Springtime Allergies

Spring is awesome...it starts warming up (I hate hate hate cold weather...love Estonia, but really winter sucks), birds start singing, flowers start blooming. And since I don't really suffer from allergies, there is just no downside to spring.

Except...

Two things are bad about spring.

Taxes, which I wrote about yesterday.

And this.

EERs.

For those not in the State Department, this means Employee Evaluation Report. It covers the period from April 16-April 15 and is due May 15. It is the time when you write about how you single handedly saved the world and your supervisor says that you are the most awesome officer ever (except for every other officer who is also the most awesome officer ever). Everyone walks on water in EERs. As I have said before, you not only have to walk on water while turning it into wine in order to stand out. 

The people who are best at it, and therefore more likely to get promoted, are the ones who are best at taking credit for everything and for general self-aggrandizement. Those who like to give credit to the team, who also tend to be the kind of folks who you would want to work with and for, tend not to be as good at it.

I hate EERs. I feel dirty writing them.

I would almost like to go back to the old way of doing them, which you can check out from the form below and the post I wrote about it four years ago:

From February 2010:

I wish I could take credit for finding this gem. Actually my wife found it (though really, if I can't take credit for what she does, whose efforts can I take credit for?!)

At any rate, it seems particularly timely given our (me and No Double Standard) recent discussion of EERs and the like. What my wife found was Form FS 316, the Performance Report for Foreign Service Officers, Revised June 1949 (and then according to a stamp on the page, again revised in June of 1958).

Now by Foreign Service Officers, the form means male FSOs...there are no feminine pronouns on the form.

Also missing from the form are the big blank boxes you have to fill in (there is only one for a summary and recommendations). Not even a "suicide box." No, instead, it is a bunch of multiple choice descriptors and the rater is to underline the one which is most descriptive of the officer and his job performance and to x out the letter of the one least descriptive.

So an example is:
A. He will probably not go much further in the service
B. He demands a high degree of efficiency from those associated with him
C. He is not active in seeking desirable contacts
D. He is imaginative
E. He is probably one of our future career ministers.

You get the idea. As I said, SHE is not an option. But at least I couldn't find the part where they graded an officer on his wife's ability to host social functions.

So with that in mind, I thought I'd share some of the funnier descriptors:

*He shows little taste in his clothes. (Maybe this is why Secretary Powell had to put out the memo saying no flip flops or sparkly tank tops)

*He is inclined to be pompous (I wonder if they consider this a good thing or a bad thing?)

*He is careless in his personal habits (this is the guy who got dust on his pants and the dust stayed there for the whole season...he wore them EVERY DAY).

* He becomes emotionally upset at times. (What, screaming is bad?)

* He gives little promise of development (And yet still gets promoted)

* He is a clock watcher in slack periods (How is this a bad thing?)

* He is petty in minor matters (and in major ones, he melts down completely)

* He is slow (How often have you asked how someone passed the FSOT?)

* He does not wear well as one knows him better (He seemed nice for the first 5 seconds I knew him)

* He bores intelligent people (this is my personal favorite)

* He has an exaggerated idea of his own importance. (I am pretty sure I worked with that guy).

* He has a tendency towards hair splitting (is this a comment on his appearance?)

* He is of limited intellectual attainments (no doubt the guy who bores intelligent people)

* His personal appearance is an asset (well thank god for that)

* He is overbearing (In the Foreign Service? Shocking!)

* He impresses you as not being fully alive to the problem you are discussing (or maybe just not fully alive?)

You know, as I read this through, maybe we should bring it back. Of course, there'd be tons of lawsuits ("You can't call me stupid! Everyone is special!"), but there'd also be some honesty in the EER. Really all you need to do is add a feminine pronoun.

Could be worse. Could be raining.

So I am still time travelling. My EER is for the period I actually worked, but apparently it will take me a year to make it effective. Sigh.

But it could be worse.

A friend got hers done LONG before I did.

