The Foreign Service Journal, April 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2020 33 and promotion policies. Advancement in the Foreign Service relies on a rank‐in‐person, competitive promotion system, supported by a traditional approach to planning, monitoring and evaluating performance. For decades, the cornerstone of both the performance management and promotion processes at USAID was the Annual Evaluation Form. The AEF served as both the annual performance evaluation, documenting how well the individual has done over the past year, and the primary input to the boards charged with recommending candidates for promo- tion. In theory, this might seem like an efficient way to “kill two birds with one stone”—however, in practice, the AEF served neither purpose well and consumed an inordinate amount of time every spring. What we suspected, and our assessment confirmed, was that candid conversations about professional development were few and far between (andmet with considerable resistance if they sug- gested that an employee’s performance wasn’t up to par in a par- ticular area), and that the AEF had largely devolved into an exercise in artful writing designed to impress the promotion boards. These and other findings reflect the fundamental problem with trying to use a single document for two very different pur- poses. AEFs tended to focus on the employee’s most notewor- thy achievements and were often exaggerated and laden with superlatives that obscured true differences across employees’ skills and readiness for promotion. Moreover, it was never clear whose opinion the AEF reflected—although “officially” written from the supervisor’s perspective, employees often wrote the first (and sometimes final!) draft of their own AEF. And 360-degree feedback solicited at the end of the year was often reduced to quotes used to support supervisors’ glowing narratives. The norms that evolved around AEFs over many years con- tributed to FSOs’ loss of confidence in the process, but that was not the only casualty. The single-minded focus on AEF writ- ing every spring also undermined what should have been the primary goal of the performance management system—namely, helping FSOs develop and enhance the many complex skills they need to be successful as they move up the career ladder. When performance management is viewed as synonymous with writing AEFs, things like thoughtful conversations about performance, honest feedback about strengths and weaknesses, and deliberate efforts to create developmental assignments tend to take a back seat. This doesn’t mean that most supervisors didn’t care about developing their staff. Many supervisors tried to maintain a focus on employee development, including holding employees accountable for poor performance, but our human resources systems provided little support for their efforts. With too few people and too much work to do, it was just too easy for mean- ingful conversations between employees and supervisors to get sidelined or postponed indefinitely. Putting Employee Development into Performance Management As HCTMmade a commitment to acknowledge, understand and address these challenges, we were extremely fortunate to have the full support of USAID’s senior leadership—including our administrator, our partners at AFSA and, most important of all, our hardworking 18-member community of stakehold- ers (CoS). Beginning in April 2016, the CoS that led the rede- sign consisted of FSOs from the FS-3 to Senior Foreign Service grades. The group was co-chaired by the USAID counselor, the highest career FSO at the agency, and an FS-3 officer. The role of the junior officers was particularly important because we sought to build to the future. The goals of the redesign were: • Facilitate ongoing, meaningful feedback and professional development to build employees’ expertise throughout their careers. • Ensure that processes for dealing with employee miscon- duct and chronic poor performance are clear, fair and effective. • Increase the transparency, objectivity and fairness of the promotion process. • Reduce complexity and administrative burden, wherever possible. HCTM supported the stakeholder community by provid- ing input from the latest research and standards of practice in both the public and private sectors, and by facilitating the many working groups that discussed, debated and, ultimately, designed the framework for the interrelated elements of the new processes. Forms, instructions and operational details were developed and refined through focus groups, field tests, negotia- The Annual Evaluation Form had largely devolved into an exercise in artful writing designed to impress the promotion boards.