Issues and Concerns: A Q&A with Kim McClure

As you can imagine, there was robust debate around the building, within the wider foreign affairs community and with AFSA on the pros and cons of creating a precept focused on DEIA. It’s a bold and unprecedented move, but one the Office of Diversity and Inclusion believes essential to achieving real change in our culture. Colleagues who were initially skeptical about the idea raised some good questions and concerns that we believe are worth addressing.

Q: Won’t having a dedicated DEIA precept lead to box-checking on DEIA efforts rather than prompting colleagues to do this work from a place of genuine interest and conviction?
Fulfilling any of the core precepts could be seen as a box-checking exercise, but what sets an employee’s EER apart from others is the strength of their examples for any given precept and their ability to demonstrate the impact that said example had on the institution and our policy. This will be no different. Some people may do the minimum, but those who are most competitive for promotion will be the ones who clearly go beyond mere box-checking and show real results in advancing the department’s DEIA goals. It’s also important to stress that there is no single magic bullet to advancing DEIA. Like other DEIA interventions, this precept is part of a broader, holistic and long-term strategy.

Q: Won’t this just compel managers to relegate even more DEIA work to their direct reports and those who are part of underrepresented groups—many of whom are already burned out—so that said managers can then take credit for DEIA work despite not doing the heavy lifting themselves?
With all precepts, most managers talk about their team’s collective accomplishments and take credit for their own role in creating the environment that enabled such work. We can’t expect that work on the DEIA front will be different. That said, we do think this precept is one in which midlevel managers can also play a distinct role from the rest of their team and take credit for that. This includes ensuring an inclusive and accessible work unit by taking proactive steps to make it so, mentoring employees from a wide array of backgrounds, making their bidding/hiring processes more transparent and equitable, and building diverse teams. Managers who take this two-pronged approach—helping their team, and also spearheading DEIA work at their own level—will likely be the most competitive for promotion.
Further, we believe part of the reason colleagues who have done DEIA work are burned out is precisely because they’ve had to do it on the margins and during their personal time. Elevating this work to equal standing with other institutional and policy work will allow managers to create time and space for it during employees’ core hours. It also incentivizes more colleagues to help with this work, leaving fewer people to do it alone. Hopefully, that will serve to lessen the overall sense of burnout.

Q: What can I do to meet this precept? While not exhaustive, here are suggestions for how you can meaningfully participate in advancing the department’s DEIA work:
• Join your post or bureau DEIA Council. Even if you are not a member, partner with your DEIA Council to host a discussion on a DEIA-related topic. Host a watch party for one of the State Department’s many DEIA-related programs, and then develop a discussion guide or host a follow-up conversation to talk about how the topic relates to your immediate work environment.
• Organize a virtual event with your bureau’s senior DEIA adviser to learn how your bureau is connecting its internal focus on DEIA with its external foreign policy goals for the region.
• Collaborate with your human resources officer or executive office to play a role in reforming your post or bureau’s recruitment and hiring practices to encourage greater transparency, equity and diversity in its assignment and hiring practices. (Think about how this can be done for local staff recruitment and hiring, as well.)
• After taking FSI’s Mitigating Unconscious Bias Course, lead a discussion with section chiefs at your post or office directors in your bureau about the role each of you can play in reducing bias in department practices. (Section chiefs and office directors have a critical role to play in this space with respect to recruiting, hiring and making sure all employees have equitable opportunities to do promotion-enhancing work, and are equitably recognized for outstanding performance with awards.)
• Lead an assessment of ways that your post or bureau could be more accessible for current or future colleagues and contacts with disabilities.
• Organize a discussion with local staff to ask how DEIA issues manifest themselves in the local culture and/or at work, and how their American supervisors could assist them in addressing these issues.
• Help post identify and use accessibility-enabled technology for events and programs. (Poll your target audiences to ask about their accessibility needs before an event.)
• Set up a dialogue with managers at post discussing best practices for rooting out bullying and toxic management practices.
• Develop and launch anonymous pulse surveys to assess how well your specific post or bureau is doing on DEIA issues and fostering inclusion.
• Help your section chief or post leadership recruit from a more diverse pool of candidates.
• Make sure you are investing the same effort in mentoring colleagues whose backgrounds are different from your own as you are investing in those who might remind you of yourself at an earlier stage in your career, and invest in their long-term success by helping them strategize around future positions and assignment selection.
Speak up when you hear comments indicating bias during meetings about bureau and post hiring decisions. Take bystander intervention training to empower yourself to act in the moment when you see biased comments or actions happening in the workplace.

Q: Can I mention my work within employee affinity groups in my EER to get credit for that work?
According to department guidance, employees may mention what they did within an affinity group, as well as its impact, but cannot disclose the name of the affinity group, as that could be an indication of their potential membership in a protected class. For example, a statement such as this would be appropriate: “I served on the board of one of the department’s affinity groups and co-drafted a policy document that went to the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Reform outlining our organization’s views on what should be prioritized in the DEIA Strategic Plan.”