34 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Coaching, a recent addition to USAID’s professional development offerings, took on new significance when disaster struck the agency. BY VICTORIA MITCHELL AVDIU AND BRYN SAKAGAWA Victoria Mitchell Avdiu is a writer, leadership coach, and retired USAID Foreign Service officer who served in eight countries over 16 years, including as country director for Belarus. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post and The Foreign Service Journal. She lives in Paris. Find her at https://vlmitchell.com. Bryn Sakagawa is an executive and leadership coach, co-founder of AID Coaching, and retired USAID Foreign Service officer. During her 20-year career, she helped deliver health and development results in low- and middle-income countries across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She lives with her family in Ottawa. Find her at https://apulitconsulting.com. USAID COACHES CONTINUE THEIR MISSION A senior USAID mission director sat across from one of us on a video call in Uzbekistan, visibly exhausted. She had spent months navigating a politically fraught program realignment overseas, managing a demoralized team while fielding pressure from Washington. She could rely on plenty of advisers and experts, but what she needed was space: a confidential, nonjudgmental conversation with someone who understood the complexity of her world. Over the course of several coaching sessions, we helped her find her own answers to the problems she faced. Stories like these are what coaching made possible inside USAID. A 2024 global study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 80 percent of coaching clients reported improved self-confidence and 70 percent reported improved work performance. In the Foreign Service, where officers are working in complex foreign policy environments, these are significant outcomes. USAID’s internal coaching program, started in 2022, was relatively new in comparison to the State Department’s program, which had been operating since 2009. Former State Coaching Manager Jerry Wang described the State program as the department’s “best kept secret,” with 85 coaches serving more than 400 clients. This reinforced our belief that internal coaching had deep, untapped value across the foreign affairs community. Development work is defined by ambiguity, and traditional training programs often failed to address the individualized, ongoing leadership challenges that staff faced in our missions. FOCUS A WORLD WITHOUT
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