The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2023 19 SPEAKING OUT Why Our Evaluation System Is Broken andWhat to Do About It BY V I RG I N I A BLASER Virginia Blaser is the CEO of a global tech and open-source intelligence company. She recently retired from 34 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, where she served four tours as a deputy chief of mission and principal officer, includ- ing five years as chargé d’affaires. With dozens of commendations for State Department employee evaluation report writing, Ms. Blaser turned her passion for the evaluation process into a newly released book, The Manager’s Workbook, available for free on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. This article is based, in part, on excerpts from that book. A pril means many in the State Department and other foreign affairs agencies are deeply engaged with annual evaluation writing … and the dread, the pressure, the angst, and the work that it brings. A significant part of the stress comes from the knowledge that our promotions and those of our staff depend almost entirely on the words in an annual form. Many of us also share a concern that success isn’t about who actually per- formed the best, but rather the ability (yours, your rater’s, and your reviewer’s) to document that performance along a spectrum of written and unwritten rules. In my experience, many people in the State Department feel negatively about employee evaluation reports (EERs), counseling meetings, and our promo- tion process because they have had minimal engagement with their supervi- sor around evaluation and counseling or have had prior bad experiences with counseling and evaluation. During my three decades in the State Department, I saw how some extremely poor evaluation practices entrenched in our culture disadvantaged those who may not be strong writers, are not familiar with how to game the evaluation system, or who have supervisors who are not fully engaged in the evaluation process or poor writers themselves. The result: Our best are not necessar- ily the ones getting promoted. Almost two decades ago, a group of first-time deputy chiefs of mission gathered informally on the margins of a regional military conference. Giddy in our excitement to embrace our new lead- ership roles, we talked about the future of the department, expressing what we wished “they” (meaning the higher-ups) would do to make our Service better. One colleague stopped us in our tracks: “You do realize that ‘we’ are now ‘they,’ and it is on us to make things bet- ter now, don’t you?” It was a humbling lesson that stayed with me; for the rest of my career, I always asked myself what power I had to make things better right then and there. The experience underscores that each of us has the opportunity to make our evaluation and promotion system better. We don’t have to wait on (much- needed) policy improvements from the department. Indeed, if each of us doesn’t embrace a better way of doing things, our system will continue to fail us all. So here are a few things you can do today. What You Can Do 1. Don’t consider an evaluation a singular moment in time; consider it as part of a continuum. Great counsel- ing, evaluation, and performance all tie together in a performance management feedback loop that constantly builds strength and aids the growth of both the supervisor and the employee. This runs from a first performance counseling ses- sion all the way to a formal evaluation; then the process begins again. A substantial number of studies reinforce this, noting that a manager who engages employees in the evalu- ation process has a striking influence on the employee and the workplace. For example, a 2013 Gallup “State of the American Workplace” report found that employees who had goal-focused conversations with their manager in An evaluation is as good as it is genuine and reflective of the effort and time all parties put into it during the year.