10 JUNE 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LETTERS Anti-Bullying and Accountability Congratulations to the editorial team on the Journal’s powerful anti-bullying focus in April 2024. The State Department’s announcement of a long-delayed anti-bullying office and policy mere months after AFSA and the FSJ raised the matter shows the power of union and employee advocacy to effect meaningful change. While every article was thoughtprovoking, I was particularly impressed by Ambassador Ana Escrogima’s take on how leaders can interrupt toxic behaviors—an approach she embraces in real life, as I can vouch from firsthand experience. Strong, compassionate leaders like Amb. Escrogima and those who’ll heed her advice are what we need. If the flood of messages I received after publication of my Speaking Out essay, “State’s Pledge to Stop Promoting Bullies,” in the January-February 2024 FSJ is any indication, the prevalence of bullying across our institution is shocking. From ambassadors to new hires, former colleagues to officers I’ve never met, people wrote and called from Washington, D.C., and around the world to talk about their experiences with toxic senior leaders. There was one unifying theme: concern over a lack of accountability that let their tormentors rise to even more senior levels or respectable retirement. In this context, the Director General’s “Focus on Accountability” initiative is timely and welcome, particularly when 65 percent of Foreign Service officers lack confidence in the department’s accountability mechanisms, according to survey data that the DG herself called “disturbing.” If the department has the necessary political will to implement this initiative, victim testimonies abound, including in the Journal’s coverage of AFSA’s 2023 Constructive Dissent Awards. Zia Ahmed FSO U.S. Embassy Muscat Learning Policy Lacks Resources I read the March 2024 Foreign Service Journal article “A Look at the New Learning Policy” with great interest. I have been following the development of the learning policy, and I appreciate the thoughtful and well-constructed framework it lays out. However, I keep waiting for the second part, the one that would make it a serious policy and distinguish it from the countless initiatives—always billed as “revolutionary” and “culture changing”—announced under every administration with great fanfare and then quickly forgotten a few years later. I am waiting for the announcement of resources. One of the ironclad rules of a bureaucracy is that your priorities are where you put your resources: money and people. Talk is, literally, cheap. The learning policy calls on us to allow our staff more time for professional development but does not seem to recognize that we lead teams on which everyone is expected to do the work of multiple people. Our people are stretched so thin that the biggest barrier to making time for professional development is the need to find ways to mitigate the stress on the entire overworked team that must pick up the slack when one person is in training. The policy also talks about the importance of long-term training opportunities, and it is spot-on. However, it does not provide any avenue to backfill these longterm gaps; and, in the fine print, it says that in most cases the bureaus are responsible for covering the costs of long-term training out of existing resources. Unfortunately, the problem with the learning policy goes further. This declaration of admirable ideas was released at about the same time as two directives that will make it even harder to make time for professional development. First, every bureau must further cut staff from already strained offices, and second, we must cut funding from already bare-bones budgets. Taken altogether, this sends an unambiguous signal of the lack of seriousness for the new learning policy. We have a model for what a serious learning policy looks like, however. I had the honor of beginning my career under Secretary Colin Powell, who created the first management continuing education program for the State Department in 2001. To do this, he personally went before Congress, multiple times, to secure commitments for additional funds that would support the initiative and give the department a large personnel increase to create training floats. That was a serious policy that didn’t just talk about respect for the work of the State Department; it demonstrated that respect. (After 9/11, the additional staffing needs for war-zone Iraq and Afghanistan took all the spots that would
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