She JUST got it bounced back. Apparently the program spit out all her changes and replaced them with upside down question marks.

Awesome.

Really wish I could write the rating statement for the person getting credit for the ePerformance rollout.

ON EDIT: Just found two upside down question marks in mine. Fabulous. Now, do I pull it back and try to fix it, risking more crap getting inserted (since I KNOW it didn't have those when I submitted it because it had done the same thing when I pasted the test into ePerformance, so I combed it thoroughly for errors) or do I just say f*ck it?

Senioritis

I has it. Seriously.

It is like I am days away from summer vacation. I haven't had it this bad since I joined the Foreign Service.

Even when I left Jerusalem, I knew I had only 5 weeks of home leave (ONLY! Home leave is awesome!) and then I had to return to work.Even though it was a (thankfully) different job.

And this time, I am not even getting time off. At least not until August (when I will be abandoning you for an Alaska cruise...it occurred to me there might not be internet on the cruise, which sort of frightens me).

But I will be back in school. And though I will probably be tired of it with about 5 minutes, right now, it seems like vacation. 17 more working days until I can wear jeans to work.Until I can work a normal length work day. Until I can sleep just a little later. Until I don't have to schedule my running days around my "short" days at work. And I am finding it hard to work at all now...really, what can I accomplish in so little time?

Plus, my EER is done. So anything I accomplish won't do me any good!

Speaking of my EER, apparently I am one of the 10% of the Foreign Service who got it in on time (and ePerformance crashed on Friday, so people shooting for getting it in at the last possible minute are screwed). I find that kind of funny, considering how long I procrastinated. I look positively responsible!

Of course, my EER is still set in the future. The dates covered are now correct but it is still effective in 2011. Too bad I can't go back and add "Time Traveller" to it. Surely THAT is worth getting promoted! On the down side, I can't tell you anything about the future, because it would cause a shift in the space-time continuum and we would all explode.

Now I am apparently a year early...

So my EER made it through panel and got posted. And the deadline isn't until Friday.

Great right?

Well....

Apparently this EER is evaluating me from June 15, 2010 to April 15, 2011 and was posted on April 15, 2011.

See anything wrong with that picture?

Finally!

I have submitted it to HR.

It is now out of my hands.

Of course

I'm ready.

I have the document started in ePerformance. I have all of the information in a word document.

Everything has been scrubbed by two senior Foreign Service Officers who I respect (one of whom I would work for again any time, any place. He walks on water...and not in an EER kind of way).

I have my bosses proxy, so I can actually move things through ePerformance pretty quickly (seriously, NOT efficient to move it back and forth between the employee and supervisor that many times. Dumb. We are busy people...did you notice the uptick in hiring we are doing? It is because we have too much work for too few people. This silliness is a collassal WASTE OF TIME).

But no matter. I'm ready.

And of course...

HR Online is down. And I will not be here tomorrow or Monday.

And it has to be signed sealed and delivered by next Friday.

So it needs to be done today. Really two weeks ago. But definitely today.

Just shoot me.

From the Sounding Board: ePerformance

A friend pointed out this comment on the Sounding Board about ePerformance to me yesterday and I think it is brilliant. I got the author's permission to reprint it for you (I have removed the author's name).

"As I read the comments from my colleagues, I confess that I too used to be despondent about ePerformance. Last December, I worked with two PDAS’s for a week to try to enter my interim EER into the system, and finally just gave up because other issues were more pressing. At the time, I assumed that once Management realized the magnitude of the train wreck the Department was going to experience during the regular EER cycle, they would abandon ePerformance and go back to the less crappy form flow filler.

