The Foreign Service Journal, April 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2022 33 After the first significant overhaul since 2015, the State Department core precepts are lean and tuned to the diplomatic requirements of the 21st century. BY L I SA V I CKERS The New Core Precepts and What They Mean Lisa A. Vickers is the director of the State Department ’s Bureau of Global Talent Management’s Office of Performance Evaluation. A consular officer, she has served in a variety of leadership posts since joining the State Department Foreign Service in 1990, including as consul general in Cairo, deputy principal officer in Frankfurt, deputy chief of mission in Lilongwe and as principal officer in Edinburgh and Mérida. I n February, Director General Carol Perez announced new core precepts for State Foreign Service tenure and promotion, which will take effect in the rating cycle beginning this month. The new core precepts mark a significant change from the previous ones. Here is an explanation of how they are different, the process for developing them and why the precepts matter. You can find the full text of the new core precepts at https://usdos. sharepoint.com/sites/Intranet-HR/offices/pe. Every employee evaluation report (EER) season for the Foreign Service, employees around the world agonize over their personal narratives and assemble bullet points for their rater and reviewer. The most effective way to organize the narrative is by consulting the core precepts, which are the deci- sion criteria for tenure and promotion. Like many of you, I go through the current table of precepts (which some refer to as a “bingo card”) to make sure that my EER touches on as many of the subcompetencies as possible. I also read my last three EERs to make sure that I didn’t forget to include something and to decide where this year’s narrative journey will take me. As director of the Office of Performance Evaluation in the Global Talent Management Bureau, I am responsible for renegotiating the core precepts FOCUS ON NEW CORE PRECEPTS