic i said a guy has to have. Politness is a good characteristic for a negotiatior, but if he has others who make him a good negotiator anyway i don't give a frog if he is polite. There are different characteristics for every ability, the more you have of them, the better you are at the overall characteristic.
"the more you have of them, the better you are at the overall characteristic." this one is obvious, but still, what, in my view, matters is the result.
Obviously not someone who gets lucky and has the right outcome once every 10 attempts. But one who gets the needed result 9 out of 10 times. And if there is someone like that in my country I would chose him to be in charge of negotiations regardless of how he gets things done.
Different views I guess. Some care about how it looks like, some care about what was achieved. I'm one of the latter.
If he gets the result 9 out of 10 times he is obviously doing a good job... no one can be lucky that amount of times.
The problem is most people doesnt have memory. In fact, having memory is actually a bad thing in this game. This makes the outcome better than the manners. I can buy the idea of politeness without results when making plans for mid-long term, but expect your fellow citizens to rage on you and remove any willingness to be polite
"All that matters is the outcome"
No, this is where you are very wrong. Outcome really doesn't matter at all. Ethics, morale and principle matters. Every time
Alright, I'll ask again then.
What good is it for a country to have a polite diplomat that doesn't get anything done?
Diplomats are supposed to get things done. Are supposed to accomplish peace, accomplish deals, accomplish the things the country needs. What use do you have for a very polite diplomat who can't get deals closed? Put the nice guy in Public Relations, ask him to be the one to send the PMs to the other governments congratulating them for being elected, and all that blablabla, and use the guy able to close deals to close them.
As I said above, the best would be a nice mix between both characteristics. But in case only one can exist, in my view a diplomat needs to be able to convince others that his point his right and should be able to get things done.
I think the point Andre makes is not so black or white, as he is favouring a mixed approach. Being a backstabbing piece of sh*t won't get you far, but being a 'nice guy' all the time doesn't either. You need to be ethic for credibility and opportunist for power (which in turn also is credibility, as lameducks are ignored).
Things are being mixed here. In that sentence i was not talking about objectives, but about analysis. What u should be looking at if you were the manager or the elector.
Outcome is the objective and manners is the way how you achieve that objective. Manners are not an objective per se. What I am saying is that you should observe what is the guy doing not what are their results. If you observe what he is doing and you know he is the doing the right things. Don't worry much about the results, they will come over time. Problem is that you can't always watch at the producers, but that does not mean you can't try it.
Principles and ethics is a complete different topics for me and the discussion would be different.
I've been MoFA of my country for 7 months in a row, and I've been in the offce for about year and a half.
My country has been erased, we've suffered a lot, specially because I'm very polite with everyone, either friends nor allies. I've been in both sides of the scale, I've been in the loosing side and I've been in the winning side and I can say that ethics and morale are funamental to a country.
No one likes a country that works for its only outcome.
My country was erased for 6 months, and in that time, we found who were our allies and who were working for their outcomes.
Look at us now, a country with a small damage, in one of the best alliances in the world, being respected not only by our allies but by our enemies too.
We have suffered for it, but everyone knows that we have a word.
If you tell me, that being like Poland is good, I'm sorry for you.
Muy buen artículo, pero lamentablemente, tanto aquí como en la vr, TODO vale con tal de llegar al sillón, y la mentira es el colchón mas confortable que encuentra el político/diplomatico, junto con la falta de memoria por parte de la ciudadania, que es la guinda del pastel.
Así nos va.
A very good article once again. I couldn't agree more and the principles should just as well be used when choosing who to run our countries.
Never read it.... like a good MoFA, I dont read anything 😛
You are a diplomatic mastermind, Rusty, we know it... and we watch you -.-
Dont watch me too closely, I will make your cringe with my Low antics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX4Icw2v7fs
[removed]
Best 3 of them at my opinion...Takimanija, ColonelBruce, Kherehabath
nobody remembers a mofa who was nice and polite after 2 years
people will remember who did great jobs 🙂
You also with the nice and polite thing? I have scanned my article 3 times already looking for the "nice" and "polite" words and they are only in the comments.
This is how I think you will get results, those are not objectives on their own, those are ways that will lead you to the objectives. In my opinion obviously. It's not that hard to understand. 🙁
Buen articulo. Te lo endoso y to 😉
Very nice article, Jordic! I fully agree with this, may I ask what you study in real life?
Majoring in Economics with a minor in Advanced Quantitative methods.
Nice 🙂 But how does diplomacy fit in that?
It does not. I'm taking a course separatelly than college. Just for having something to do during summer.
How nice, let me know if I can help 😉 I'm a student of international relations and conflict studies in historical perspective 😉
I wanted to write something boorish but then suddenly changed my mind
Excelente articulo
You have to be a good listener...not understand the words but understand what people say,what they want.