The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

14 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 9 rarely have direct knowledge of the employees they are assessing, with very little solid information on which to base their own rankings. This has five pernicious effects on the Foreign Service as an institution: Inefficiency: Many excellent officers advance quickly through the ranks of the Foreign Service, but the high de- gree of randomness in promotions (a direct consequence of our unhelpful EER process) means a great number of the “best and brightest” are delayed by a year or more in assuming positions of greater responsibility commensurate with their abilities. This built-in ineffi- ciency deprives the Foreign Service of the optimal use of its top performers and puts it at a disadvantage relative to other institutions with more effective performance evaluation systems. Demoralization: Seeing “the best and brightest” passed over year after year is almost as bad as seeing “weaker performers” shoot past them based on nothing more than a well-written EER. Frequent occurrences of this phenom- enon sap morale, discourage hard work, and prompt some high achievers who do not get promoted quickly to consider other careers (or agencies) that offer a more direct link between performance and reward. Ineffective mentoring: Allowing managers to classify all their subordi- nate officers as “above average” makes the EERworthless as a tool for guiding employee performance. While there are many mid-level and high-ranking FSOs who take seriously their respon- sibility to groom younger officers, this conscientious behavior takes place in spite of the system, not because of it. Narrowing, not broadening: Offi- cers who accept assignments outside of the department mainstream — i.e., who have raters or reviewers not steeped in the EER’s inflated rhetori- cal tradition — run the risk of being disadvantaged by a less-than-hyper- bolic evaluation. Awareness of this danger discourages career-broadening experiences beyond the traditional FS track, a problemSally Horn analyzed in her June 2008 FSJ article, “Rewarding Functional Policy Expertise.” Wasted time and energy: EERs ought to be drafted with care, but the amount of time we spend on the process is excessive. Though unfortu- nate, this is not surprising, given that many promotion panel rankings are made more on the basis of how an eval- uation “reads” on the page (with the focus on writing style, typos, white space, use of buzzwords, etc.) than on comparative ratings among peers. Better Ways to Evaluate Performance It is ironic that an organization with one of the most rigorously meritocratic recruitment processes in the world has a performance evaluation system so to- tally lacking in rigor, especially com- pared with the “hard grading” systems employed by other large bureaucracies. Each branch of the U.S. military uses different methods to assign top grades to rated officers, from the Army’s top block (restricted to less than half of the rater’s subordinates) to the Air Force’s “stratification” (25 percent of a rater’s subordinates) to the Marine Corps’ keeping a lifetime record of grades assigned by each rater, which retroactively affects the weight of any grade given in the past. (If a Marine colonel gives top grades to all his or her majors this year, any good grades given to previous subordinates are corre- spondingly devalued.) Virtually every major multinational corporation also limits the number of top performance evaluations that a su- pervisor can award. At General Elec- tric, for instance, managers identify the 20 percent of “top talent” ready to move up, the 10 percent who are lag- ging, and the 70 percent in the middle. Each of these systems, unlike ours, forces someone in the rated employee’s direct chain of command (not complete strangers sitting on a promotion panel) to do the hard work of rationing the number of top grades given. In most cases this “grade giver” is not the im- mediate supervisor (equivalent to our rating officer), but one level further up (equivalent to our reviewing officer). Whether these grades form the proxi- mate basis for the decision to promote (as in many private-sector companies) or are forwarded to an independent promotion panel that makes that deci- sion (as for the military), there exists a clear link between performance and the promotion process, something cur- rently lacking in the Foreign Service. Naturally, the rationing of top grades stimulates competition among rated officers (and perhaps their im- mediate supervisors) as they lobby the grade-giver over who deserves to make the cut, creating a certain amount of “office politics” and interpersonal stress within the work unit. But because S P E A K I N G O U T When everyone is hailed as a superstar, it is hard to differentiate between real achievers and mediocre performers.