It was with a mixture of surprise and dismay that I witnessed HR stick to its guns. Not only was management going to use ePerformance, but it was actually doubling down its bet by spending money and time on classroom training, training tutorials, FSI Distance Learning Courses, Learning Labs and even ePerformance town hall meetings. Why, I wondered, would anyone is his right mind spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to install a computer program that not only doesn’t save time, but instead sucks up tens of thousands of additional man-hours across the Department? I could understand, perhaps, if it allowed us to hyperlink samples of memos we’d written, or family photos into our EER’s. If ePerformance actually wrote our EER’s, or at least had a hyperbole-checker, maybe it would be worth all this effort. But a software program to simply fill out a form? I simply couldn’t understand how smart people could persist in pushing such a stupid piece of software down our throats.

As my thoughts turned to locating a nice retirement community, I had an epiphany, of sorts, one that has cleared away this negative thinking. As one peels back the ePerformance onion, it’s obvious that it is not just designed to fill out our performance evaluations, but to actually improve our performance. As we all know, in a foreign service career, officers will often have to beat their heads against intractable problems (like Middle East peace), deal with mulish bureaucracies at home and abroad, and show flexibility in working across cultures. Over the years, HR has instituted all sorts of training regimes to help us do just that. I suddenly realized that ePerformance is like that exercise in A-100 where we all stood blindfolded in the woods, holding a rope and shouting at each other. It didn’t make any sense at the time, but we all learned from the experience.

HR has cleverly recreated that learning experience and team building exercise through ePerformance. For example, our team in Embassy London, faced with the ePerformance challenge, figured out a clever work-around, which apparently allows us to ignore most of the software’s features. Another team, stimulated by ePerformance and similar software, has actually formed an eHell working group (I’m not making this up) to try to bring some reason to the system. Both efforts are examples of team-building in the face of adversity – in the finest traditions of the foreign service – and neither would have taken place without ePerformance. Once I understood the real reason we’re using this system, I stopped cursing HR and began to think about how I, too, could use this adversity as a team building exercise for my office.

Unfortunately, the software itself still looks unfathomable, but maybe with enough blindfolds and beer, we’ll be able to conquer it. "

Because it wasn't bad enough...

This morning I learned that I have to put my EER into ePerformance.

Awesome.

Because everyone is LOVING that program so much.

And because I needed one MORE thing to do on my EER (which has not progressed at ALL since last week).

Luckily I have everything saved in Word...so the theory is I can cut and paste.

Tomorrow, I shall wear red shoes, click my heels together three times, and chant: "There's no place like FSI, There's no place like FSI."

EERing and moving on

I am convinced that Catholics have a guilt sponge surgically implaced at baptism and for the rest of our lives, whether we are practicing Catholics or not, we absorb any free-floating guilt in the room and make it our own.

I have been feeling guilty about procrastinating about writing my EER. It has made it so that I couldn't do anything else (well...except run - did I mention I am starting Week 5 of Couch to 5K today? - and blog, because guilt shared is guilt enhanced). So I haven't really given myself over to thinking about my onward. I have also gotten very little done on my dissertation.

But now that my EER is moving towards being complete (I still need to write my response to his part, but that is much easier), I can move on to fantasizing about my next assignment.

So in just a mere 7 weeks, or 34 more working days (since I am taking a long weekend in May to go to the beach), I will be done with these 12-14 hour days. I will move on the the bliss of sleeping a little later, biking to work, wearing blue jeans for work attire, and studying like a college student. Okay, probably better than a college student, or at least better than *I* was as a college student!

And I can start thinking about my next post.

Baltic Reports on Facebook helped me out with that a bit today by posting some pictures of Tallinn. I'll leave you with this non-copyrighted one. This link will take you to where you can see the rest.

I am also going to start working more on my dissertation. Tomorrow.

Procrastinating

Nobody in the Foreign Service likes writing EERs. If you don't believe me, check here, here, here, and here.

Show me a Foreign Service Officer who likes writing their EER and I will show you one of the most arrogant people on the planet.

I hate it. HATE. IT.

So I have been procrastinating.

Our EERs go through April 15. You should have bullet points to your boss by then or shortly thereafter. They have to be all signed, sealed and delivered by May 15 (this year, they have extended the deadline until May 21 because of some problems with the form, which only makes me want to procrastinate more).

