PEACEMAKERS OF PROFESSIONALISM, PROTOCOL, AND PREPAREDNESS: CSW62 CAPACITY BUILDING SESSION
Ambassador Suzan Johnson Cook
By Ambassador Suzan Johnson Cook, transcribed and edited by WFWP Newsletter Editor Mira Brown (content in quotation marks were words taken directly from a recording of her speech)
At the WFWPI Horizon Summit during CSW62, Ambassador Suzan Johnson Cook presented a capacity building session on March 17, 2018. She encouraged the participants to become peacemakers who embody professionalism, protocol, and preparedness, who can present and publish material in a clear and diplomatic way. A leader should embody CPR: courtesy, professionalism, and responsibility.
The way a person uses language, whether a foreign language or their own language, affects their professionalism. She explained: “sometimes your first language is your strongest and speaking the second is difficult. There are two things you can do: either you have a translator or you find tiny amounts of time to work on your language. You need someone honest enough to [help you] say what you meant to say.” Professionalism means “understanding that you’re on, that you’re a public figure, but you’re handling your business in a way that’s professional.”
One must be careful not to “get too familiar” and maintain proper protocol in their speech when interacting with other leaders. She would never have gone up to Former President Barack Obama and said, “Hey Barack!” She and her team in Washington, DC didn’t “have that relationship [with him]. We love him we’re proud of him and everyone feels like they know him. But I worked for him. So he was Mr. President. [You need to] understand your presentation is the whole package.”
Having “peace within” and being prepared to keep your emotions in check are important for maintaining a professional demeanor. Ambassador Cook demonstrated this with a story:
“One time I was at an awards ceremony, and while I was in a bathroom stall, there were two women complaining. I could’ve cursed them out but I didn’t. You have to prepare for things without getting angry. You have to find the peace within. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get upset or angry or frustrated. But you have to have discipline of your emotions, of your feelings, and how you handle things.”
As a leader, it is important to monitor “your protocol, your peace within, how you present yourself, and how you have prepared yourself.” When she spoke with organizations and committees in Washington, DC, they would know “from the first question they asked whether I was prepared or not. Did I do my homework? So [in that time], I had to be briefed every single day.” She also was responsible for supplying the funding necessary to carry out her ideas. “There’s no money for peacemaking; they don’t pay your way, and they don’t promise you the call. When you get the call, [you have to] be ready because you will not get another shot. ”
Ambassador Johnson Cook “deputized” the attendants “for peace.” She explained that when WFWP chairwomen and co-chairwomen plan their events and activities, “they’re getting the opportunity to show what [they] can do at a local level.” All of this is in preparation for “the call” to do something larger on an international scale. A woman who is working as a leader locally might find themself suddenly on the “world stage,” and she must be prepared and have done her “homework” so she can best represent her cause. The Ambassador asked her audience, “Are you ready?”
She emphasized the importance of understanding policy and how policies are created. “To be an international influence, you have to be able to affect policy. Policy is what determines what happens in our lives. Whether it’s urban policy, national policy, or international policy. You have to figure out which groove you flow best in, but you have to learn it. If you make it to the policy making table, that’s an influential table. They carry out the policies that happen at that table, so you’re really a game changer if you know policy.”
When she was working for Former President Bill Clinton as a White House Fellow, she was tasked with the issues of homelessness and youth violence. One day at a cabinet meeting on urban policy, he left her in charge. In her head, she was nervous, but she knew it was a valuable experience, so she said, “yes, Mr. President!” Then she found herself “at that urban policy table with all white men in ties...discussing urban policy! But here was an African American woman who was actually from an urban area, at the head of the table. Could I not influence it a little bit? This was a moment I had not expected. But this was my moment. And when you get the moment, you have to speak up. It’s not the time to be shy or act like you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is your moment. If you get asked a question or you can insert yourself into the conversation, that’s the moment.” Be ready for all opportunities and possibilities so you can rise to the occasion when it comes.
Her experiences with urban policy helped prepare her for her current work with foreign policy, and she learned many things along the way. “Every experience in life prepares you for the table you’re going to sit at … every experience, ever, prepares you for the place you’re going to be.” An important way to help yourself be prepared is to realize that politics affects everything in life, including why you’re invited to some meetings and not others, who is chosen as speakers at events, and which children are accepted to a school. “Politics means there is someone [else] who was waiting for what you have.”
