Scott DeLisi

Ambassador to Nepal,
Former Ambassador to Eritrea

Degree: MA, 1980
Location: Washington D.C., U.S.A.

Entering the Foreign Service, Scott DeLisi admits he wasn’t completely sure what he had gotten himself into. After stints in India, Madagascar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Botswana, as well as an Ambassadorship to Eritrea, he has a pretty good sense: “I look back 28 years and think, ‘I would not change one minute of this. It has been the most enriching, rewarding career I could ask for.’”

In March, DeLisi was appointed by President Barack Obama as the Ambassador to Nepal. Prior he was the director at Career Development and Assignments for the U.S. Department of State.

What do you like best about your work?
The biggest surprise for me is how much I’ve come to value the sense of service to our nation. The fact is, I didn’t join the Foreign Service with that sense of service. I didn’t really know what the service was all about when I joined, but with every passing year I have come to appreciate more and more how much our State Department colleagues—like our colleagues in uniform—really are serving our nation. There’s pride in that—very few of us are going to be in history books, but we all make a contribution, and there’s a true satisfaction in that.

How did the Humphrey School help get you where you are?
I worked both as a teaching assistant for Professor Bob Kudrle and I was the Minnesota coordinator for the Humphrey North–South program. We brought Humphrey Fellows from around the United States to Minneapolis for the closing program. I didn’t realize at the time what good training that would be for the Foreign Service.

Years later, I was having lunch in Islamabad with Shafqat Mahmood, an adviser for Benazir Bhutto at the time. I told him, “Shafqat, you seem so familiar.” It turns out he was one of the Humphrey Fellows from Pakistan. We had met each other on the banks of the Mississippi River. So, you never know where your connections from the Humphrey School will lead you.

Do you have any advice for incoming and current students interested in a career like yours?
You need to understand yourself and assess whether or not you have the qualities to make it in this life. Are you willing to change jobs every three years? For some people, that’s a horribly frightening thought. The ability to shift responsibilities, to live in strange and exotic places—that has to be you. There are many different career paths in the State Department and you have to ask yourself where you would work most effectively. It’s great if you study foreign policy and it’s great if you think about issues of policymaking, but in addition to the interest and intellectual debates, you have to have that spirit of adventure, that willingness to embrace serendipity.

What is the biggest career lesson your have learned since graduating from the Institute?
You can be the most brilliant analyst, you can be a fantastic policymaker, you can have outstanding intellectual firepower—but if you don’t have interpersonal skills—the ability to work effectively with others, communicate your ideas in a way that results in them being acted upon in whatever culture you operate—the ideas never go anywhere. A brilliant idea that remains only an idea doesn’t count for much. At the end of the day, you need those fundamental communication and interpersonal skills. That’s what leadership is all about.