The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

tion boards must decide how to weigh all of the factors described above because the promotion precepts are silent on these difficult trade-offs. Boards may do so collectively or indi- vidually, and their internal guidelines can be explicit or vague. Whatever method is used, both the decision and the method used to reach it remain behind closed doors. This lack of transparency not only weakens confi- dence in the overall promotion process, but greatly reduces the con- sistency and reproducibility of results. Using promotion points, the value of time-in-class versus performance would be instantly transparent, as would a host of other trade-offs. These factors would be transparent because they would be reflected in the “point curve” that would be used to translate each employee’s position on the annual ranking prepared by promotion boards into a specific num- ber of promotion points. As with all grading systems, there is no reason why promotion points should be assigned in a strictly linear or propor- tional fashion based upon employees’ rankings. In fact, there are very good reasons for a non-linear approach. Whatever the shape of the curve, I believe that it should be negotiated by the department with AFSA. To understand the way the point curve would work and how it would incorporate difficult time-in-class ver- sus performance issues, let’s look at some examples. If a linear 100-point maximum curve is adopted, then employees judged to have turned in the very best performance would be awarded 100 points while the average would receive 50 points, and low- ranked employees (nearly) zero. Thus, under a linear system the very best employees could expect to accu- mulate points — and therefore reach promotion — exactly twice as fast as the average employee. Amoderately progressive (upward- sloping) curve could have a very dif- ferent impact. For example, if employees ranked among the top 1 percent for the year received 250 points, employees ranked in the top 10 percent received 100 points and those ranked between the 40th and 60th percentile received 40 points, the department would be explicitly decid- ing to recognize and reward mainly employees who turn in absolutely out- standing performances. Under either scenario, a consis- tently low-ranked employee would never be promoted while those employees who consistently gravitated toward the lower end of the scale would experience slow but pre- dictable promotions. Whatever the shape of the curve, the impact of one or more poor EERs would be transparent. Because points would be awarded annually, a single year’s bad performance would delay promotion only once; it would not in any way prejudice future promotion boards. Indeed, to better preserve the integrity of the system by ensuring that boards reach their decisions based on employees’ performance over the past year only, they should not know an employee’s previous 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 S P E A K I N G O U T u The current system successfully identifies top performers and those in need of improvement. However, it leaves mid-ranked officers uncertain of their prospects.