The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2006

finished a close fourth and fifth, respectively, but no other govern- ment agency even broke the top 25. The study, conducted by Philadel- phia-based Universum Communica- tions, was based on a survey of 37,000 undergraduate members of the class of 2006. The students were asked to list their top five prospective employ- ers from among 189 organizations that were frequently mentioned by students in the previous annual survey. The Partnership for Public Service’s most recent rank- ing of the best places to work in the federal government is similarly encouraging. This annual survey is viewed as a reliable gauge of employee attitudes because it is based on federal workers’ responses to questions posed by the Office of Personnel Management in its biennial Federal Human Capital Survey on pay and benefits, family- friendly policies, diversity and leadership. The PPS, in cooperation with American University’s Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation, then crunches the numbers. State finished second among Cabinet departments, close behind the Department of Energy, in the 2005 results, which mainly reflects the fruits of Powell’s lead- ership. Overall, the department rose from 19th to 10th place. “It was quite a nice rise,” says PPS Vice President John Palguta, who previously was director of the Office of Policy and Evaluation at the Merit Systems Protection Board. “When Colin Powell became Secretary of State, he really paid attention to the people part of his job,” recalls Palguta. “He listened to his troops. And one of the things he did was lobby for more money for proactive recruitment. He also looked at the deployment of his folks and where people were most needed. He listened to the employees where they said they were stretched thin, and set about trying to rectify that.” Now that DRI has ended, the big question is whether that momentum will continue in the new era of transfor- mational diplomacy that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has proclaimed. Palguta thinks it will. Referencing the PPS survey, Under Secretary of State for Manage- ment Henrietta Fore has assured employees that the department is committed to making itself the best place to work in the federal govern- ment, and has exhorted everyone at State to adopt that goal. She may have a hard sell, howev- er, judging from the responses of Foreign Service officers interviewed for this article. Many have serious concerns about Rice’s leadership style, which, in contrast to that of Powell, is less attentive to Foreign Service management. Even the prospect that the long fight for overseas comparability pay may finally be coming to a victorious end has not allayed widespread doubts about her willingness to go to bat for her depart- ment. Meanwhile, huge concerns persist about the depart- ment’s commitment to helping diplomats maintain their family lives, especially as Rice pushes for massive rede- ployments of officers to hardship and danger posts in the developing world as part of her Global Repositioning Initiative and the number of unaccompanied posts is expected to grow. (Such posts already account for more than 700 unaccompanied positions.) To be sure, the department has made progress on finding more jobs for spouses than it did in the past. But much more could be done on this critical issue, officers say. Still, in comparison to the human resources-related turmoil now sweeping the Defense and Homeland Security departments, State’s labor-management rela- tions are civil and generally productive. Both DOD and DHS are mired in court fights over their plans to imple- ment pay-for-performance systems, the result of legisla- tion passed by Congress in 2003 and 2004 allowing them to scrap the decades-old General Schedule, the civil ser- vice’s pay system, in favor of new regimes that grant pay raises based on formulas that will consider performance reviews, locality and market factors. The Pay-for-Performance Tradeoff When Rice went to Capitol Hill earlier this year to pre- sent the Bush administration’s Fiscal Year 2007 budget request, she dropped what would have registered as a bombshell in almost any other Cabinet department. She asked Congress to authorize sweeping changes to the Foreign Service personnel system that would eliminate C O V E R S T O R Y 20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 6 Shawn Zeller, a regular contributor to the Journal , is a senior staff writer for Congressional Quarterly. There is no doubt that the Powell-era Diplomatic Readiness Initiative brought State back from the brink.