Speaking Out

BY JOHN FER

We lionize bullies. Contrary to our stated policies, regulations, and op-eds in the FSJ, we put those who bully others on a pedestal. We leave them unchallenged. We wait them out.

The depth and persistence of the bully problem at State is a stark measure of the department’s organizational weakness and the institutional weakness of the U.S. Foreign Service.

Like groups who have resigned themselves to being abused, we’ve created language that excuses the bully’s behavior. We describe them as “tough.” We cast them as those who know “when to break china.” Or we make the Faustian bargain, conceding their foibles in exchange for their foreign policy “expertise.”

You don’t have to look far to prove my point. Enter the Harry S Truman building via 21st Street, and you pass by a display celebrating Richard Holbrooke’s career as a diplomat. Through it, we tacitly condone his demeaning, philandering behavior in favor of celebrating his skills as a negotiator. He’s not the only one.

Another officer, known as a “stapler thrower” (who once tossed one at a subordinate, also an A-100 classmate of mine), is still writing op-eds and influencing the dialogue. Other bullies had the gall to sign their goodbye letters, “Be kind,” when in their career they were anything but, and will probably have a few rooms named for them.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Bullies in top positions, after all, are not much different than the Biff Tannen–like characters we see in movies and television. In the context of Foreign Service officers (FSOs), our bullies are usually fakes. Take Holbrooke, for example, who grew up a neighbor of Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

We should never accept the illusion that he went through the same processes we did. He picked and chose the administrations he wanted to work for, hobnobbed with journalists instead of his fellow State colleagues, and existed as a soldier of fortune, somewhat endearingly nicknamed Bulldozer.

Bullies also surround themselves with serial staffers. I once asked a mentor how a certain high-ranking bully was able to be so successful, and they told me: “[X] is a risk taker who surrounds themselves with the risk averse.”

Sure enough, you can see many of those risk-averse staffers now reaping the benefits of their fealty, having been given positions leading missions. And how many times have you heard deputy chiefs of mission described as “good shock absorbers,” meaning those who can endure the abuse of chiefs of mission and shield subordinates from them?

At a recent roundtable for mid-level officers, when asked what the organization could do to combat toxic bosses, a senior department official acknowledged the problem and said: “Unfortunately, accountability has never been a hallmark of this department.”

While honest and accurate, that’s like me telling my spouse: “Fidelity has never been a hallmark of our marriage” and thinking that puts the onus on my spouse to adjust to that grim reality. Again, we create language that enables us to be bullied.

Strong organizations, those with an established culture of leadership, are not as susceptible to bullies.

When we do examine bullying, it tends to be as if it were a brief pest infestation, and one callout (e.g., an op-ed, cable, or acknowledgment by the Secretary) will rid us of “them.”

We do not acknowledge, however, that the reason bullies have been able to hold sway here for so long is that our institutional culture enables them.

Rooting them out requires a hard look at what we incentivize in our leadership structure and how opportunistic people take advantage of it.

We also neglect certain internal aspects of our organization that, if embraced, could help weed out (at best) or isolate (at worst) State’s bullies.

Simply put, strong organizations, those with an established culture of leadership, are not as susceptible to bullies. Nor are they as vulnerable to destabilization on account of the ebb and flow of political appointments and partisan administrations.

Here are three recommendations through which we can build a culture of leadership and strengthen our organization.

1. Stop Talking About Training and Mandate More

The State Department only mandates three one-week classes on leadership to the FS-1 level. You’d be hard-pressed to find a good organization of similar size and budget that has fewer mandatory trainings in this vital area.

To develop a culture of leadership, we need more deliberate, mandatory forums in which we allow our current and future leaders to test and hone their skills, examine our organization, and weed out those who have gamed the system to promote themselves.

Hiring hundreds of new officers will not change the fact that we are not incentivized to seek professional development. Currently, most people see the decision to pursue long-term training as a courageous act of taking oneself “out of the game,” implying that long-term training won’t help toward promotion.

