Episode 6: Training Float

Part 2 of the conversation between Dr. Vic Marsh and fp21 CEO Dan Spokojny.

Transcript

This transcript was written by a robot.

Dan Spokojny
I want to follow up on a point that you made about merit and technical skills. It seems one of the vital components of that is to have an apparatus that trains our people productively to be able to perform the jobs that's to them, and to be able to update those skills in response to what works and what needs to be improved. What's falling short. So I noticed this legislation includes a line on a training float, it says the secretary shall develop and submit to the appropriate congressional committees a strategy to establish a training float to allow for up to 15% of the Foreign Service to participate in long-term training at any given time. Can you explain whether you think this 15% training float is relevant to the diversity inclusion conversation and what it means?

Vic Marsh
There are a couple of ways to get the right brains with the right job. The first path is you can hire someone who's born with it, you can go and scan the US population to say, Hey, we have this job. And we need someone super-specialized to do this work. And you have to come already specialized. We want a package deal. Your brain already has this specific knowledge about the basil two accounting standards, your brain already has this specific knowledge about section 301 trade enforcement mechanisms, right. So you might specify in that way, and that's our template for the civil service side of the State Department. That's the general framework, you have to have someone in headquarters who really knows not proliferation treaty, you can't have me as a former generalist kind of winging it in setting the tone of our non-proliferation treaty writing, like, I need some instruction, I need some background, I need to be the control officer for visits from those bureaus of expertise, it makes sense for us to have a hiring pathway that requires people to already have the knowledge they have arrived. They already did their PhD, they already did their master's degree on this specific thing. The second alternative is you teach people the skills that they will need for their next job. And that's very relevant to generalists, professions inside the State Department. If you show up, you're hired because you have general great thinking skills, you seem to have good judgment. And you seem to have a knack for learning about foreign places, and foreign cultures. a knack for negotiation. All that doesn't necessarily help you learn the Cyrillic alphabet, but you have to actually have a class where people sit down and teach you these things go through the boom lots in Turkish and other languages and go through the case endings in Hungarian. So if you're going to have such a major and important part of your workforce, rely on new skills, then you've got to have some time to do it. And Case in point, I was really pretty dismayed by a series of Facebook videos, where embassies had a little fun with the fact that US diplomats are a little bit bad at language. So these videos were going viral on social media. I think many people found them endearing. But as a human resources nerd, I found them horrifying. The idea that she would put on care for some us official speaking Bulgarian badly, and say, Oh, look, there are these misunderstandings that happen in basic conversation even though I've had a long training I in Bulgarian back at the State Department that he made me wonder if we are getting the product we need if we're getting the longevity we need in our training experiences, to deliver a smooth diplomatic product and leverage those to negotiate important agreements abroad. So I really want a real training float. And I just fear that crises intervene in people's best-laid training float plans. Colin Powell coming from the military as Secretary of State, he definitely wanted training flow. But you fast forward into his tenure, and we had a few wars complicated his ability to deliver on that Plan. So I think if the US Congress smooths the pathway to making this permanent, by flipping it from a maximum requirement of a training float to a minimum to a floor to say, no matter what is going on, no matter the emergency, we are authorizing you to increase hiring to meet those needs, so that you can maintain this training float, that would be one incremental improvement that I think will make a really big difference, a really positive difference on the agency. So I'm glad that Congress has focused on this topic of a training float of having some folks who it will boggle some people's minds How dare these people just be at college while I'm out here busting my back in hard manual labor diplomacy is sometimes hard to sell. But look, it helps our labor's if the people we send to negotiate their agreements are actually able to communicate actually no the substance of what they're negotiating, we can deliver more for everyday Americans, every worker in the country, if we've got diplomats who really know what they're doing, get the skills they need.

