The Foreign Service Journal, October 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2012 45 taining, motivational feedback. They can also single out employ- ees for sustained or periodic good effort. The Foreign Service’s best leaders at every level do all these things. But too many supervisors still treat good effort as par for the course, not as anything special. Coaching. A recent Foreign Service Journal article (Jeffrey LaMoe and Ted Strickler, “The Army’s Approach to Leader Development,” July-August) criticized the lack of career develop- ment planning for FS members, and noted that Defense Depart- ment civilian supervisors are trained to engage subordinates in developing training programs to support individual career plans. Employees thrive when they know their supervisors want them to succeed and show them how to do so—both in the short term, through tips and coaching, and through mentoring for longer- term development. Reams of managerial consulting products confirm that work- ers are most productive when they believe they are getting better at their job. Brown-bag lunches with front office and country team principals, Foreign Service Institute training opportunities and one-on-one informal writing seminars are all ways younger employees can see themselves improving their tradecraft. The antithesis of this is an authoritarian supervisory style, where the aim is judging rather than motivating. One of us had a supervisor toss him a copy of the New Yorker and Elements of Style in response to his first drafting effort, back in 1977. Meaningful work. Many younger employees yearn to “change the world.” Just read any college application essay to find out how many of them think they’ve already started to do this while in high school! Countless graduation speakers, teach- ers and mentors reinforce this mentality. Nor does it help when new FSOs see their peers in the private sector and at nongovernmental organizations already chang- ing the world via Facebook. A recent Washington Post “Federal Faces” profile presented the contributions of a college graduate’s work for a federal agency in a conflict zone in glowing terms. Whatever the reality of their time there, the effect on that per- son’s motivation had to have been huge. Younger employees want to hear why their work matters. Checking a box on an evaluation form is not enough; they want to know how their work had impact. Smart managers tell these subordinates how their contributions advance American foreign policy goals. The managers we have seen doing this have happy employees. Autonomy. The 9-5 schedule is passé for younger employees, who can “go on a tear” at 11 p.m. and are used to the flexible class schedules of contemporary universities, which are geared