Interview: John Kringen - CIA Director for Intelligence

A Conversation with CIA Leadership Concerning Its Diversity Initiatives

In August THE BLACK COLLEGIAN visited the Central Intelligence Agency to discuss with executives the issues that are facing the Agency and how having a diverse workforce helps the CIA in its mission. The discussion participants were John Kringen, Director for Intelligence; Carmen Medina, Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence; and Gertie Starks, Management Leadership and Diversity Programs.

TBC: Please tell our readers more about your background. How did you go from being a college professor to working at the Central Intelligence Agency?

Kringen: I had been teaching at the University of Maryland and also doing research for the Department of Defense. A representative from a defense contractor heard me give a presentation at a conference and offered me employment with his company. However, I accepted an offer from the Agency. If my parents were asked, they would tell you they are not surprised that I chose to work for the CIA.

TBC: This is the third in a series of interviews we have had with the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) leadership. In the first, your predecessor, Jami Miscik, talked about diversity and why it is critical in your business. Last fall, Carmen Medina provided us with her views on diversity. After 18 months in your position, what is your view on diversity?

Kringen: As Carmen alluded to in her interview, we have been under a lot of pressure in regards to the quality of work that we do and ensuring that our analysis includes different perspectives, different views of the world. The criticism levied at us has been one of groupthink. We view diversity in the broader notion; we need individual opinions and a variety of viewpoints. In the DI, we must create an environment in which people from different backgrounds feel comfortable expressing different views, because it matters in our analytical work. We need people who are able to challenge conventional wisdom, to lay out alternative arguments, so that we don’t automatically march down the path where we arrive at a wrong conclusion. I have always thought the strength of our approach to hiring is that we have our managers directly engaged in whom we hire. We build relationships with campuses, and we do that with some planning and forethought as to where we can get a diversity of students. That has been a key to our success in terms of attracting people from different regions of the country and from different ethnic backgrounds.

TBC: How do you communicate your view of diversity to your management team?

Kringen: We started under my predecessor, Jami Miscik. She required each office to put together a diversity strategic plan. After I became Director for Intelligence, we had a session to review those plans. We said: “Here is what you said you were going to do. Now, how have you actually executed those plans?” Part of the plans fit in our outreach and recruitment initiatives, and part had to do with overall management practices. It is like with anything else: If you think it’s important, you have to engage your managers.

Carmen Medina: I might add that we had a meeting where we discussed how well we did as a Directorate in the past year. We talked about everything: the quality of our product, our retention statistics, our language skills, also on the table was how well we did in terms of diversity. We had a conversation about the percentage of minorities in our offices’ management teams. I am encouraged that we now have made at least enough progress on this issue that we can actually begin to have such a conversation. And, it’s a meaningful conversation, not just about the diversity in our office, but the diversity of our management team. Even as we have increased our hiring in a spectacular way, we have continued to bring in a diverse pool of candidates, but we are still not as diverse as we would hope. What’s important is that we not only talk about diversity as a management team, but that we do so in the context of our most strategic goals. We don’t have a separate meeting about diversity.

TBC: How is your view on diversity communicated to the workforce at the CIA?

Kringen: Carmen Medina, Peter Clement (Deputy Director for Intelligence for Strategic Programs), and I are pretty active in engaging the workforce. We participate in management offsites; we are invited to various employee groups. We speak to groups of potential employees, such as those Gertie invites to visit headquarters as part of our diversity outreach initiatives. We are invited to participate in affinity group offsites. We welcome any opportunity to speak with employees about our values, about diversity, and why diversity is important. We are constantly on the road talking about what we are trying to do as an organization, which includes our approach to diversity. Gertie delivers a presentation on “Valuing Diversity in the DI” to all new employees as they enter the Career Analyst Program (CAP).

Gertie Starks:We encourage our employees, including our student interns, to participate in affinity groups, and we value the feedback from those groups. Our employees participate in offsites where they discuss issues of importance to them. These issues can range from mentoring to employee development to challenges they face in the Career Analyst Program (CAP). Directorate management is invited to participate. They listen to what employees have to say. And, I can say that decisions have been made and actions taken based on these discussions.

TBC: The DI has outreach efforts with several colleges and universities. Have those efforts been successful?

Kringen: Oh absolutely! We have done very well at majority schools with high minority populations and also at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. In a numbers sense over the past two years, we have had a net increase of approximately 100 minority officers who have been brought on board into the Directorate. This is a positive development in itself and, in my view, can be attributed directly to the work we have done in getting our message out to students, professors, department heads, career counselors, etc., about our mission, the role of the intelligence analysts, and the skills and academic backgrounds we seek.

Starks: We host outreach conferences at headquarters, where, in addition to inviting students, we invite professors to spend a day or two with us. So, as they recommend their students to us, they know firsthand the environment in which their students will be working.

TBC: In your outreach approach at targeted universities, you have an opportunity to talk with the department heads and professors. Do you get an opportunity to engage them about your Directorate’s mission, as well as the kinds of talent you are seeking?

Kringen: Absolutely. We have, depending on which audience we are dealing with, a certain amount of baggage associated with the label CIA. There are ready reasons to overlook the Agency as a potential employer, if you are only listening to the media. We have to work through that, and the only way to work through it is having some level of personal contact.

