US State department
Employment policies

Rex Tillerson’s First Speech at the State Department: Lessons for Employers

Leave a comment

Lessons for Employers

The U.S. State Depart­ment has about 70,000 employ­ees. Rex Tiller­son was con­firmed as Pres­i­dent Trump’s pick for Sec­re­tary of State, and yes­ter­day was his first day on the job.

So Tiller­son spoke yes­ter­day to hun­dreds of State Depart­ment employ­ees to intro­duce him­self and talk about their shared mission.

I was impressed by the speech, and I thought the speech could give a lot of guid­ance to man­age­ment about the mes­sage that com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment agen­cies should com­mu­ni­cate to their employees.

Here are my thoughts on what Sec­re­tary Tiller­son said that should be viewed as exemplary:

  1. Tiller­son expressed humil­i­ty. He was Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer of Exxon­Mo­bil, one of the largest cor­po­ra­tions in the world (which prob­a­bly has even more employ­ees than the State Depart­ment), but he described him­self as “the new guy” that need­ed the help of the employees.
  2. Instead of brag­ging about his decades of exec­u­tive expe­ri­ence in the oil & gas busi­ness, he charm­ing­ly recount­ed his wife’s mes­sage that his career at Exxon­Mo­bil was a “41 year train­ing pro­gram” for his new job at the State Department.
  3. He showed respect to his new employ­ees. He stressed their extra­or­di­nary col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence and exper­tise. He not­ed that the employ­ees had an aver­age 11 years at the State Depart­ment, and he said he had been there for 45 minutes.
  4. He stressed cores prin­ci­ples such as that all employ­ees would be treat­ed with respect.
  5. He focused on the shared mis­sions, includ­ing keep­ing employ­ees safe and advanc­ing the inter­ests of the Unit­ed States.
  6. He stressed account­abil­i­ty and a need to ques­tion old ways of doing things to look for ways to bet­ter accom­plish the missions.
  7. One of the over­ar­ch­ing mes­sages was respect, both in rec­og­niz­ing the exper­tise of the employ­ees and stress­ing the need to treat employ­ees with respect.
  8. It would be hard to find a bet­ter mes­sage, com­ing out of a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly hos­tile elec­tion, to try to ral­ly employ­ees around a shared mission.

So employ­ers should watch the speech for the prin­ci­ples it reflects.

Rex Tillerson’s Speech at State Department

Here is a link Tiller­son­’s speech from the State Depart­men­t’s YouTube chan­nel, and you can watch the speech in the embed­ded video win­dow below:

Drew M. Capuder
Fol­low me:
Lat­est posts by Drew M. Capud­er (see all)

Leave a Reply