I am constantly cautioned against relying on the mantra, “That’s how it’s always been done,” as a rationalization for current practices. The Coast Guard has made some notable advances in its history in rejecting this mantra. In 1942, after concluding its capabilities were restricted by allowing only one gender to serve on active duty, the first group of women began basic training in Cape May as Recruit Company Sierra-89. In 1984, after determining it could save lives by lowering Coastguardsmen of supreme athletic ability and fitness into the water during lifesaving operations, the Rescue Swimmer Program was established. Following the 9/11 attacks, the Coast Guard revamped response capabilities by establishing maritime safety and security teams. Each advance stemmed from questioning precedent to find better ways to accomplish the mission.
Unfortunately, the Coast Guard has not rejected the mantra with its officer evaluation system. It remains an unreliable, top-down approach to assessing officer performance. It is time to challenge the status quo and guide the service to a well-designed, all-encompassing 360-degree performance evaluation system that incorporates feedback from not only an officer’s supervisor, but also from an officer’s peers and subordinates. Honest, constructive criticism is needed for continuous leader development.
Role of the Performance Appraisal
In the workplace, performance appraisals should achieve two goals: provide true, independent assessment of an employee’s performance; and feed a ranking system where top-tier employees are promoted and underperforming employees are demoted or terminated. Accomplishing the first goal is critical to organizational health. Employees who, as a result of the performance appraisal, are better aware of their strengths and weaknesses are able to leverage their talents in support of organizational efforts and focus on areas they need to improve.
The military’s merit-based promotion system places increased weight on the second goal—a hard ranking system. The military must detail the highest performing, most qualified officers to the toughest leadership positions. It relies on the system to eliminate officers who have demonstrated an inability to perform the mission or adhere to core values. Therefore, a performance appraisal system that accurately compares its members against one another is an essential need. However, as accurate comparisons cannot be achieved without an accurate evaluation basis, extreme care must be taken to implement the most effective system. Therefore, investing in a cutting-edge performance appraisal system is as important to long-term mission success as investing in cutting-edge technology. Unfortunately, the Coast Guard has yet to accept this view.
An Ineffective System
In the Coast Guard, an officer is assessed by the supervisory chain alone. The bedrock of the appraisal is a two-page officer evaluation report. Completed yearly for most ranks, the officer evaluation report is the most significant document in managing an officer’s career. It uses a numerical ranking system in which the officer is graded by a supervisor on a 1 through 7 scale in the following categories: performance of duties, leadership, and personal qualities. The appraisal includes blank space below each category for the supervisor to provide written justification to support the numerical ratings.
As part of the evaluation process, officers under review provide “carefully crafted supporting material” to their supervisor to highlight accomplishments throughout the review period. Many officers, as a result of the initiative the Coast Guard has instilled in them, take this a step further and draft their own evaluation. Naturally, officers often inflate the impact of their accomplishments since they assume the supervisor will modify the write-up—but many times the inflated language slips through the cracks. Consequently, a document intended to provide a true and accurate assessment of the officer is, in many cases, a self-evaluation.
Though the Coast Guard has attempted, somewhat unsuccessfully, to eliminate self-assessment ‘creep’ in officer evaluation reports through guidance intended to discourage officers from drafting their own evaluations, the process nonetheless reduces accuracy.2 A reliable assessment of an officer’s performance may be difficult to attain from the supervisory chain alone. An officer’s peers are in a unique position to assess that officer’s teamwork, yet they have no voice in the evaluation. Similarly, enlisted service members that an officer supervises are in a prime position to assess his or her leadership.
From my perspective, the officer evaluation report fails to achieve the primary goal in performance appraisal—a true assessment of the officer’s performance. Instead, it highlights only positive accomplishments. This is evident in the numerical performance ranking scale trends. Though a mark of “7” is the highest grade in each performance criteria and should be reserved for only the best performing officers, a mark of less than “6” is considered unusually low. Furthermore, adjectives such as “expert” or “best-in-grade” are increasingly common descriptors of individual performance. True assessment of performance should ultimately include both the positive and the negative. However, grade inflation has eliminated any room to include the latter into the officer evaluation report. This shortcoming has severely limited the Coast Guard’s ability to determine those officers best fit for promotion and the most challenging jobs.
Circle of Information
A 360-degree evaluation system should incorporate assessments of an employee’s job performance from all those in a position to observe—up, down, and across the employee’s chain of command. This diverse perspective stands in contrast to a pure supervisor evaluation. For example, supervisors can offer an accurate evaluation of an employee’s written work, as they will likely have reviewed this content directly. However, they may not be in a position to provide a fully informed assessment of the employee’s teamwork skills, a quality better gauged by an employee’s peers. The 360-degree system accounts for these intricacies.
These evaluation systems have proven to increase accuracy and reliability of the evaluation process. It is no surprise a number of large organizations have adopted the 360-degree performance appraisal approach. Google, for example, augments supervisor evaluation with feedback from a selection of peers and subordinates in their “Objectives & Key Results” system, where reviewers are asked to highlight areas of improvement with constructive criticism.4 The federal government’s Office of Personnel Management encourages a 360-degree performance evaluation system, adding that the approach is well within the confines of regulation for formal appraisal.
Can this Work for the Coast Guard?
Adopting a 360-degree performance appraisal system has significant potential to improve the accuracy of the officer evaluation report by introducing honest assessment and constructive feedback. However, because performance appraisals are used for vital employment and promotion decisions, careful implementation of such a system is imperative. A methodology must be established that not only provides the accurate feedback from peers and subordinates required for an officer’s professional growth, but also one that fairly and effectively manages this additional information in a way that negative feedback does not automatically restrict an officer’s potential for promotion.
A 360-degree performance appraisal system requires a clear distinction between the constructive criticism portion of the evaluation and the means by which the officer is evaluated for promotion. Implementing 360-degree appraisal as a direct replacement to the officer evaluation report, where feedback from peers and subordinates is available to a promotion board, should be avoided. Instead, a two-part system is the preferred solution:
Part 1: Feedback from Supervisors, Peers, and Subordinates
Create an easy-to-use electronic performance feedback system that allows preselected peers, supervisors and subordinates to provide continual performance evaluation to the officer. The system should encourage reviewers to offer frequent and timely feedback and should be available throughout the entire review period. Education should be provided to all reviewers on effective criticism.
Part 2: Supervisor’s Final Evaluation
The officer’s direct supervisor should review the results of the 360-degree feedback provided in Part to craft the final performance appraisal. In addition to an assessment of the performance criteria already established by the Coast Guard, the final appraisal should include an assessment of how effectively the officer used peer and subordinate feedback.
Implementing this two-step approach would allow the officer to recognize and address strengths and weaknesses within the reporting period. Documenting the officer’s ability to do this in Part 2—the final evaluation—would help the Coast Guard develop a culture that encourages acknowledgement of failure and rewards individual commitment to a path of continuous improvement.
Though a healthy debate on the Coast Guard’s ideal approach toward performance appraisals is warranted, maintaining the status quo because “That’s how it’s always been done” is not. A solution that provides Coast Guard officers with the true and constructive evaluation system that they deserve is long overdue.