The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2020 23 Achieving meaningful change requires a fundamental shift in the Department of State’s handling of its most important asset: its people. BY CHAR I TY L . BOYETTE Charity L. Boyette is chief of staff in the Office of Audit, Risk and Compliance at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where she is also pur- suing a Ph.D. in public administration. From 2009 to 2018, she was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, serving overseas in Lagos, Krakow and Brussels, and with domestic assign- ments as a line officer in the executive secretariat and as a deputy A-100 coordinator at the Foreign Service Institute. T he first half of 2020 forced all of us to reconsider what we previously “knew” to be true. The COVID- 19 pandemic disrupted nearly every element of life, work and play, revealing fault lines in the American public many suspected existed only on the fringe. One of the deepest of these fault lines erupted following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and many other fellow citizens, demonstrating yet again the devastating reality of institutionalized racism. As the collected voices of protestors grew louder, Americans across the social, economic and political spectrums were forced to reckon with their own—often unrecognized or unacknowl- edged—biases, prejudices and assumptions that enable the sys- tems keeping significant portions of our population in perpetual second-class status. For members of the U.S. Foreign Service, that introspection was often visceral and shocking, as current and former colleagues shared deeply personal accounts of racist treatment by their fellow citizens, employees of other agencies and—most shamefully—their colleagues in Washington and missions abroad. In the midst of this reckoning, several past and present members of the foreign affairs community—inspired both by the courage of the colleagues who volunteered their experiences and the fervent desire as representatives of the United States to do better, to demand better, to be better—began to collect ideas for reforming the Foreign Service to address the processes that per- petuate inequity, hamstring efforts to diversify the workforce and block the diplomatic corps from benefiting from the wide range of backgrounds, experiences, capabilities and cultures found in the American population. Reading through the many proposals offered up on social media threads, it was clear that achieving meaningful change requires a fundamental shift in the Department of State’s han- dling of its most important asset: its people. To meet the chal- lenges ahead, the Foreign Service and its officers must prioritize management tradecraft in hiring, tenure, promotion and assign- ments decisions to be able to set—and meet—aggressive goals to strengthen itself through diversity. The Management Skill Set Management, as a skill set, is far too often ignored in favor of leadership or dismissed as an automatic corollary to technical competence. The latter is a frequent problem in all industries; it is assumed that the ability to do a task well also confers the abil- ity to manage other people who do that task. A significant body of study exists disproving that theory, but it continues to thrive, including in the Foreign Service. Among the reasons for its per- petuation is the frequent conflation of management and leadership, which happens when the characteristics we expect our “leaders” to display are actually examples of good manage- ment—namely, thinking strategically, facilitating organizational change, set- ting goals and amassing sufficient resources to achieve them. Ask any FSO to describe the best officer they’ve encountered during their career, and, inevitably, the attributes are more practical than esoteric, with descriptors like “fair,” “goal-oriented” and “prag- matic.” Because good managers move the organization forward, they are always leaders; unfortunately, however, the reverse is not necessarily true. The absence of a management mindset in designing and implementing the systems that support the people and practices of the State Department is most apparent in the process of select- ing new officers, awarding tenure and promotions, and making officer assignments; and a direct line connects the continuing struggle to diversify to this deficiency. “Management skills” as a