The trouble with writing EERs is that everyone walks on water. In order to get promoted, you have to demonstrate that not only do you walk on water, but you can change that water into wine while doing it.

I have reasonably strong self esteem, but arrogant is something I am decidedly not.

My trouble this year is that I am getting a taste of what the FS-02s are having to do, which is basically having to write the whole thing. So they have to describe how they walk on water rather than having their bosses do it based on bullets they have provided.

Like many people, my boss is really really busy, so I am writing a draft of his part for him.

I just finished my draft of his part.

And I feel dirty.

And my fear is he will either leave it as it, and think I am arrogant, or change it, and ruin my chances at getting promoted.

Hate it.

HATE. IT.

Eight Weeks

At a meeting with the Secretary I attended right after she took office, the Director of the Office of Civil Rights suggested that if she or her staff got lost in "The Building," to find a sixth floor staffer. They could get you anywhere.

I am one of those sixth floor staffers, or at least for eight more weeks, and I have been for nearly two years. So I can find most anything in The Building.

I mention that only because this morning, on the way to my office from Russian class, I decided to take a different route, one that took me right through the main area of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, my old stomping grounds. I chatted with several people I ran into, because I was in INR for two years and I know LOTS of folks there, and I was thinking how much I miss working in INR (side note: INR is a GREAT place to serve. I LOVED it and will probably make it my minor bureau). But then I remembered that towards the end of my tour there, I was ready to leave. Eager in fact.

Much like I am eager now.

Not because this job, or that one, are bad. As my wife said, in these jobs, I have not had to give my bosses nicknames.

But the Foreign Service attracts people who are smart and easily bored, or more precisely, with career ADHD. We know we will seldom be in one place, or one job, or with a certain boss, for more than a couple years. It is a burden and a luxury. No matter how bad (or, unfortunately, good) your boss is, you will only be with that person for a limited time. And then you will move on.

It is hard not to check out once you get your next assignment. But because I am on my third one-year tour (I had to bid four years in a row, and in case you are new here, I HATE bidding. How dumb was THAT career plan?), I couldn't really check out each time I got my new assignment because I had only just gotten to my current one.

But now I have eight weeks left. And I am giving myself over to checking out with abandon (though if I were smarter, I would wait until I finished my EER, but I never claimed to be smart!). I am fantasizing (and boring anyone who will listen) with the joy of thoughts of biking to FSI, of days that are not 14 hours long, and of retiring my suits in exchange for jeans as usual work attire. For 13 whole months.

Of course, I am certain I will be bored with it long before I get to post, but for now, it looks like heaven. And knowing that by the time I am bored with it, I will still be YEARS away from having to bid again makes it all the better!

As Promised

I wish I could take credit for finding this gem. Actually my wife found it (though really, if I can't take credit for what she does, whose efforts can I take credit for?!)

At any rate, it seems particularly timely given our (me and No Double Standard) recent discussion of EERs and the like. What my wife found was Form FS 316, the Performance Report for Foreign Service Officers, Revised June 1949 (and then according to a stamp on the page, again revised in June of 1958).

Now by Foreign Service Officers, the form means male FSOs...there are no feminine pronouns on the form.

Also missing from the form are the big blank boxes you have to fill in (there is only one for a summary and recommendations). Not even a "suicide box." No, instead, it is a bunch of multiple choice descriptors and the rater is to underline the one which is most descriptive of the officer and his job performance and to x out the letter of the one least descriptive.

So an example is:
A. He will probably not go much further in the service
B. He demands a high degree of efficiency from those associated with him
C. He is not active in seeking desirable contacts
D. He is imaginative
E. He is probably one of our future career ministers.

You get the idea. As I said, SHE is not an option. But at least I couldn't find the part where they graded an officer on his wife's ability to host social functions.

So with that in mind, I thought I'd share some of the funnier descriptors:

*He shows little taste in his clothes. (Maybe this is why Secretary Powell had to put out the memo saying no flip flops or sparkly tank tops)

*He is inclined to be pompous (I wonder if they consider this a good thing or a bad thing?)

