The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

22 JUNE 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL careers by building expertise, not only by managing people and resources, just as in many Silicon Valley companies. For the Foreign Service, the rank-in-per- son personnel system should facilitate an expert career track. As employees move through Facebook, for example, they can become experts in their field or product managers leading teams and initiatives. Such a change could also alleviate some of the pressure around promotion quotas by allowing individuals to be recognized for their accomplishments and potential not only as supervisors but as individual contributors to U.S. diplomacy. Feedback Is a Gift The first lesson in business school is that feedback is a gift. Genuine feedback can be both hard to elicit and hard to hear in the professional world. While some professionals, like salespeople, face recorded metrics and others hire executive coaches, in diplomacy per- formance feedback is far harder to find because of the absence of clear metrics and a culture of direct feedback. The consular and management divi- sions have led the charge in surveying employees and gathering responses at the State Department. FSI has also instituted a leadership survey as part of management training, but most employ- ees receive little feedback, even as part of the performance evaluation process. Employee-led feedback is far more common at high-performing companies. Google holds an annual Googlegeist survey across the entire company to gauge employee sentiment. Google also offers awards for the best postmortem assess- ments—akin to “hot-wash” sessions in the military—designed to gather reflections on how to improve. At the consulting firm McKinsey, team-based surveys are sent every two weeks to gauge team perfor- mance; this is a helpful tool for leadership to assess when intervention is needed by more senior managers. Radical candor may be too much for most diplomats, but the department can encourage employees to get curious and not defensive when presented with feedback. We all need data and help from others to understand our performance and how we are perceived. Broadening existing surveys to measure performance at each level, at each post, each year would be a great first step (rather than once every five years in an Office of Inspector General survey). The department should also teach employees and supervisors to give and receive feedback in ways research sug- gests are most effective. For example, encouraging givers to demonstrate a genuine interest in the rated employee’s performance, incentivizing employees to seek feedback and making feedback concrete, actionable and directed at the work itself helps employees disassociate their egos from their actions. Global Interoperability For an inherently global organiza- tion that recently adopted a One Team One Mission motto, we are often siloed into regional or functional bureaus and budgets. Imagine a world where an employee travels to a new country, arrives at a U.S. diplomatic facility and immediately gains access to the com- pound by swiping a global identification badge. The employee’s phone or other department-issued devices connect automatically to the same protected wifi network used at U.S. diplomatic facilities around the world. The employee sits down in a common area and starts to work with a laptop with a screen-protector. If problems or questions arise, there is a tech help desk where one’s badge can be scanned, allowing a local tech team to see the individual’s status and devices and pro- vide assistance. This scenario plays out every day at every Google office in the world. Yes, there are heightened security concerns for the U.S. government; but for unclas- sified work this should be possible. Greater interoperability will require different parts of the bureaucracy with different budgets to work together, but we can aspire to a day when employees retain their government-issued devices and credit cards across postings. Because our people truly are our greatest asset, we need to treat them that way. Let’s make their lives easier and remove logistical barriers to productiv- ity, no matter where they work. Looking Ahead After my sojourn in Silicon Valley, I have been pleasantly surprised by some new developments at the department. The Center for Analytics, the streamlin- ing of unnecessary regulation (e.g., the elimination of Fair Share bidding and the “6” in the 6/8 rule) and the launch of new collaboration tools will all simplify the lives of employees and make the department a better place to work. Perhaps most important is the department’s focus on setting the condi- tions for success and its willingness to try new approaches informed by data and research. As the saying goes, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” and now is a great time to build on the department’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to further expand resources to support telework and video conferencing, unte- thering employees from their offices and