Analysis | A third of U.S. diplomats are eyeing the exits
That might be a good thing.
Zed Tarar
Earlier this month, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy published a report by three Rangel Fellows at the Harvard Kennedy School that found that approximately a third of Foreign Service Officers were actively looking to leave the State Department. The following is a response to this report by a current Foreign Service Officer.
“This is the worst posting I’ve ever had,” a colleague confessed to me recently, lamenting, “I’m not allowed to do my job.” With over two decades under their belt and serving in a large European capital, this seasoned diplomat’s frustrations stemmed from a lack of autonomy and endless procedural loops. As numerous articles and research papers have shown over the last few years, the State Department’s organizational decay is taking a toll on its diplomats. As illustrative as these firsthand accounts can be, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” But thanks to a groundbreaking new study by three Rangel Fellows at Harvard’s Kennedy School, published by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, we have real, up-to-date, numbers to place today’s challenges at State in perspective.
Bidding adieu
According to the study, over a third of current U.S. diplomats are actively exploring exit strategies — a staggering number, considering the average annual attrition rate (which include retirements at 65) for the Foreign Service is about three percent. The study’s authors received 2,800 anonymous responses submitted via the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomatic corps’ union of sorts, meaning the sample size yielded a margin of error of 2.5 percent and confidence level of 99 percent.
Scholarly literature indicates voluntary employee turnover decreases organizational performance. Indeed, the retention study authors dedicate a chapter to the potential deleterious effects of such a rapid loss of diplomatic talent on the United States’ national security. “Loss of officers not only affects the Department’s finances but also mission readiness and institutional knowledge,” the report says.
Such a loss is not new to State — the late 1990s and early 2000s saw a dearth of diplomats and an acute absence of much-needed language skills. A series of hiring initiatives aimed to address this shortfall and brought on thousands of new diplomats, particularly between 2009 and 2012. That cohort is now euphemistically known in State circles as “the pig in the python”: given the pyramidal structure of the diplomatic corps, a large influx of new diplomats at the same time was bound to slow promotions to a rate well below other federal agencies and the private sector, sooner or later.
What is driving America’s diplomats to the off-ramp? The retention study gives us a hint — respondents said two of the top three reasons for leaving were the slow and opaque nature of both promotions and overseas assignments. Yet to focus solely on a given diplomat’s personal rank and chances for moving up the formal career ladder risks obscuring the root cause of discontent within State: a lack of engagement and empowerment.
Rudderless careers
The State Department underperforms its agency peers on measurable employee engagement, according to the Partnership for Public Service annual rankings. The data, derived from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, shows a steady decline in employee engagement numbers from its peak in 2010 — today, the agency ranks 14th on the Partnership for Public Service’s rankings of ”best places to work in the federal government.” Extensive scholarly literature establishes a clear link between employee engagement and retention: a paper published by the consulting firm Deloitte notes leading companies “continuously ask themselves why their employees would commit to working at the organization for any length of time.”
Similarly, evidence shows there is a strong link between employee empowerment and engagement. That is, when an employee can control how they get their jobs done, they report a greater feeling of engagement and tend to stay with the organization. The professional social media platform Linkedin harnessed its large user base to estimate the effects of wise organizational leadership on employee retention. The company notes, quoting Rick Lepsinger of OnPoint Consulting, “[a] common reason for leaving an employer is the employee’s lack of empowerment or control over their work and their career path.”
This is precisely what is driving away the diplomatic corps’ top talent: a lack of control over their careers and their day-to-day jobs. Many colleagues, both current and former, complain to me of the stifling bureaucracy and unending permissions needed to accomplish the most mundane tasks, and countless essays on the organizational challenges at State support this notion. Storied diplomats Bill Burns and Linda Thomas-Greenfield wrote in Foreign Affairs in late 2020, “A seismic cultural shift is needed to create a more upstanding, courageous, and agile institution, with greater tolerance for risk and a simplified, decentralized decision-making process.” Similarly, a paper spearheaded by Ambassador Nick Burns, a former career official, highlights the absence of empowered diplomats and prescribes a remedy: “Systematic efforts [must be] made to devolve responsibility to the lowest possible levels, including a dramatic streamlining of clearance processes and a flattened organizational structure.”
