The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

J U N E 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15 these organizations consider managing talent a paramount responsibility of those in supervisory positions, that is deemed an acceptable trade-off. It is high time the Foreign Service reformed its officer evaluation system to ensure our “best and brightest” are leading the charge. The department should take the following steps to de- sign a new evaluation system: • Shorten the EER form dramati- cally, with single-paragraph narrative sections for the rated officer, rater and reviewer; • Require the reviewing officer to place all FSO generalists of the same rank that he/she is reviewing into one of the following three categories: Rec- ommend promotion, satisfactory per- formance, unsatisfactory performance; • Forbid the reviewing officer from placing more than 50 percent of all re- viewed officers of the same rank in the “recommend promotion” category; and • Establish a credible enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance. The Advantages of Hard Grading Reducing the time and effort needed to complete EERs would en- courage the movement of ratings and reviews up to higher-level supervisors, who could identify their top subordi- nates by merely recommending them for promotion, rather than composing essays that try to outpraise the compe- tition. This would enable higher-level officers to review more subordinates more quickly. Larger pools of reviewed officers would, in turn, bestow greater credibility on the evaluations. A top grade given by a reviewer to the only FS-3 he or she evaluates (which might occur at a very small post) might not hurt the rated officer, but would obvi- ously not carry the same weight as the top grades given to three out of seven FS-3 officers reviewed by another indi- vidual. Most importantly, promotion pan- elists would have something solid on which to base their own rankings, to the benefit of all those officers whose per- formance was truly excellent but whose narratives failed to stand out, whether due to a rater’s poor writing skills or the inflated EERs of others in the same rank cohort. Promoting these high per- formers would strengthen the Foreign S P E A K I N G O U T