The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

I t is difficult towrite the typical January column, full of new hope andoptimismfor FCS, inaNovemberwhen themul- tiple frustrations and false hopes of 2004 are still fresh, and cynicism abounds. This New Year’s wish for leadership and professional competence, combinedwith a new sense of mis- sion, is a sincere one. It is also attainable, given the talent of our newmanagement team and a revamped and expandedOffice of ForeignServiceHumanResources that should be fully operational early in 2005. But it will be necessary to overcome the incompe- tence and drift that has stalled progress on a shared agenda to date. Let’s start with the basics: personnel and payroll. It is hard to engage onother issues when weekly and monthly meetings fail to solve simple things like determining base- pay levels or answering fundamental personnel policy questions. I can’t tell you how depressing it is to see somuchvaluable timewasted trying toobtainanswers tokey ques- tions that have an important finan- cial or career impact. These are often answers that shouldbe findableonthe IntranetWeb site and requireno staff time at all. This year’s Senior Selection Boardwas chargedwithmaking rec- ommendations for adjusting the pay of individual members of the Senior Foreign Service, yet despite repeat- ed attempts, they could find no approved guidance from the Commerce Department as to how they shouldmake those decisions. We likely will spendmost of the first half of 2005 arguing over pay levels and how to adjust them. There has to be a better way! In the realm of recruitment, performance management and selection boards, I see nothing to create a sense of hope. In an era of flat-lined budgets, significant retirement of awhole generation of officers, rising costs overseas and ever-increasing security con- cerns, I have found no strategic vision for the way forward in recruiting, assignments or allocation of overseas staff. There is still no genuine career development but rather a mechanistic process to fill the slots, which is, at least, more transparent than it used to be. Wewere successful in putting in place a newperformancemanagement system, yet widespreadmisunderstandingandmistrust remainamongmembers as tohowtheprocess works, as well as strong suspicion that it ismanipulated by a few insiders who take care of their own. I can tell you that this cynicism is misplaced, as I have watched the selec- tion board process closely, having served both on boards and in management. There is integrity in the system: what is lacking are transparency and openness and enough training and information, aswell as anhonest discussionof whether officers should rate and judge fellow officers in an agency this small. We have knownmost of this for a long time, sowe canonly hope that 2005becomes the year of action. In the end, we need the leadership and the vision that will allow us to renew ourselves, fix longstanding structural problems and rise above the cynicism and drift that are only serving to hold us back. ▫ V.P. VOICE: FCS  BY CHARLES A. FORD The Importance of Being Honest 4 AFSA NEWS • JANUARY 2005 There is integrity in the system: what is lacking are transparency and openness and enough training and information. ASSESSING SECRETARY POWELL’S STATE DEPARTMENT Foreign Affairs Council Gives Powell High Marks BY DAVID CODDEN A t an AFSA-sponsored press confer- enceonNov. 22, theForeignAffairs Council, an umbrella group of 10 organizations — including AFSA, the AmericanAcademyofDiplomacy and the Associatesof theAmericanForeignService Worldwide — discussed its new report: “SecretaryColinPowell’sStateDepartment: An Independent Assessment.” The FAC is concerned with “process- management of U.S. policy and the peo- ple involved therein.” In this domain, Secretary Powell received high marks. Ambassador Thomas Boyatt, FAC’s founder and president, praised Powell’s “extraordinary performance,” noting that underPowell’s leadership30percent of the personnel and resources lost during the budget-cutting of the 1990s have been recovered. The report looks at the achievements made by Secretary Powell and his man- agement team, and calls Powell “an exemplary CEO.” The report cites achievements in two crucial areas: strengthening the leadership culture at State and remedyingmanagement flaws. Employee morale, which had been dan- gerously low, is now robust, and the old tensions between the Foreign Service and the Civil Service have subsided, under the mantra “one mission, one team.” Moreover, staffing has improved under the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative, and IThas finally caught upwith the 21st cen- tury. State’s hardware is now on a four- year replacement cycle, and it is beta-test- ing the State Messaging and Archival Retrieval Tool (SMART), which will replace the antiquated telegram system. The report also credits Powell with improving State Department relations with Congress, “critical for obtaining resources for hismanagement objectives;”