Yin & Yang

How do you build a winning team, a high performance team?

Yeah, that's a really great question. I gave this a lot of thought. I'm not sure if I found exactly the secret sauce on it, but there were a couple of things that jumped out at me. And one was to make sure that I had diversity. So I did bring in people from other bureaus, which in the State Department is not always an easy thing to do. But I did do that. I brought in two people from different bureaus to kind of shake up the mix a little bit while maintaining some of the very experienced and very talented people who were already in the bureau. So I tried to create exactly the same mix. The other is recognizing what your own strengths and weaknesses are and making sure that you're offsetting your weaknesses with people on the team. So that was really important to do.

What would you say are some of your strengths as a leader and some of your weaknesses?

Well, I am, I hide it well, but my team knows I am a very, very strong introvert. And so being out in public and sort of being out there all the time was not my norm. And I needed a certain time of the day to be able to recharge my batteries. And I knew that. So I hired a principal deputy who is my polar opposite in terms of personality, has boundless energy, never stops, is a people person. And so we were able to kind of balance each other out as two really different people. So I think that was the key thing. I knew I needed to balance.