Women in particular have much to overcome when they are in positions of leadership. If they claim to be an ambassador for peace but then go off in anger at someone or something, people will just see “an emotional, out of control woman,” whom they cannot take seriously. She urges, “you have to control [your emotions], you have to reign [them] in because you don’t want others to see you as an angry woman, a woman that can’t handle peace, because then you’ll never be in the line of peacemakers. You’ll always be on the shelf of the angry women.”
Sometimes in leadership and peacemaking work, people of diverse backgrounds are brought together on a project, and their success depends on how well they can overcome their differences. During her time in Washington, “conservative, evangelical, Republicans” often briefed her and prepared her for her hearings, and as a “black Baptist woman from the Bronx,” she came with a very different perspective. She said that even though “I didn’t look like what they thought on paper I was going to be,” she “had to sit with them, and they had to sit with me.” Without those circumstances, “we would’ve never been in the same room, let alone in the same conversation.” Through their time together, they learned from each other, and despite their differences, they became friends. “Peacebuilding means crossing the line. Go places where you might not have gone before. How are we going to get to peace if we don’t talk to each other? How can we talk about changing the world, if we can’t talk to one another? Cross the line!”
Ambassador Cook carried her experiences in government with her as she returned to her neighborhood in 2013. In response to the lack of peace she found there, particularly among women of different ethnicities, she formed a movement for women called Pro Voice, or Pro Voz in Spanish. She said to the Latina and African American women there, “we have to sit down together.” Pro Voice became a “safe space for women leaders to talk, vent, be mentored and try out ideas, because they weren’t at any tables of influence, so there wasn’t a way to air their frustrations.” The group focuses on three Cs: connections, celebrations, and conversations.
These meetings provide the opportunity to “talk to women on other sides of the aisle, politically, or other sides of the highway. That’s a peacemaking effort. Which is simple, it’s not costly. We had Republicans and Democrats from both sides of the aisle, who had voted for different presidential candidates, who had never spoken to each other, [even though] the election’s over! They left and said, ‘this was the best [meeting] we ever had! I never would’ve talked to them and they never would have talked to me.’”
As leaders, many of us have stories to tell, and no one will know them if they are not published. She had a professor and in her third year of seminary, he said, “my books go where I can’t go. I can’t be in Ethiopia tomorrow and West Africa the next day. But my books can. In my books, I’m really transparent. I tell my stories.” Share the stories of your challenges and how you overcame them. Tell “the story of how you transition. How do you keep your life going and not shut down? How do you close a chapter so a new one can open? How do you close that so that you can go forward?” Anyone can share a story at the very least on social media, just “be careful what you post. Remember your posts follow you for the rest of your life. Don’t put something up there that sounds crazy because you’re hysterical right now.” Have a friend preview your words before you post them. Friends, colleagues, and family are important for partnerships; “1 and 1 is 2 except when it’s side by side, then it’s 11. [With partnerships], you have the multiply effect.” The more partnerships we form, the better.
Along with their public responsibilities, peace leaders also have the “responsibility first to your family, [so] don’t ever forget that you have them. Even if that means resigning to make sure they get through college.” She shared an anecdote about her oldest son, who’s currently in med school, about a time when he was in eighth grade. She was serving at the time as the first female president of a huge ministers conference, which came with a lot of pressure. She had the responsibility of addressing 12,000 people in attendance, but one day during the conference, she had to leave for her son’s graduation. There were no flights that night, so she hired a limousine to drive her all through the night, in the pouring rain, for eight hours. She arrived late and fell asleep in her bed, and when he awoke he was surprised to see she’d come! “It was one of those kodak moments. I cried, he cried. I said [to him], ‘this is something important to you!’ Those are the moments that you can’t pay for. So as you’re out saving the world, make sure you don’t lose what you have. Those relationships are what’s important to me, and to you.”
The principles of peacebuilding leadership are: following practical steps, maintaining protocol, preparation, presentation, policy, politics, professionalism, publishing stories, and partnerships. The session concluded with Ambassador Cook instructing the participants to turn to someone next to them, take their hands, and say to them: “You’re my partner in peace! You’re my fellow ambassador! You’re fabulous! You’re fine! You rock! You’re going to be a world-changer! And I give you my peace.”
As a leader, “you’re stepping out there. You’re saying, ‘I have a dream, I have this nudge in my soul that says I can make a difference.’ When we’re collectively doing it, we can make a difference. We can be peacemakers in this world, peace builders in this world, and world changers.”