Dan Spokojny
It's a good investment in our country to train our diplomats who are going off to engage with the world. I heard you also pick up this little language in this authorization bill as currently proposed, it says to allow for up to 15% of the Foreign Service. And it's worth noting that a lot of organizations like the American Academy of Diplomacy, fp21, itself, others have said there should be at a 15% float. That's right, at least a 15% fed lease. It's worth noting the machinery here, Foreign Service officers are all considered generalists, like the military, both you and I are former foreign service officers. So we may slip into we but we were asked to rotate our positions every 234 years into a new job in order to be able to see the world from a more holistic perspective and understand all the machinery of Foreign Affairs. So in between those different jobs, We're often asked to go train on the new language, the new issues, we'll be engaging with perhaps new technology, new software, whatever it is that we're going to need for our next job. Yet, it seems that there's often this poverty mindset related to training at the Department of State that there's this urgency, if there's a chair empty, and there's nobody there to backfill it, then you got to get your butt out to your embassy and get working. Because these issues are important. They are urgent. But the short-term urgencies build up and create a culture that doesn't find a way to get its staff trained, effectively. So this float will allow while if somebody is in training, somebody else is going to be at the desk still working. This is something that the military has figured out long ago, and they've got a 15% float. And that's a right number that they've calculated, so that people can both learn and do their job without losing effectiveness.

Vic Marsh
This is practically before my final assignment out in the Mediterranean region, both myself going out to be the deputy political Chief, and the future, the prospective econ Chief, we both attended the energy class. So it was a seminar that got us diplomats in training in touch with scientists who deal with various types of energy, renewables, petroleum, nuclear, we got in touch with industry types who were doing current research and development in all of those different areas petroleum, deep sea water drilling was especially relevant for the eastern Mediterranean Sea. To learn in that context with a bunch of experts was so important. I learned stuff about the technologies for deep sea drilling American advantages that we have some comparative advantages we have in those technologies, learned about renewables and bright sunny places. And there's a lot of bright sunny places in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. And so when we got to post together, we were able to work jointly to help people in Washington understand the political ramifications of new technology being deployed in both renewables and in the natural gas sector in the eastern Mediterranean. No one had to teach us from the ground up what the difference was between an easy and exclusive economic zone and territorial waters. We no one had to teach us on the job. We already had some background. And so we were able to produce the set of cables that actually won and official kudos cable from the intelligence community. So we knew we had made the right investment. We had really worked on learning our topics ahead of time, I covered the political angles, she covered the core economic angles, and we were able to deliver analyses that helped advance the US government's thinking on these issues. And then they told us though, which was really nice for us to tell our team

Dan Spokojny
seems obvious, it's such a, it's such an obvious story that the government will want to train you to be an expert on the issues you engage on. But I think it's important to know that too often, folks are sent out to post with zero training that they skip right from one country to another country, and they go in cold and aren't asked to learn the language aren't asked to learn the issues in the new portfolio. And they're very smart, very hard-working people in the Foreign Service, and you learn pretty quickly on the job. But as your story suggests, there's a real qualitative difference between somebody getting some time to really focus on what their job will be, versus having to hit the ground running, and maybe leaving some of the details to be figured out along the way. And maybe you'll catch up and maybe you won't,

Vic Marsh
you're not going to generalist your way into knowledge about resource extraction on a deep level or renewables and greed issues you don't when it comes up, like when it comes up in country, it's often too late for you to go and study. Because what you're doing in at least with reporting offices, at least with political in econ offices, is you're facing a lot of local experts who are trying to spin you It's like the line at the bottom of various intelligence reports that this person spoke with us with the intention to influence the policies that the United States chooses. And if we're going to be the one shaping events elsewhere, then we've got to learn our stuff at home before we before we jump overseas.

Dan Spokojny
Section 1403. In this new legislation on State Department authorization, asks the director general of the Foreign Service, the dg HR to offer to all departing employees an opportunity for an exit interview and to analyze those results for diversity impacts. Can you explain to me, Vic, why exit interviews are so important in this space?

Vic Marsh
Oh, exit interviews are very important that human resource nerds, and not just to the nerds, they feed back into your decisions about organizational change, right. So let's say there's a couple types of ways to change ways to innovate in your big, old agency. However, the first cabinet agency at the US Department of State, we've got to change with the time sometimes, and one of your best sources of knowledge is people who no longer depend on you for a paycheck, right? No one has to self edit, and moderate and reduce the intensity of their feedback to the organization because they don't work for you anymore. They went and found another job. And so you've got this unique opportunity for candor for feedback that gets straight to the real without the fluff. And that's a major learning opportunity that the State Department has not fully taken advantage of. Now, part of this section does confuse me a bit. And I was confused by earlier testimony and US representative Castro's committee, because I heard that exit surveys were new, as well as the idea of exit interviews being new. I think it's true that exit interviews would be new, a new thing for the State Department sitting down or having a video conference with people who are departing and understanding their reasons for leaving in detail. I think that might be new. But exit surveys are not new, I was surprised to see sworn testimony that said that we haven't done that before. Because when I departed in 2015, I did fill out a short exit survey. And I'm happy to produce that for anyone who is interested. So we definitely have some survey data somewhere, I circled some answers on a form or, and scanned it in and emailed it in to the department's HR Bureau. So the exit surveys are available. And I think they've been around for a long time. I think it's time that we digitize that work. I think it's time that we have serious academics going in and doing some sort of text analysis on that to to get some themes about why people are leaving. And if we know a bit about why people are leaving, we're gonna, if we learn a bit about why people are leaving, we're gonna learn a lot about some changes that people wanted to see. But we're not realized while they were in the US Department of State,

