The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

ning ahead,” two of the represen- tative hypothetical tasks given in a worksheet I saw were as follows: “The technician plans own work at least three days in advance. The Accounting Chief must plan the work unit tasks at least quarterly.” The fact that those wizards are judging the value and rank of a job according to special criteria to which only they are privy, and to which those outside, including the jobholder, have no access, only compounds the suspicion. (By design and rule, the outsider is supposed to “guess” what the CAJE system values when doing or redoing a job description, while only the job assessors in HR are allowed to see the concrete detailed criteria used to conduct the formal assessment.) I should acknowledge that my experiences with sev- eral exceptional FSN colleagues have significantly shaped my views of CAJE. In Malaysia, for exam- ple, I had the privilege of working with one of the world’s masters of charm and “interpersonal skills.” And it did not take me long to rec- ognize the enormous benefits, intangible though many of them were, that his skills and abilities brought to the embassy and to the U.S. government. Like a number of other countries, Malaysia is a place where relatively few people agree with (or even understand) a number of key U.S. policy priorities, and where most people are predisposed to suspect the worst of us in any case. It is also a place (again, not unique) where many of our contacts, including close ones, do not see the point of returning our phone calls. F O C U S A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 The CAJE framework fails to assign full value to the contibutions of all FSNs.