*He is careless in his personal habits (this is the guy who got dust on his pants and the dust stayed there for the whole season...he wore them EVERY DAY).

* He becomes emotionally upset at times. (What, screaming is bad?)

* He gives little promise of development (And yet still gets promoted)

* He is a clock watcher in slack periods (How is this a bad thing?)

* He is petty in minor matters (and in major ones, he melts down completely)

* He is slow (How often have you asked how someone passed the FSOT?)

* He does not wear well as one knows him better (He seemed nice for the first 5 seconds I knew him)

* He bores intelligent people (this is my personal favorite)

* He has an exaggerated idea of his own importance. (I am pretty sure I worked with that guy).

* He has a tendency towards hair splitting (is this a comment on his appearance?)

* He is of limited intellectual attainments (no doubt the guy who bores intelligent people)

* His personal appearance is an asset (well thank god for that)

* He is overbearing (In the Foreign Service? Shocking!)

* He impresses you as not being fully alive to the problem you are discussing (or maybe just not fully alive?)

You know, as I read this through, maybe we should bring it back. Of course, there'd be tons of lawsuits ("You can't call me stupid! Everyone is special!"), but there'd also be some honesty in the EER. Really all you need to do is add a feminine pronoun.

CASAS: It's Time to Change the Culture

Lest you think I exaggerated in my post about "Some People", you need to read this post over at Calling A Spade A Spade. Actually, read it even if you didn't think I exaggerated.

Here's some of what he said:

Do you see what I'm getting at here? The spinelessness that holds you back from an honest employee assessment is part and parcel of the same hesitation we have at delivering truth to foreign powers -- to our long-term detriment.

The U.S. Department of State is in need of a fundamental cultural makeover. But there's another problem: if you decide to stand on principle and deliver honest feedback in response to 360 inquiries, write forthright assessments of your subordinates, write awards only when they are truly deserved, then you disadvantage those you work with, because everyone else is playing the game.

He's right. I have never gotten a Superior Honor award. I think I may have deserved one maybe once. I have gotten some Meritorious Honor awards I deserved and some for reasons that had little to do with me. I have seen people who have gotten nearly A DOZEN Superior Honor awards. These are individual and limited in quantity. So what was this person doing to help his subordinates? How was he working as a team player? It sounds instead like he was stealing all the sunlight from those around him, since I doubt anyone is REALLY that good.

I know another who also got lots of Superior Honor awards. He wrote his own EER, made his boss sign it, then cut and paste part of the text into an award nomination and got his boss to sign it. His boss was apparently afraid to say no.

We don't have honesty in our evaluation system and can't until we change the culture and have it across the board. Because partial honesty means you risk harming good officers while mediocre or worse rise to the top . As CASAS says, everyone else is playing the game.

And honest assessment doesn't mean encouraging good officers to be spineless to get ahead. As I said over at CASAS, I had a supervisor once try to put as my area for improvement that I was blunt. That he thought this was an undervalued quality in the Service but that he feared it might hurt my career (so what that means is, I think this is good but really you are better off to lie?).

I made him change it, not because it isn't true (it is...I am blunt, appropriately I think), but because it isn't an area I feel the need to improve. And if you are going to give me an honest assessment, awesome, but don't do it in the form of telling me (and the reviewers) that I need to change something you don't really think I need to change but your fear for my career tells you that you think I should change anyway. It probably means I won't make Ambassador, but if I finish my career having had fun jobs (whether career enhancing or not) and with my integrity in tact, I'll be happy. But I don't think that is true of most.

Considering EERs

Considering I am in the middle of the EER process (because my boss has to finish them early because he has volunteered for Iraq), I really like some of the suggestions The Cookie Pusher has for the EER process. It's broken...let's fix it.

360 reviews for all!