TBC: The DI has hired record numbers of employees in the past two years. Has that impacted your ability to hire a diverse workforce?

Kringen: No. We were initially concerned that with hiring so many new employees, we would not be able to focus on diversity hiring, but in fact we have had successes. We actually had a net increase in numbers of minority hires and a relative increase in our overall minority population.

TBC: How do you plan to continue this?

Kringen: Well, I would say we will maintain the same approach that achieved these hiring successes. We have hired so many new people in the past two years (and we’ll hire several hundred more in 2007) that we need to make sure we develop and retain this talent. Thus, we are focusing as much attention, if not more, on the issue of retention. What we are doing now is building the next generation of analysts at this Agency. The current challenge is to retain this workforce. So, we have been in dialogue with a group called the Black Executive Board and have an initiative under way to look at how we can strengthen our coaching and development efforts. The last thing we want to do is be in a cycle where we are not able to retain people and, therefore, will have to continue to invest in this massive hiring program.

Starks: Our outreach relationships with universities remain strong, thus positioning us to continue the level of minority hiring successes we have seen in the past two years. Additionally, we will continue to place emphasis on our internship program, which has traditionally been a success for the Directorate, as we convert a large percentage of our interns to full-time staff positions.

TBC: Is there a formal way of measuring your progress?

Kringen: Yes. First, on the recruitment side, Gertie pulls together a lot of the data for us. A second measure is how we are treating our mid-level officers: Did it look like they are getting comparable rates of promotions and the same career opportunities as others? Are they moving into the feeder group to move into management? We have seen this feeder pool grow significantly; so, that is an additional benchmark of success. The one area where I don’t think we would claim any real success is at the senior level. In part, this reflects that for years, we did not have a large enough feeder pool to do that.

TBC: Is that one of your diversity targets?

Kringen: Seeing growth in this area is certainly an objective. These kinds of decisions are also discussed with other Agency senior managers. This issue is not isolated to the I.

TBC: What are your plans for developing and retaining this diverse workforce?

Kringen: We are not yet where we need to be in the mentoring area. We are shooting for fall to come up with a formal mentoring plan that will involve all of the senior executives in the Directorate, including those of us in Directorate leadership, reaching down to the more junior level, perhaps a range of levels. This program will help coach those in the management and senior analytic feeder pool through career challenges and what they need to do to get to the next level. The program does not just include DI senior managers; we have a commitment from the Black Executive Board, as an example, to also play a mentoring role. What we need to do is put together a plan that combines the two sets of players. The other thing we are trying to do is improve the caliber of management and leadership training for all managers.

Medina: To prevent a problem from occurring we must pay attention. This year we started doing a quarterly report on retention for the Directorate. One of the things we wanted to learn is if the retention rate for minorities was any different than the overall retention. We are looking at it and we are paying attention. It’s like preventive medicine; we are a lot better off preventing problems than reacting to them.

Starks: We have made some substantial gains in the past two years in development and retention. Our statistics show that minorities are moving well through our system, with impressive rates of promotion.

Kringen: I think we must ensure that we continue to invest in programs that Gertie manages for the DI and which have proven successful for us. But the real challenge is to ensure that our employees, particularly those we view as having potential for management, are given opportunities to grow and develop. For example, in an office I worked for previously, we hired a female minority manager who came in and all of a sudden there were four or five minority officers working for her within a year. You can say that’s just coincidence, but that’s not what intelligent analysis tells you. What you need to have is people in management positions so that they can be seen as role models for others and help maintain the momentum.

Medina: General Michael V. Hayden is the new Director of CIA and we expect him to discuss his strategic direction. I expect him to set some goals for the Agency on diversity that will affect the future efforts, but I think we have already created a virtual cycle where, by being more diverse, we’ll attract more minority candidates.

Kringen: No, we are not there yet. But we have also taken advantage of the change in demography of the U.S. As the population has become more diverse, then inevitably we are going to be tapping into those pools.

Medina: One of our office directors came to see me this week. He showed me statistics of one of our divisions, consisting of several dozen people, that had more African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans than it had Northern Europeans, to include the chief. So, I thought, that’s jolly good.

TBC: What is your vision for the next five years?

Kringen: I envision a continuation of our programs that sustain the kinds of increases at the junior levels through hiring. We continue to have the progress we have made in terms of moving those folks out of mid-grade into management. We must have diversity in our management ranks; we need people in management positions who are visible and can serve as mentors. These programs must be self-sustaining; we must sustain our commitment. We must imbed diversity culturally in the organization, instilling it as part of our value system. We must create a virtual cycle where being more diverse attracts diversity.

Medina: I would like to be so diverse five years from now that no one would talk about it because they know we are diverse. It’s just part of the culture. I think I said in the last article, as long as we are still counting, we are not there yet.

Kringen: The great thing about working in this organization is this business works best from the bottom up. It does not work well if all decisions are made from the top. People who come here will have an opportunity to have an impact right away. For example, when Carmen, Peter, or I meet with new employees in CAP, at least two or three of them have already written an analysis for the President’s Daily Brief. The people we are hiring now will have all kinds of opportunities to do things earlier than would have been the case in the past. You can make an impact in this organization sooner rather than later. That’s the kind of thing that attracts smart, intelligent, analytical people.

TBC: Thank you