Day 213 - Protocol

a diplomatic reception

The session during my orientation to the Foreign Service that was most troubling was the session on protocol. Protocol has been defined somewhat flippantly as behaving impolitely on purpose. But that only works because it requires rigid following of the rules. Some of those rules seemed arbitrary themselves. But mostly what struck us all was how important it was to sit at the right end of the sofa, to get into and out of a car in the right order, and to arrange for guests to be seated appropriately at conferences and dinners. Breaking the rules was the fastest way to insult someone. If the someone was the boss, there were career consequences. If the someone was from another mission, there could be political consequences.

Fortunately, most of the rules I had to worry about only had career consequences.

another diplomatic reception

One of the rules required that staff members stand whenever the ambassador entered the room. Since I had not worked at an embassy before, I hadn't observed the rule anywhere, but everyone around me in Doha made sure I knew about it because the ambassador took this gesture of respect very seriously. I knew the ambassador - any ambassador for that matter - would be the last person to enter a room for a meeting. Those who were invited to the meeting were expected to be there on time. No one could ever enter a meeting late if the ambassador was present. So I knew that when the ambassador stepped into the conference room for our weekly country team meetings, we were all expected to stand until he sat down and told us we could take our seat.

But I hadn't realized the ambassador expected us to stand up when he came into our offices to talk with us. When one of my colleagues told me he did expect it, I asked his secretary, Marge, if he expected her to stand up every time he walked into her office, something he did several times a day. She responded that of course he didn't. But she didn't realize he was making an exception for her.

another diplomatic reception

At a larger embassy, it would be a very rare thing for an ambassador to come into the office of a staff member. It would be much more likely that staff members would be called and told to come to the ambassador's office for a conversation. So it is likely people would have stood up if the ambassador entered someone's office at a larger embassy. One of our local consular section employees, Randa, had previously worked at the U.S. embassy in Damascus and she confirmed this was the case there. But our embassy in Doha was about the smallest in the world - the ambassador and six other Americans. The small size meant that the ambassador couldn't avoid entering some of our offices.

When he came into my office one day and I didn't stand up, he stated his reason for dropping in and then pointed out that I perhaps didn't realize all the protocol rules because I should have stood up when he entered my office. I told him he was right, I hadn't realized that, and that I would stand up when he entered the room in the future.

We grumbled about this a bit because we all suspected that at most embassies the ambassador would likely only expect the staff to stand when he entered the conference room for meetings or when there were others from outside the embassy present. Most ambassadors, we thought, would have told the staff to dispense with the formalities when we were alone. But our ambassador was not like most ambassadors.

another diplomatic reception

It was not only our staff that was small; our building was also small. It was so small that the lobby of the embassy had been cut up with partitions to carve office spaces within the room. And since the ambassador walked through the lobby to get to his office and then through it again whenever he left the building, he expected the two employees whose offices were within that lobby space to stand up when he walked through it. As he had frequent appointments, he walked through the lobby several times a day, expecting those two employees to stand up each time.

Another aspect of protocol that the ambassador reminded us of often was that when we were invited to his home for a representational event, we were expected to be there before any of the other guests arrived and we were expected to remain until the guests had left. This was not an exceptional expectation since this protocol was well understood and observed everywhere. The difference in Doha was that the ambassador held so many representational events at his home and he invited all of us to each of them. He thought it was good for morale. We weren't in a strong enough position to point out to him that it had the opposite effect. I didn't find it very morale boosting to be the only embassy staff member to be seated at the table with all the teenaged children of the guests at one sit-down dinner event.

But maybe I missed the protocol point being aimed at me that day.