The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

FSJ: Would you talk for a moment about the facilities that will be available to students at the new campus? Taylor: We cannot always bring students to the schoolhouse, even though we may have the greatest schoolhouse in town. So the training center has to be a sort of spark plug. Technology can take training to the workplace, through interactive video, which we should be building toward in four, five or six years. No matter how good our training, a portion of it isn’t used until many months later, when a person runs into the first task or responsibility associated with that training, so we need to think about “just-in-time” training, which puts the information on a person’s desk right when they need it. That opens whole new vistas of train- ing categories of people we’ve just left out for cost reasons — like Foreign Service Nationals. Grove: The best possible effort has been made to set up electric and electronic capa- bilities in the construction process that you might not be able to use fully for some time to come, but ultimately will use. There is a satellite dish. We have will have a capacity to establish an interactive relationship with any post in the world, much like Worldnet. If the General Services staff of an embassy are hav- ing particular problems, or need training in something new, a tele- vised connection can be set up between them and the right people in the department and FSI to provide training. That’s yet another way that technology, as we will use it at Arlington Hall, is going to change the entire character, not just portions of the content, of training. FSJ: Apart from technology, how can a new location substan- tively alter the nature of training? Grove: The new campus provides the environment and the physical facilities to do this. As the Cold War drew to an end, everyone at FSI realized that tremendous change was upon us and that we would have to do virtually everything in training different- ly. Funding of the campus at precisely this time and its emergence brick by brick was serendipitous. The economic dimension in our training clearly needed to be strengthened. There would be new languages to teach. Management and executive leadership would have greater emphasis than we had been able to provide. A sense of profound change drove our interest in Arlington Hall. You thought of doing things differently at the new campus and realized that the move was not a matter of transporting tacky furniture from Rosslyn to a new building: it was getting a new mind-set. Taylor: Training should be a building block for our efforts to strengthen American diplomacy and American leadership in the post-Cold War world. We are using the move to the NFATC as a metaphor for making associated qualitative changes in our training in advancing U.S. competitiveness, for example, developing a tech- nology strategy, integrating global issues and developing a new system of language instruction. The NFATC will contribute to inno- vative training for the country teams of the future. The campus will also afford opportunities for training partnerships with the private sector, with nongovernmental organizations, and with academia, all of which are more important actors in for- eign affairs than in the past. FSJ: If there is one aspect of training that you hoped would be emphasized at the new facility, what would that be? Grove: I attach great importance to lan- guage training and to continuing to draw upon the best possible technologies for training people in the 63 languages that we now teach at FSI. Of course, married to lan- guage training are area studies. … [Also] we don’t do nearly as well as we should in reaching large numbers of senior executives in the Civil Service and Foreign Service for leadership and executive training. Far too often, we have people in very responsible jobs who are poor lead- ers and don’t need to be. That just has to change. Taylor: My view is that the Foreign Service in the future will really be a leadership profession. In this complicated, interagency environment, the ability to mobilize resources and people on behalf of a common agenda, to set priorities, to move forward and real- ize our objectives, is more and more a leadership game. If we begin with an employee when he comes into the system, it will pay back over a career of 30 or 40 years. Leadership is person-depen- dent. Everyone, in his or her own way, can exercise positive lead- ership. Grove: This is the most complex time since 1945 to the early 1950s. It calls for the same kind of creativity. A Foreign Service and a Civil Service with real spirit, knowledge and commitment have served this country well, even though using the inadequate facilities in which our previous training has been located. Arlington Hall has got to foster the same urgency, the same selfless com- mitment, the same quest for quality in our professionals that we have had in earlier times. We must not lose our spirit now.  F O C U S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 My view is that the Foreign Service in the future will really be a leadership profession. — Lawrence P. Taylor