The Foreign Service Journal, March 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2023 39 was pushing for a wall on our southern border, a Border Patrol agent gave an interview, saying: “The minute you build a 12-foot wall, there’s going to be a sale on the other side of 13-foot lad- ders.” Similarly at State, no matter how we change the precepts to include “leadership” or “institution building,” it may simply encourage greater wordsmithing to convince the promotion boards, regardless of veracity, that this is happening. Another indicator of the perversion of managing up is the dom- inance of “staffer” career tracks, ones in which senior leaders arrive at the pinnacles of their careers not by leading andmanaging oth- ers, but by jumping from staff job to staff job, chasing the highest- profile principals to get better jobs and be promoted. Inmany cases, this results in a corps of high-ranking career State people who have no idea (in the sense of leadership forged in battle) how they became in charge. (They can explain their career progression eloquently in writing, but their behavior on the ground when faced with leadership challenges often tells a very different story.) This lack of experience comes at the expense of the people in the organization. A staffer who rises to the top without being tempered by leadership training and experience will seek other staffers to get the job done, perpetuating a cycle of subservient, please-thy-boss-at-all-cost behavior that is, again, damaging to the organization. Pleasing one’s boss is important, but not when it comes at the expense of those at the working level. At State, where the conse- quences of our actions (outside consular work) rarely result in immediate loss of life or declining revenue, this behavior is toler- ated at best, embraced in the worst cases. It makes our organiza- tion one that cultivates selfishness. We frequently hear at every level, “No one is advocating for you. Only you can take care of your EER, your career.”This ethos also intrudes into our hiring practices. How often do managers go beyond cherrypicked 360-degree evaluations to actually inves- tigate who is angling for which jobs and how those candidates could affect the missions to which they will be assigned? Even one’s résumé and personal statement can be tailored to the “no one is looking out for you” credo. Think of the implications if a significant number of State’s most successful officers believe that