The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

rankings or present point total when deciding upon this year’s ranking. References to past point totals or time in class should be added to the list of inadmissible comments in order to ensure that promotion panels rank employees based solely on their per- formance and potential as document- ed in EERs and other official person- nel records over the course of the year. (Incidentally, another potentially beneficial change would be to remove the name, grade and title of rating and reviewing officers from the copy of the EER received by the committee. Boards should rank employees based on documented performance and potential, yet anecdotal reports from promotion panel members consistent- ly indicate that evaluations written by senior officials are more likely to result in promotion than are those written by officers just one rank high- er than the rated employee. Who is being rated, after all — the employee or the supervisor?) Another way a point system would bring greatly increased transparency would be by translating valuable but vague policies into explicit transparent results. For example, while the department already has a policy that long-term training should not disad- vantage officers with respect to pro- motion, what does that really mean? To answer that question under a point system, the department could adopt a policy under which students in long- term training are assigned a number of points equal to the statistical aver- age of all employees. Better yet, the department could provide predictable rewards for outstanding performance while in training by awarding the top students (measured either by final language score and/or teacher evaluation) a higher than average number of points. Underperform- ers could be penalized in a similar manner. Whichever system the department adopts, the result would J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 S P E A K I N G O U T u