The Foreign Service Journal, April 2022

38 APRIL 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL • Lead an assessment of ways that your post or bureau could be more accessible for current or future colleagues and contacts with disabilities. • Organize a discussion with local staff to ask how DEIA issues manifest themselves in the local culture and/or at work, and how their American supervisors could assist them in addressing these issues. • Help post identify and use accessibility-enabled technology for events and programs. (Poll your target audiences to ask about their accessibility needs before an event.) • Set up a dialogue with managers at post discussing best practices for rooting out bullying and toxic manage- ment practices. • Develop and launch anonymous pulse surveys to assess how well your specific post or bureau is doing on DEIA issues and fostering inclusion. • Help your section chief or post leadership recruit from a more diverse pool of candidates. • Make sure you are investing the same effort in men- toring colleagues whose backgrounds are different from your own as you are investing in those who might remind you of yourself at an earlier stage in your career, and invest in their long-term success by helping them strat- egize around future positions and assignment selection. Speak up when you hear comments indicating bias during meetings about bureau and post hiring decisions. Take bystander intervention training to empower yourself to act in the moment when you see biased comments or actions happening in the workplace. Q: Can I mention my work within employee affinity groups in my EER to get credit for that work? According to department guidance, employees may mention what they did within an affinity group, as well as its impact, but cannot disclose the name of the affinity group, as that could be an indication of their potential membership in a protected class. For example, a state- ment such as this would be appropriate: “I served on the board of one of the department’s affinity groups and co-drafted a policy document that went to the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Reform outlining our organization’s views on what should be prioritized in the DEIA Strategic Plan.” And the only way to ensure this is to tie forwarding the DEIA mis- sion to promotions and performance for both the Civil Service and the Foreign Service. Time for a Dedicated Precept Frankly, in the Foreign Service what gets people promoted is what gets them going. Even for those who are not motivated primarily by the path to promotion, one cannot deny that what the department emphasizes in its promotion criteria signals what our institution views as its core mission. DEIA efforts, by contrast, have long been relegated to the sidelines of that mission, consid- ered work that is nice but tangential to our focus on foreign policy. Those who have labored to make our organization more equitable and inclusive have usually done so on the margins, after-hours during their personal time, and without formal rec- ognition or compensation through the department’s promotions and awards processes. Some even operated in outright fear that mentioning this work in an employee evaluation report (EER) would tag them as a member of an underrepresented group, potentially triggering unconscious bias within promotion panels, or suggesting to selection boards that they did not spend enough time focused on “more important” work. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken speaks with Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on April 12, 2021, the day of her swearing-in. U.S.DEPARTMENTOFSTATE Kim McClure, Continued from previous page