The Foreign Service Journal, March 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2016 63 C) He is not active in seeking desirable contacts. D) He is imaginative. E) He is probably one of our future Career Ministers. A) He has a good sense of humor. B) He is adaptable. C) He shows little taste in his clothes. D) He is inclined to be pompous. This evaluation process is flawed on three counts. First, the statements in each group are binary, either good or bad, and usually very good or very bad, which significantly skews the scoring. Second, the statements have very little correlation with each other: What does a sense of humor have to do with taste in clothes? Third, weighing answers between groups is entirely subjective: Is “probably one of our future Career Ministers” twice as good as “adaptable”? Four times as good? The saving grace was that narrative comments were allowed to remain. In my aunt’s case, this new format appeared when she was assigned as first secretary/consul in the political section at the London embassy and had received excellent reviews. While she received an anonymous 89 score (out of 100, or a Very Good rating) on Parts I–IV, the Part II narrative section, written by Minister-Counselor Julius Holmes and approved by Ambas- sador L.W. Douglas, recommended her for appointment as a chief of mission. One explanation for this odd addition is that while the number of State Department employees had stayed relatively constant (1,000-2,000) between 1900 and 1940, it rapidly rose to more than 10,000 during World War II, and topped 16,000 by 1950. With too much time on their hands, these bureaucrats created tasks to keep themselves busy, including massively revising and expanding existing reports and procedures and issuing new requirements. Fortunately, order was restored in 1952 when the AER was totally revised and renamed “Efficiency Report.” It now had six parts: Parts I–V numerically graded the employee, using the new six-point grading system, on duties performed, personal qualities, factor analysis (30 factors about knowledge, per- formance and personality traits) and language, followed by a single, overall rating number. Part VI, Summary Comments and Recommendations, covered 15 topics such as attitude, executive ability, physical fitness, adverse factors, etc., followed by summary comments, all in narrative form. In addition, there were boxes asking if a review panel was used and if the report was discussed with the officer under review—obviously desirable, but not manda- tory steps in the evaluation. This format continued up to 1955, when Frances Willis received her final evaluation, one month before she was appointed Career Minister. She was promoted to Career Ambassador in 1962. A Work in Progress Frances Willis never complained about discrimination during her Foreign Service career. In fact, she said just the opposite in a 1951 speech to the National Council of Women in Finland: “I can say to you with complete honesty that since the day when I entered the Foreign Service I have been given equal treatment with the men in the Service. I have heard it said, of course, that there is discrimination against women who wish to enter the Service. All I can say is that my personal experience does not bear that out.” It is likely that my aunt never reviewed her dossier, which contained many negative gender bias comments over the first 20 years of her career. Even if she had done so, she would prob- ably have simply ignored them and pressed on. In important ways, personnel evaluation is always a work in progress. For example, numerical grading systems have their own flaws. In the 1970s such a system was abused by some U.S. Air Force reviewing officers who wanted to ensure that the best and brightest members of their organization were promoted, so gave them the maximum 4.0 grade in every factor in the review. It didn’t take long for word to get out about that tactic, which greatly increased the number of perfect reviews submitted, ending the utility of that system. And, of course, a similar tactic has captured academic grading to an even greater degree, with grades higher than 4.0 being routinely awarded. The fallback position is to revert to the ponderous—but much harder to abuse—narrative-type evaluation, which the Foreign Service has embraced. n This process made the board’s jobmuch easier, because everything they needed to know about the candidate was summarized in the new paragraph. But it also opened the door for mischief.