The Foreign Service Journal, April 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2023 21 5. Always write for the right audi- ence. Having chaired a specialist threshold panel, served on countless post-based EER review panels, and writ- ten hundreds of EERs for staff from every cone, specialty, grade, and foreign affairs agency, I would urge writers to produce a document for the only audience that matters: the panel. Consider the task panels shoulder: reviewing hundreds and hundreds of EERs for 6 to 12 hours a day nonstop. The review process is fatiguing because it requires intense focus. Making EERs easy for caring but tired colleagues to read so that they reach the appropriate conclusion about each employee is important. Writ- ing for the review panel, however, is also a skill that requires practice and training. What the State Department (and Other Agencies) Can Do 1. Provide formal training in perfor- mance counseling and/or EER writing. In more than three decades of govern- ment service, my training spanned from shooting guns to writing contracts, conducting television interviews, and interpreting complex immigration laws. Throughout my career, I spent hours every year in mandatory (and repetitive) classes on cybersecurity, counterintel- ligence, and retiring documents. But never—not once—was I offered formal training in performance counseling or EER writing. If the future of our Service depends on our ability to support performance of staff and promote the best, then genuine training in this space isn’t just impor- tant, it’s vital. It is important for leader- ship across the foreign affairs agencies to correct this oversight and find ways to address the bias and inequality that is baked into our current processes. I urge the department to embrace the opportunity AI text generation repre- sents and get ahead of the inevitable by teaching people how to use such tools. 4. Train and equip promotion boards. My experience serving on a promotion panel is that the vast majority of our colleagues take the responsibility seriously. They want to be fair and follow the rules and do a good job. But given the seriousness of the task, boards need better equipment and tools and more training—before they open the first EER. Windowless rooms and bare-bones computer setups are not conducive to the best outcomes. And as technolo- gies grow, many of our panel members may need specific training on how new technologies impact our traditional sys- tem, so that the bias inevitably created between those who use new tech and those who don’t is fairly addressed. It is time for the State Department and the other foreign affairs agencies to acknowledge that evaluation writing is a skill that requires new tools, practice, and training. The good news is that our evaluation and promotion systems can be quickly improved if the agencies and individual supervisors make the effort to change poor practices at the individual, managerial, and policy levels. This isn’t just important for diversity, morale, inclusion, and performance—it is critical to the survival and legitimacy of the Foreign Service. n Speaking Out is the Journal ’s opinion forum, a place for lively discussion of issues affecting the U.S. Foreign Service and American diplomacy. The views expressed are those of the author; their publication here does not imply endorsement by the American Foreign Service Association. Responses are welcome; send them to journal@afsa.org . 2. Enforce good rules already in place. Some good practices are already required on paper, but because they are not embedded in our culture, they do not occur in practice. For example, the “mandatory” counseling session date required by our evaluation system. Typically this date is set to line up with when evaluations are due to make it appear on paper as if a counseling session had been held, when in fact no genuine counseling occurs. Similarly, when performance issues arise, many supervisors elect not to docu- ment concerns or discuss them with the employee as is technically required. 3. Embrace new technologies. One aspect of evaluation writing that will be intriguing to watch evolve is the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to expertly draft complex text, including EERs. On the assumption this is already well underway in the Foreign Service, I predict that AI text generators (like GPT-3) will evolve into the modern-day equivalent of spell check and Microsoft editor (easy tools that I wished more staff would use with regularity!). As far as EERs are concerned, this kind of assisted writing doesn’t concern me as a negative trend because the act of writing an EER is the last of a series of tasks needed to arrive at a genuine and meaningful evaluation. Because AI is only a tool, the need for the “human in the loop” becomes more important than ever, including in the counseling and evaluation process. AI writing may even help defeat bias in our evaluation writing, eliminating the trend that “good writers” (or those whose bosses are good writers) get promoted over others. As long as the rest of the feedback loop includes appropri- ate personal and human engagement between supervisors and employees,