The Foreign Service Journal, April 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2014 17 SPEAKING OUT Bring Back the Powell Fellows Program BY TY L ER SPARKS The department effectively cancelled the only vehicle that sought to identify, train and mentor our future leaders. Tyler Sparks joined the Foreign Service in 2005, and has served in Malawi, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Ecuador, where he currently serves as deputy politi- cal counselor. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the Department of State or the U.S. government. I n an April 2013 article in The Atlantic , “The White House’s Secret Diplomatic Weapon,” author Nicholas Kralev said that his research had suggested that the State Department has a specific weakness in not adequately “identifying promising young Foreign Service officers and nurturing them to become strong leaders and top-notch diplomats.” Unfortunately, he’s right, as practically everyone agrees, including some of the department’s top leaders. In spite of this, in 2009 State effectively canceled the only vehicle—the Powell Fellows Program— that sought to identify, train and mentor our future leaders. Here’s why we should bring it back. Identifying Leaders As an organization, we face a number of challenges in identifying mid-level offi- cers with the genuine potential to be our future leaders—or in Kralev’s words, our “next Bill Burns.” Those challenges range from the bureaucratic, such as a broken evaluation and promotion process, to the cultural: ingrained biases against critical employee evaluation ratings and a dis- proportionate fear of nepotism. As if these faulty building blocks were not bad enough, we also fail to be proac- tive about recognizing talent within our ranks, and then working to ensure that we both keep that talent and make full use of it. While the task of identifying future leaders has links to issues such as evaluations and promotions, it is a funda- mentally different problem given the Foreign Service’s rank-in-person system. In that respect, our challenge in some ways mirrors that of the military. Former Secretary of State Condo- leezza Rice is among those who have said the Foreign Service could learn from the U.S. armed forces. “They actually do career planning with their people,” she’s quoted as saying in the same Atlantic article. Rice adds that early in enlistees’ careers, the U.S. military identifies indi- viduals with the potential to rise through the ranks, and gives them a series of experiences to get them ready. Similarly, retired Ambassador Cameron Munter, quoted in the same article, says that mili- tary brass “look at the captain and major levels and pick winners.” Instead of following an organized, methodical process to “pick winners” while they are still at mid-level, we push off any sort of career development process onto our officers themselves. Moreover, our helter-skelter assignment process, which is completely divorced from our evaluation process, forms the crux of our career development system. Obtaining each assignment you desire relies on a combination of your intan- gible “corridor reputation” and your skill at lobbying for that position. Nowhere in the process do we stop to identify nascent leaders—not who will fit into which next assignment, but who has shown the potential and capacity to be an ambassador, assistant secretary or even under secretary 15 or 20 years down the line. While the military faces challenges of its own related to training and retaining talented leaders, they are still well ahead of the Foreign Service. We do not have programs to ferret out and cultivate our best and brightest, much less to prepare them to become our next generation of leaders. But we used to. The Powell Fellows Program In 2005 the department began what was, for State, a new and innovative approach. Run jointly out of the Secre- tary of State’s office and the Foreign Ser-