Paus-Ex for EER Season

CAA will take a pause in posting (pip?) for the next two weeks in order to give full and due attention to EERs.

Those who know, will understand. Others must be patient.

That is all.

Learning Leadership

One of CAA's loyal readers is a new FSO stationed somewhere in The Great Abroad. He or she really liked something I had posted, specifially:

"For all the great stride the Department has made towards improving State's traditionally dismal leadership culture, we're just not there yet. New officers are getting leadership training from the very beginning, with reinforcements throughout their careers. It's still not inculcated the way the uniformed services do it (and they have their own,
recurrent, problems) but we're getting there. It's the more senior folks, both on the Civil Service as well as the Foreign Service sides, who sometimes fail to get leadership isn't just one of those management fads that comes along periodically, like Six Sigma, just-in-time-inventory, or TQM."

She or he provided the following words by email, posted here with kind permission:

"I couldn't agree more. Having been in the military, I am finding myself feeling at times like a fish out of water here at State; chafing at some folks' inability (or outright refusal) to deal with problem employees, as well as make unpopular but necessary decisions. Earlier this week I was grousing with a colleague about the EER process, recalling how in the military evaluations were a top-down process. Your supervisor or CO tells you what's right with you and what's wrong with you, and that's it. The EER at State is like the grown-up version of zero-outcome soccer. Everybody's a winner, just some people are bigger winners than others. Everything is a collaborative effort, even when you are being evaluated. Given the amount of time I have spent so far on my first EER, I would much prefer to receive an assessment based on my supervisor's impression of me, and not something that I have cooked up myself. The whole process seems to have been born of a reluctance to criticize.

I did see eval inflation in the military also, though- but your eval and how your CO dealt with you on a daily basis were two different things. One of my old skippers ripped me a new one so many times I thought I was a knob back in college, but come eval time he made me look like the best thing since sliced bread. I think that is the difference between DoS and DoD. It's rainbows and puppy dogs all the time at State. At Defense, your CO will generally tell you when you are screwed up, but won't depth charge you on your eval if you fix your problems after they are pointed out."

Advice from an FSO blogger

A fellow FSO and web logger emailed me over the New Year's holiday and asked:

"I’m a new FS blogger, and you’re sort of the legend in the field, so was wondering if you had any advice or tips for a new blogger. I notice that out of all the Foreign Service blogs I’ve read, yours is the only one that touches on foreign policy, and you use a fictitious name. Is there some rule (other than the required disclaimer) that prevents FSOs from blogging? Has blogging every caused you problems with the Foreign Service? Anything else I haven’t thought of that you wish you’d known when you started out?"

My response included:

"Advice? Hmm, how about don't? Sure, I use a fictitious name (taken from Herman Waulk's The Winds of War) and fictitious post & country (taken from Frederick Forsyth's The Deceiver). My political views, such as they are, don't have anything to do with how I perform my job; after all, we're all professional diplomats here. So I don't want to cloud the rating issues at EER time, but at the same time I have the same Constitutional rights to my own opinions, for instance, as did "X" when he wrote for Foreign Affairs back in the early Cold War days.

I haven't had any professional issues crop up related to the web log. I was more than a little startled the first time Liam Schwarz quoted/linked me on his Consular Corner. I keep waiting for a polite call from the Seventh Floor to tell me to knock it off; perhaps with the new administration.....

Anyhow, my only advice would be this:

As with anything we (FSOs) do, never do/say anything you're not prepared to explain before a congressional committee;

Don't engage in gossip-mongering, especially about your colleagues and/or superiors;

Don't violate the privacy of your colleagues, the fellow countrymen/women for whom you may provide American Citizen Services, or the foreign nationals you may provide (or not) visa services;

Encourage and applaud the things you feel the Department or the Service is doing right; be judicious in your public criticism (after all, Damning-with-faint-praise is something of an FS tradition);

Take advantage of the many opportunities to explain/defend your profession, the Service, the Department, when commenting at other web logs or when unfair/unbalanced media coverage slams us. As a Department, our PD effort is on the weak side, with lots of room for improvement, and as "new media" proliferates and increases in importance, it's incumbent upon individual FSOs to help "carry the water." It's not about being a mindless cheerleader, it's about combatting outdated and pernicious stereotypes that interfere with accomplishing our core missions. An informed citizenry is a bulwark of democracy."

I also noted:

"The notion that I am any sort of "legend" is one I find truly appalling."