The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

16 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 Service by putting our best people into positions where they canmake a bigger difference sooner rather than later, and motivating them to stay in the Service, knowing that their hard work is more likely to be rewarded. Such a system would also spur a healthy dialogue among rated, rating and reviewing officers over how to compare performances. Ideally, re- viewing officers would base their grad- ing on fair and transparent metrics that would spur virtuous competition among those being reviewed. A potential complaint about insti- tuting a “hard grading” system is that it would unfairly penalize missions, sec- tions or offices that tend to attract a dis- proportionately large number of high performers. This is a valid concern, one also faced by elite military units like the Army’s Rangers or F-15 fighter squadrons in the Air Force. Neither service, however, makes exceptions to limits on top grades for so-called “elite units,” yet this does not spell ruin for excellent officers who fail to obtain a top score every time. In such cases, the senior reviewer’s short narrative is cru- cial to contextualizing the absence of a top grade. And after all, if the officers of a par- ticular unit really are elite, they will re- ceive a disproportionate share of top grades when they are transferred to other “non-elite” units. The same pat- tern would likely hold true for the For- eign Service. The current EER system reflects and exacerbates the conflict-averse managerial culture of the Foreign Serv- ice. By not forcing senior officers to rank subordinates, it essentially ran- domizes who gets promoted each year. Without a strong link between per- formance and promotions, the Foreign Service has learned to use other ways to identify top performers, such as an officer’s assignment history and “corri- dor reputation.” But those are neither as efficient nor as fair as an evaluation system that actually does its job. If we are serious about the “War for Talent,” it is high time we made EERs more rel- evant to the promotion process. ■ Jonathan Fritz, an economic officer in Beijing, entered the Foreign Service in 1993. He has served in China, Latin America and Washington, D.C. S P E A K I N G O U T