The Foreign Service Journal, April 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2020 31 generation. Lack of self-awareness, emotional intelligence and people skills comes through in EERs. None of this is to suggest that there are no false positives and false negatives when it comes to promotions. But the system is designed to mitigate against it. More important, their occurrence suggests that more reform is essential. Such reform should draw from employee and AFSA input, in addition to reviewing results and mining best practices from both public and private-sector initiatives, to create a new architecture and new user-friendly software interface. The Road Ahead During 2017 performance management reform received comparatively less attention as the department grappled with the hiring freeze, the Redesign (later rebranded The Impact Initiative, or TII) and the President’s Management Agenda and associated Office of Management and Budget reporting require- ments. Even as GTM concentrated on workforce hiring and attrition issues, the sizable outflow of Senior Foreign Service personnel meant losses in both national security and foreign policy experience, as well as leadership—including in inspiring employees and programmatic management, further deflecting attention from performance evaluation. In 2019 the State Department listed “Talent” as the first category of its top five management priorities. As noted earlier, performance management improvements are highlighted as an objective, though regrettably the format of the management state- ment did not include a specific, targeted, timebound goal. As with any change, for performance management reform to be a success, robust, ongoing communications with, by and for employees will be essential as the department moves to design and implement a new performance management architecture and EER form and processes. It can build incrementally on the 2015 reforms (go small) or adopt a more radical approach (go big, and join the ranks of cutting-edge enterprises); both have benefits and risks. It remains to be seen what lessons the department draws, what resources it devotes, what benchmarks it sets, and what timelines it develops for implementation. n