Dan Spokojny
it seems that this touches to a piece of criticism that some folks have had about the conversation Department of State, that it's too much about how to get new diversity in the door. And rather than recruiting from within and saying, hey, there's actually a lot of really great people in here in this organization who we've trained, who have seen inside and out of the way that our government works, who are prepared for positions of leadership, and just haven't seem to get the opportunity and we see the data that they're being blocked from higher positions of authority and are leaving because of it. And so just bring in new faces to hit a bottleneck isn't going to help the cause. So it seems like this exit interview piece this mid level retention question is really vital. And to

Vic Marsh
their credit, the director general's office has framed their conversation around retention. Definitely DG Perez has made a point over and over again of saying that our problems are primarily with retention of diverse talent. Not that that we've never recruited them. So that's an important finding. To just delve deeper on, we need to know why are folks leaving? And what is what are we missing out on what is what are the American people losing one of the hardest ideas in this topic of diversity is a mirror image of one of the toughest ideas for undergrads to capture in an economics class. That's the idea of opportunity costs. That's the idea of putting a number on the choice that you chose not to make, and comparing it with the benefits that you were able to achieve under your chosen pathway. And that's really what makes it hard. That's why Twitter conversations about diversity are so disappointed to put it mildly, right is that someone says we've got to do this work on retaining diverse people. And then someone immediately comes in and says, it shouldn't be based on diversity, it should be based on merit. I hate to be that academic, but actually, you're good the needs of diversity, if you're going to achieve anything meritorious for the American people, if you're pushing out the women of color, are you assuming that we there's just no brainpower there that we could have used right, the women of color who had are these baskets of skills that we didn't be with careful measuring of this opportunity cost with tracking the career progress of the people who we let slip through our institutions fingers? If we track that, and we compare it to the folks who stayed, we'll have a better idea about whether we are attained retaining strategically? Are we retaining people who are top performance based on their knowledge, skills and abilities? Or are we retaining people primarily based on their family size, because it's a huge education bit of it if you got a big family, to join the Department of State and enjoy the sort of golden handcuffs of our strong educational benefits for large families. So we really got to be careful and make sure we're retaining the right people for the right reason, and delivering meritorious results for the American people.

Dan Spokojny
Yeah, I want to follow up on a point you were talking about earlier, with Biden's executive order on new data for understanding personnel. This legislation also includes direction for the Secretary of State to publish a report in a searchable database format. I love that language includes disaggregated demographic data regarding the diversity of the workforce, is there anything more you'd like to say on this request? Is it emphasizing or different than President Biden's order?

Vic Marsh
The first step is to bring in some kind of table into your statistical software. If it's all locked in some sort of Microsoft Word or PDF format on PDF format, or launched on a website, then you just have all of this extra delay to even starting your research projects on this. So I think one important thing that both the Biden executive order and Congress's draft legislation do is that they focus on making transparency real, it's not enough to just put a PowerPoint slide with your bar chart about the State Department's diversity, right? You actually need to just upload the darn Microsoft Excel file, or dot CSV, or whatever, just something, anything that statistical software can read. And so I think, I don't know which one gets to that result. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know if machine-readable is a better phrase than searchable database. But I do know what I want. And that is, I want as a person who does not anymore depend on the Department of State for my paycheck, right? I want to independently be able to download a file into move that into some statistical software and start analyzing it. This is a very important point. And I'm glad Congress is focused on this, because it makes transparency real. It's not just transparency in the way that say, our court process has with discovery. You're suing some company and you get the right to do discovery. So they bring by 1 million boxes of superfluous irrelevant memoranda and bury deep inside of it is some data that you actually need for your lawsuit. And so what I think Congress and executive branch are both saying with one voice, slightly different words, but one loud voice is we want external people to be able to analyze all your numbers.