That line of thinking encapsulates why our organization, despite having some of the best people in government, is so bad at developing leaders.

Currently, most people see the decision to pursue long-term training as a courageous act of taking oneself “out of the game.“

At a December 2023 town hall on modernization, when asked the question, “Why aren’t there more mandatory leadership classes?,” senior leaders variously blamed the budget, said that Secretary Colin Powell “left gaps,” and encouraged us to not “discount on-the-job training [OJT].” (Note: By the very fact that we do not measure OJT in the field, we are discounting it.)

These responses all dodge the glaring need to deliberately bring our officers into a training regimen that helps build a better organization. Training should not be seen as “stepping out of the game.” We should make it mandatory, competitive, and deliberate.

Those who get the best training have better opportunities to distinguish themselves. Senior leaders often pivot to praise the great work of FSI’s Leadership and Management School. They would do better to prove it by making more courses, including FSI’s new core curriculum, mandatory.

2. Take Commissioning Seriously

Senior leaders feel no great impetus to make change, because many have found their niche in appealing to the revolving door of political appointees and their staffers who occupy the highest reaches of our organization.

Political appointees are a reality in our branch of government, but we could distinguish ourselves by building a culture that they have to adapt to, not vice versa. Instead, we allow appointees to treat our culture as an Etch A Sketch—just shake it and start over.

The bipartisan disregard for career officers as ambassadors, and the preference for “special envoys” for pet projects, grabs headline-level attention. However, there is also a significant amount of disrespect in putting political staffers—many of whom have little more than graduate degrees and committee work experience—in charge of dozens (sometimes hundreds) of career State employees.

One of the ways to combat this is to institute an officer training program, one more robust than the current orientations we provide for Foreign and Civil Service officers.

Commissioned personnel in other branches of government know exactly what it means to have the responsibilities and privileges of officership. That cannot be said in the State Department.

By developing a long-term officer training program, for both Foreign and Civil Service, we would also cultivate an organization in which it is harder for those conditioned to be “serial staffers” to thrive.

Staff work is essential, of course, and good staffers are necessary; but they should not occupy such a pervasive share of the senior ranks in an organization. Ask a serial staffer to define and model leadership, and you will detect a serial stammer. It’s not in their nature.

3. Value Locally Employed Staff

The hallmark of a weak body is its inability to protect its backbone. At State, locally employed (LE) staff make up 70 percent of our workforce: they are our “backbone,” and yet they are given a sliver of the attention, resources, and pathways for development they need.

We underscore our derision for them every time we ask officers during the bidding process, “How many Americans have you supervised?”—as if to suggest that FSOs are some rarefied species that requires an entirely different set of management skills that don’t apply to LE staff.

Every geographic bureau should create an office dedicated to LE staff issues. These offices should produce public reports and recommendations for the Secretary and Director General based on constant feedback from the field.

Even if these recommendations are not all implemented, we could at least say that the voices of our institutional knowledge, our LE staff, made it to the seventh floor. Today the best we can do is offer the usual platitudes about how much we value LE staff, without putting up the requisite resources, time, and attention to prove it.

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This article opened by exposing our vulnerability to bullies, one striking characteristic of organizational weakness. The bigger issue, however, is that we have the power to shape, strengthen, and defend our institution—and yet we relinquish it.

Put in place the recommendations above, and the bully problem will recede. And you’ll see us all succeed—no matter who is president.

John Fer is the deputy public affairs officer at U.S. Embassy Moscow. With the State Department since 2009, he has served in New Delhi, Managua, Moscow, Riga, Tbilisi, and Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he worked as a firefighter/EMT for Montgomery County, Maryland. He is an Air Force veteran and a returned Peace Corps volunteer (Nepal). He and his wife, Victoria, have two sons.

Read More...

• “Tips from the Belly of the Python” by John Fer, The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015
• “Respect, Trust and Partnership: Keeping Diplomacy on Course in Troubling Times” by Ted Osius, The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018
• “Why Senior Leaders Cannot Reform the State Department” by John Fer, The Foreign Service Journal, March 2023