The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

14 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 6 Most of you are afraid. No, really, you are. But don’t worry; I’ve got your back. Shelly down the hall does, too, and so does Rich in the other sec- tion. Heck, even Condi (if I may be so bold) is taking care of us. So why are you still so nervous? There is a problem in the culture of the State Department, one that saps our will, damages our morale and lowers our productivity. I am refer- ring to a pervasive lack of trust I have seen supervisors display toward their subordinates. Did fear produce over-cautious behavior, or is it the other way around? When today’s minister-coun- selors were wet-behind-the-ears junior officers, they were often micro- managed, and our institutional mem- ory got skewed. Reasonably cautious behavior grew in time to ... well, not paranoia — we are not that far along yet, thankfully — but certainly a lack of trust. It’s not any one person’s fault, but it needs to be addressed sooner, not later. This anxiety is a nebulous thing, hard to pin down, and therefore hard to counter with reasoned arguments. Partly, of course, it’s fear of making a mistake (did we address that memo to Condolleza instead of Condoleezza?). After all, everyone wants the 7th floor to know his or her name, but for the right reason, not the wrong one. And for most supervisors, particularly ambassadors and DCMs at high-pro- file posts, the cost of being wrong is far greater than the reward for being right. Admittedly, it can be very hard to quantify the damage that overcau- tious attitude inflicts. The sad truth is that embassies with poor morale often still do great work and, conversely, posts with high morale are sometimes poor performers. But the sort of micromanagement I am talking about is more than just annoying. It results in genuine harm to the national inter- est. A Time-and-Motion Study Let us suppose that an FS-1 sec- tion head asks an FS-3 officer to write a cable on bluefish migration patterns in Balao. The subordinate works on it for three hours, then the boss spends an hour marking it up and sends it back for a rewrite. That takes another hour. Then the FS-1 spends another hour getting it ready for the ambassador. Total staff time: six hours. Estimated cost: $230 (not including post differential and so forth). OK, in absolute terms, that may seem to be a pretty low outlay to get a really good cable on bluefish migra- tion patterns. But analyze it another way. Let’s say the two individuals in our story each work an average of 10 hours a day (pretty average, really). That means the drafter in our exam- ple above spent 40 percent of his day on one task, and the section chief spent 20 percent of her day redoing it. Lest I be dismissed as a crank, let me say here that my relationship with my most recent supervisor was stellar. He trusted me implicitly and, when time was short, would sign what I put in front of him, knowing that I had completed the staff work and would never steer him wrong. But in all too many instances, supervisors get down “in the weeds” to follow up the most miniscule details. This is contrary to the whole idea of empowering employees, which says that when you give a sub- ordinate a task, you trust him or her to carry it out. Of course, you have a duty to follow through, and it can be dangerous, to put it mildly, to put your career in the hands of a person on their second tour. But that is what we Micromanagement and the Culture of Fear B Y L LYWELYN C. G RAEME S PEAKING O UT The pervasive lack of trust many supervisors display toward their subordinates damages morale and lowers productivity.