The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

T hough retired for some years now, I can easily recall the anx- iety caused by the annual cycle of employee evaluation reports. The tension was even worse in those anti- quarian days, which I remember, when the officer was not allowed to see the report. Secrecy greatly re- duced the inhibitions of the rater, who never got to feel the rage of the eval- uated officer upon reading criticism of his wife’s martinis. These days, of course, we live in the high, fresh sierra of openness. But now that we have left the tuber- cles of insensitivity behind in the swamps below, many EERs nowadays still seem drained of all life. Most are as pureed as Gerber peas. They are certainly less interesting than in the days when poison flowed. These thoughts are personal, natu- rally. Reading EERs while on thresh- old and senior promotion boards and while carrying out inspections, I con- stantly encountered the sameness that you see in those little Nutcracker dolls at Christmas. What always seemed missing was flesh and bone. A graceful, insightful EER cover- ing the required six competencies is possible, but it is as noticeable as Rudolf Nureyev bounding onto the stage at a third-grade dance recital. An exception was a DCM in Paris who presented the reader with a painting from life. You knew that he was busy, yet it was obvious that he had thought about employees as per- sons throughout the year. His EERs flowed in one liquid essay, not hacked up into itemized competencies like “management ability” — an approach that sometimes gives EERs the look of a probation officer’s report. He repeatedly won, and richly merited, commendations for his evaluations by following Ezra Pound’s recommenda- tion to young writers: “Make it new.” Is this moaning over the undiffer- entiated nature of EERs exaggerated? Not if you’ve heard the thud of a thou- sand feet “hitting the ground run- ning.” Not if you’ve stood in the street and tried to wave your flag to the dirge of an endless procession of supervisors “leading by example.” Fortunately, most raters are capa- ble of better writing and some show it in the following extracts. (All quota- tions are approximate, based on my memory and notes.) “He prepared an outstanding report on beer marketing, establish- ing that GNP growth was trickling down to the countryside.” “He throws out ideas like a high- speed pinwheel. Some just go phifft.” Addressing an officer unwilling to change: “He stood there like a black- smith watching automobiles go by.” Achieve; Don’t Just Perform True, we should not think of EERs as a fine-arts exercise. The stuff of evaluations is performance, not the artistic or literary ability of the rater. Yet surely there is room to jump a lit- tle higher. I prefer the word “achievement” to “performance.” The latter term con- jures up for me the hum and reliabili- ty of a toothpick-sorting machine, whereas “achievement,” described with sufficiently decorous drama, can evoke the shuddering force of Rocky Balboa’s right. If we are to keep the word, perfor- mance should not merely signify working hard, surviving staffing gaps, meeting visitors at the airport, beating deadlines, or keeping on good terms with everyone — worthwhile as all those jobs are. “All of these things the gentiles do.” Performance, it seems to me, is achievement rooted in strong conceptual ability and charged with sane energy. Ambition is also important, of course. A drama teacher in elemen- tary school asked my youngest son Bill what kinds of parts he liked. “Big parts,” he replied. Someone has suggested that in order to be a water-walker, you first have to find a post with water. That’s true. As Dr. Samuel Johnson ob- served: “To discover great talents, it is necessary to have great exigencies that call them forth.” There is no point in cursing a selection board just because 18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 7 How to Read and Write an EER B Y J OHN J. E DDY FS K NOW -H OW Is the moaning that all EERs read alike exaggerated? Not if you’ve heard the thud of a thousand feet “hitting the ground running.”