...But, at least the EERs provide a clear picture of how good an officer is, and are submitted to clearly-understood criteria which a promotion panel reviews and promotes based on an unbiased judgment of merit, right?

OK, after you stop laughing, read on.

Our EERs are labor-intensive, and require the most work (in which the entire Department is convulsed in the March-April time-frame) from the highest-ranking officers. What’s worse, not one officer I’ve ever met, senior, junior, or mid-level (including several who have served multiple times on promotion panels) feels the systems offers any guarantee for promotion of people who really do a good job.

The doublespeak of EERs

As I leaf through a few of my old EERs, I’m forced to ask the question: why haven’t I been promoted to ambassador yet? Why haven’t I gotten the Congressional Medal of Honor? If you read the language as an uninitiated observer, I appear to have nearly-superhuman diplomatic qualities and am certainly the finest mid-level officer in the whole wide world.

And yet, I get promoted at about the same rate as everybody else. Eureka! The answer is: We’re all special, “which,” as Dash in Pixar’s The Incredibles rightly points out, “means that none of us are special.” We’ve engineered a regime of doublespeak and subtlety so refined that we ourselves don’t know when someone is being honest, when praise is praise, and what exactly criticism is.

No room for improvement

Every EER has the fabled “area for improvement,” in which an officer agrees with his or her boss on a criticism so faint and (ideally) irrelevant that it can’t possibly be construed as, in fact, a problem. I’m personally proudest of a year where my boss agreed to write that I needed to acquire a certain area of substantive knowledge for my next job. Allow me to emphasize that he didn’t suggest I needed it for my current assignment, but for the future – and I had time to do so before the next EER. Perfect.

U-Write EERs

Since we’ve established that EERs fall heavily on managers’ shoulders, how do they cope? Answer: typically, by having the employee write (or at minimum, provide a couple pages of outline for) their own evaluations. No wonder we all come across as heroes. We’re describing ourselves to the promotion boards most of the time.

Finding the criticism

Quite correctly, the Department understands that not everyone is as good as their EER makes them out to be, and since budgets are always a reality, only a certain number of officers get promoted in any given year. They force the promotion panels to divide officers into “promote now,” “low rank,” and a rank-ordered list of the rest. But what puts me higher up the ranking, with a better chance of getting above the cutoff number, and securing that promotion?

Who knows. But one thing is for sure: the typical panel reads quickly, since they all have day jobs, and if something jumps out at them in their cursory read, it makes a lot of difference. This can be positive, but since a bad officer rarely suffers a full-frontal assault by his boss in writing, the panels are often left to look for “damning with faint praise,” which means that any officer could potentially be misunderstood as under-performing because… get this… the boss didn’t praise you highly enough. So, your boss’ writing skills (or perhaps your own, if you are one of many who crafts much of your own EER) become the greatest influence on your promotion.

...Save our time. Save your money. Save our collective sanity. Move to universal 360 reviews now. Here’s how I’d recommend doing it:

All reviews would be numerical only. No prose.

Rating and reviewing roles (your boss, and your boss’ boss) remain relevant. Their participation remains mandatory, and their numbers count double.

Including rating and reviewing officers, you have to have 10 (just a number I’m offering) evaluations. If you have co-workers in the same section, they must review you (up to let’s say 3 people). If you have subordinates, they must review you (up to a certain number, let’s say 3, and the subordinate positions which have a review role are designated in your position description). Finally, you have 2 left which you can solicit at large from any State Department employee with whom you’ve worked or are working.

Highest and lowest reviews are thrown out (but not the rating or reviewing officers’), and a computer figures out who has enough points for promotion.

The only thing I’d add is that, as with the military, we should maintain “eligibility for promotion” criteria: time in class, completion of training, language requirements, hardship postings, and so forth. If you check all these boxes, and have the points, congratulations.

The Department of Agriculture, a much bigger bureaucracy than ours, has done it for years. Major corporations much bigger than State do it, too. Now, tell me why we shouldn’t move to 360.