The Foreign Service Journal, April 2020

28 APRIL 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL promotion and help all employees do better while cutting clutter, complexity and costs, including time often spent on misguided standards and ineffective and inefficient processes. Mindful of the new developments in this area and the advan- tages they bring, the State Department made a series of initial reforms in 2015 as preliminary steps toward a more consequen- tial future overhaul of the performance management system. USAID launched a separate reform in 2017-2018 [see p. 32 ]. Though progress has been limited in the past couple of years, the 2015 EER reforms are building blocks from which State aims to establish, in the near to intermediate term, a state-of-the-art performance management system, including a user-oriented online interface. Director General Carol Perez has made reform a priority and hopes to achieve traction this year. Foreign Service Institute Director Daniel B. Smith is determined to achieve improved leadership and professional training, building on recent pathbreaking reforms. Further collaboration between the Bureau of Global Talent Management (formerly the Bureau of Human Resources) and AFSA, speaking for the Foreign Service, holds promise to have a genuinely positive impact for employees. A new performance management system would significantly enhance employee confidence; better identify high performers and high-potential employees; cut processing time; deliver promotion results earlier; and have professional development baked into State’s corporate DNA. The 2015 EER Changes In developing the 2015 reforms, State conducted some 23 information sessions, received more than 2,000 comments from a SharePoint site, reviewed years of selection board reports and recommendations, and collaboratively negotiated with AFSA. The relatively modest EER changes incorporated structural and cultural elements, as outlined below. Their objectives were to: • Focus on past performance and project future capacity (“effectiveness areas”) rather than describing siloed proficiency in individual components (“the six competencies”). • Focus on goals, outcomes and results rather than tasks, activities and output. • Emphasize responsibilities (positive), not just requirements (defensive); and reduce the requirements section in the EER (which selection boards did not find especially useful) while retaining it in other documentation. • Change “Area for Improvement” (a negative) to “Develop- mental Area” (neutral), recognizing that no matter how strong employees are, they have not achieved perfection and still have scope for growth and professional development. • Add a new short section for the Senior FS for performance pay, to provide performance pay boards with additional infor- mation for that competition. • Move Meritorious Service Increases to a separate process, in keeping with the Foreign Service Act. (The MSI, commonly mischaracterized as Meritorious Step Increase, is designed to identify and reward exceptionally meritorious service; its lan- guage and placement in the FSA—separate from the discussion of promotion—suggests that the act’s drafters considered it as rare, not commonplace.) This change was made in recognition that selection boards are charged with identifying for promotion (future capacity) and under-performance (failure to keep up with the cohort), not taking an overall look at past service and performance. A further aim was to introduce greater equity because some competing groups had too few members to qualify for MSIs under the exist- ing precepts. Last, the highest numbers of MSIs were being awarded to lower ranks—which had the greatest number of employees eli- gible for promotion, but where it is less likely that, with relatively limited experience, employees would truly have demonstrated especially meritorious service. By contrast, employees at the mid-ranks and FS-1s had comparatively few MSIs available. The lack of rigor and equity in awarding MSIs was jarring. • Eliminate classwide reviews. These had required two steps to achieve one total promotion number for each cone (often with necessary adjustments in subsequent years if cones overshot or fell short of projected numbers). Further, they had not achieved their stated objectives for greater diversification and growth across all cones. The data showed that two cones received nearly 70 percent of promotions at the FS-1 and above levels, and some employees received counseling letters for not serving in cone (undercutting the very premise of classwide competition). Also, because classwide reviews came first and were followed by conal reviews, the board seasons slid into October, deep into bid sea- son, before promotion results came out. GTM anticipated it would take several years for employees to adjust and adapt to the new system, and several more years to fully embrace it.