To put these statements in context, we need only look to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, where fewer than half of State’s respondents answered favorably to the statement, “Employees have a feeling of personal empowerment.” The favorable response ratio has barely budged since at least 2010.
The [assignment] hunger games
The way State selects and dispatches diplomats around the globe appears mysterious to outsiders, yet the view from within the diplomatic corps is no less murky. The process by which one diplomat ends up in Tokyo and the other in Togo, “crushes morale and drives people out,” according to one anonymous officer quoted in the retention study. “Doing good work every day is not enough to get you a good assignment,” they add. Similarly, a report on organizational reform by the Truman Center devotes a sub-chapter to assignments and promotions and describes an ideal outcome as, “a State Department where every employee feels they have equitable access to rise up through the ranks with promotion, assignments, and award processes that are transparent and merit-based.”
While the headaches of finding fulfilling postings with progressively greater responsibility are well understood and documented, the knock-on effects are less discussed. When employees feel that rewards are unlinked to performance and recognition processes lack fairness and transparency, they leave, according to research. Here again the Viewpoint Survey paints a striking picture, stretching back to at least 2010 and remaining consistent: only two in five State employees believe promotions are based on merit. Such a staggering loss of confidence in the most basic talent management principle should give senior leaders pause. Yet, the diplomatic service maintains the same promotion and assignment system designed in the early 1980s, save for a few cosmetic changes and a move to managing paperwork on the cloud. Career diplomats will be quick to clarify that the issue is fairness and transparency. Knowing a better-suited colleague is headed to the job you wanted in Senegal is welcome; what “crushes morale” is the apparent randomness of postings and seeing poor performers given increasing responsibility and high-profile assignments.
A possible solution
The organizational problems at State are well understood and, in essence, simple to articulate: a failure to adopt modern talent management principles, including rewarding performance, which leads to low employee engagement and morale, and ultimately to poor organizational performance. Pick any of the recent well-researched papers on reform at the State Department and you will similarly have a clear roadmap to improving the organization. The tactical details differ, but the overall path for renewal remains constant. The diplomatic service needs to employ modern management techniques, beginning by flattening the hierarchy and empowering employees to fulfill their mandates, and it needs to promote a culture shift where innovation, risk-taking, and outstanding performance are rewarded.
Viewpoint surveys and anecdotes from disgruntled diplomats notwithstanding, the consequences for neglecting organizational health are difficult to measure. Without profit-and-loss statements or widgets produced per hour or battlefield readiness to help quantify the damage to outcomes from the current bureaucratic malaise, the impetus for radical change is missing (the exception being passport and visa operations, which, unsurprisingly, receive considerable public attention).
Sowing and reaping
If the 2,800 survey respondents in the retention study are to be believed, we may finally have a measurable negative consequence. Should up to a third of serving diplomats leave public service in the next few years, it may finally spur senior leadership within State to implement the organizational reforms needed. As it stands, the study’s findings seems to be attracting little attention from the top echelons of the department: a recent piece in Politico notes, “a senior State Department official responded that frustrations about promotions notwithstanding, only about 3 percent of these officials actually end up leaving the department annually.” In other words: how bad can it really be if people are choosing to stay?
While hemorrhaging talent might prove to be a useful indicator and stimulus for renewal, it will likely harm U.S. national security and diplomatic readiness. The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that top-tier talent can be 800 percent more productive than the average employee, giving firms who attract and retain the high-performers a profound advantage over rivals. In an interconnected world, where diplomats serve to bridge divides and find common ground to intractable problems, losing to rivals with better diplomats could have real consequences on national security and prosperity. Within the larger U.S. government, an executive branch creating strategy on the advice of talented officers from the defense and intelligence communities, outcompeting their diplomatic counterparts, risks codifying professional biases in policy.
As hyperbolic as it may seem, the next few months will likely determine the course of the diplomatic service for a generation. I know many of my colleagues will be hoping for the best, but, like me, nonetheless will be polishing their LinkedIn profiles and exploring their exit options.
Zed Tarar is a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service and is currently serving in London.
Disclaimer: Zed Tarar is a career U.S. diplomat. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of his employer or the U.S. government.
Read ISD’s synopsis of the report:
Read the full report:
