20 SEPTEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL themselves. Senior leaders often pivot to praise the great work of FSI’s Leadership and Management School. They would do better to prove it by making more courses, including FSI’s new core curriculum, mandatory. 2. Take Commissioning Seriously Senior leaders feel no great impetus to make change, because many have found their niche in appealing to the revolving door of political appointees and their staffers who occupy the highest reaches of our organization. Political appointees are a reality in our branch of government, but we could distinguish ourselves by building a culture that they have to adapt to, not vice versa. Instead, we allow appointees to treat our culture as an Etch A Sketch— just shake it and start over. The bipartisan disregard for career officers as ambassadors, and the preference for “special envoys” for pet projects, grabs headline-level attention. However, there is also a significant amount of disrespect in putting political staffers—many of whom have little more than graduate degrees and committee work experience—in charge of dozens (sometimes hundreds) of career State employees. One of the ways to combat this is to institute an officer training program, one more robust than the current orientations we provide for Foreign and Civil Service officers. Commissioned personnel in other branches of government know exactly what it means to have the responsibilities and privileges of officership. That cannot be said in the State Department. By developing a long-term officer training program, for both Foreign and Civil Service, we would also cultivate an organization in which it is harder for we need more deliberate, mandatory forums in which we allow our current and future leaders to test and hone their skills, examine our organization, and weed out those who have gamed the system to promote themselves. Hiring hundreds of new officers will not change the fact that we are not incentivized to seek professional development. Currently, most people see the decision to pursue long-term training as a courageous act of taking oneself “out of the game,” implying that long-term training won’t help toward promotion. That line of thinking encapsulates why our organization, despite having some of the best people in government, is so bad at developing leaders. At a December 2023 town hall on modernization, when asked the question, “Why aren’t there more mandatory leadership classes?,” senior leaders variously blamed the budget, said that Secretary Colin Powell “left gaps,” and encouraged us to not “discount on-thejob training [OJT].” (Note: By the very fact that we do not measure OJT in the field, we are discounting it.) These responses all dodge the glaring need to deliberately bring our officers into a training regimen that helps build a better organization. Training should not be seen as “stepping out of the game.” We should make it mandatory, competitive, and deliberate. Those who get the best training have better opportunities to distinguish When we do examine bullying, it tends to be as if it were a brief pest infestation, and one callout (e.g., an op-ed, cable, or acknowledgment by the Secretary) will rid us of “them.” We do not acknowledge, however, that the reason bullies have been able to hold sway here for so long is that our institutional culture enables them. Rooting them out requires a hard look at what we incentivize in our leadership structure and how opportunistic people take advantage of it. We also neglect certain internal aspects of our organization that, if embraced, could help weed out (at best) or isolate (at worst) State’s bullies. Simply put, strong organizations, those with an established culture of leadership, are not as susceptible to bullies. Nor are they as vulnerable to destabilization on account of the ebb and flow of political appointments and partisan administrations. Here are three recommendations through which we can build a culture of leadership and strengthen our organization. 1. Stop Talking About Training and Mandate More The State Department only mandates three one-week classes on leadership to the FS-1 level. You’d be hard-pressed to find a good organization of similar size and budget that has fewer mandatory trainings in this vital area. To develop a culture of leadership, Currently, most people see the decision to pursue long-term training as a courageous act of taking oneself “out of the game.“
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