The Foreign Service Journal, April 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2020 21 three weeks over a normal career of more than 15 years, and our orientation courses for new Foreign Service generalists and specialists last six weeks and three weeks, respectively. Civil Service foreign affairs professionals receive just a one-week orientation in most cases. Modules in some of these courses focus on leadership development, including a new leadership capstone project in A-100. There is also a sepa- rate “One Team” course for newly hired employees that brings together various employment categories to learn about the department’s mission, culture and history. These are steps in the right direction, but are not nearly enough to develop the corps of leaders the depart- ment needs at every level. Specialized skills courses in, for instance, negotiations, crisis manage- ment and public speaking taught by experienced officers are only infre- quently available and not required. These are skills that should be taught, not learned ad hoc on the job. By comparison, a Marine Corps officer receives 2.5 years of initial train- ing, including learning the culture of the institution, followed by additional train- ing throughout their career. At State, employees can take rotations and assignments outside the depart- ment, but doing so sometimes comes with a cost. For some FSOs on detail assignments, promotion is delayed because the panels, reflecting State culture, do not view learning as part of our work. Attending long-term education programs in some cases even carries a negative stigma. Often, it seems, detail assignments and long-term training are viewed as resting sites for returnees from high-stress posts and as last resorts for undesirable officers lacking onward assignments. Without a more significant invest- ment in education, we are abdicating our responsibility to prepare the next wave of diplomats. While we have been hiring from a much wider scope and breadth of backgrounds and education, our failure to invest in education undermines retention and sets up the next generation of diplo- mats to be less effective. Promotions: A Departmentwide Writing Contest The recently renamed Global Tal- ent Management Bureau (previously HR) brought thoughtful changes to the evaluation process in recent years by making the form shorter and granting employees a greater say in their self- evaluation. However, for all the changes, it remains subjective. Unlike the pass/ fail Civil Service evaluations or the private sector’s various metrics-based evaluations, there are few quantifiable criteria or comparable data for the pro- motion panels to use. Moreover, promotion panels are not a trained, professional cadre of evalua- tors; rather, they are a jury of our peers, with their own widely differing biases, standards and criteria. Research shows that objective rules tend to be applied rigorously to out-groups (those who are different from “us”), but leniently to in-groups (those who share com- monalities), and that this effect is more pronounced when review criteria—for example, the core precepts—aren’t clearly specified or taught. It is very likely that our promotion and awards systems are accentuating biases that are slowing down promotions for some over others. For instance, according to a 2019 study in Frontiers in Psychology , research shows that women are often hired based on their accomplishments, while men are hired based on their potential. If Foreign Service evaluations are supposed to be an assessment of future potential, how might this affect advancement? According to LeanIn.org, research on bias has also shown that replacing a woman’s name with a man’s name on a résumé improved the odds of the woman being hired by more than 60 percent. Similarly, a 2017 study pub- lished by Harvard Business Review noted that hiring rates doubled when names were made “whiter.” Why wouldn’t this apply to promotions, too? With raters and reviewers’ biases playing an outsized role in the advance- ment of our employees, how does even the best panel then take up the task of comparing one officer’s accomplish- ments during a crisis in a politically volatile country to another officer’s accomplishments maintaining a strong bilateral relationship in an economically and politically stable country? More important, 90 percent of the evaluation focuses on accomplishments and less than 10 percent on areas for development. While feedback from panels routinely indicates that the area for improvement should not be a throw- away, using the space correctly nonethe- less remains an exercise informed by rumor and potentially false assumptions (e.g., never list “interpersonal skills”). This is not conducive to developing the skills necessary to advance in one’s career, nor does it help the department build a professional corps of expert dip- lomats; and it reinforces the “born, not made” mindset. One way to expand on an already positive trend is to shift into name- redacted, gender-neutral evaluations and awards, as was done in the new Meritorious Service Increase process in