bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 30–31
The following paper was submitted by the PAFSO Executive to management.
PAFSO has been invited by the management of External Affairs to discuss the department’s current stream review exercise. PAFSO welcomes this opportunity to review an issue of central importance to our members with the management of the department. We hope that this exchange of views can be broadened in the near future to encompass related issues which affect the career development of our members.
In a May 16th meeting with Alan Morgan of ADD, the Association learned that the department is currently considering three options for the future of streaming within External Affairs: first, the status quo with modifications to permit greater flexibility for cross streaming; second, abolition of all streams in favour of a single officer pool in External Affairs; third, amalgamation of the existing trade and political streams, leaving the aid and immigration streams unchanged. On the assumption that the department’s mandate and structures are not changed, it is PAFSO’s position that in the short term, the first option best serves the interests of our members and of the department; in the longer term, the second option could prove the most preferable if it were accompanied by extensive reforms of the training, assignment, appraisal and promotion systems within the department; and that the third option offers the fewest benefits for our membership as a whole. Our rationale for this position follows.
Before addressing the issue of streaming, PAFSO wishes to affirm the commitment of its members to professionalism in the performance of their duties in meeting the government’s priorities. PAFSO also wishes to state at the outset that the department’s current stream review does not appear to address directly two other issues of growing and grave concern to our members: limited promotion opportunities and the importance of prospects for career satisfaction independent of promotions. Any changes in streaming will be judged by officers largely in terms of the impact on these two issues. It is PAFSO’s opinion that if carefully handled, revised streaming procedures could not only improve officers’ prospects for career satisfaction and lead to a more equitable pattern in promotion but could also respond to the department’s needs and priorities. However, unless management explicitly takes these issues into account, the stream review exercise will likely increase confusion, lower morale and ultimately reduce the productivity of officers.
The existing streams in External Affairs reflect the history of a foreign service drawn originally from four separate departments. In an integrated foreign service with single senior management pool there is no logical requirement for maintaining four streams. Nevertheless, the existing stream structure serves at least three important functions which any alternative must also address. The first is that it provides specific cadres of officers within the department who are dedicated to serving the interests of important constituencies: the business community, CEIC and CIDA in particular. PAFSO recognizes that a continued and enhanced ability to serve these clients will be an important criteria for any alternative streaming system, although it is not an issue that the Association will address directly. A second function of streams, more closely related to issues that concern PAFSO, is their ability to foster the development of specialized skills among officers. A third important function is that they allow officers with comparable job experience to be judged for assignments and promotions against their immediate peers.
At the same time, there are a number of liabilities to the present stream structure in the department. First, assignment to streams is an extremely arbitrary procedure. A decision is made at the end of a two-hour interview that determines an officer’s choice of assignments for the rest of his career. Any stream preference expressed by the candidate is usually based on only a rudimentary knowledge of the department. The result is that many officers whose talents or preferences would better suit them to a different career path find themselves locked into one stream upon arrival in External Affairs.
A second liability is that the existing system places barriers in the way of assignments that would build on officers’ previous experience, but which entail crossing streams. Of course, mechanisms currently exist for cross-stream assignment. However the system is the least flexible for the most sought after jobs. This constrains both: the employees’ possible career paths and the employer’s abilities to select the best qualified candidates for key jobs in the department. PAFSO understands that this is currently a major issue for management with regard to staffing economic policy positions from the trade and political streams.
A third liability is that, given the different balance of working level versus managerial positions and functions to be performed within each stream, the opportunities for promotion to EX levels vary markedly. This would be less contentious an issue if assignment to streams was based on a better assessment of officers’ managerial potential. As it is, the system leads to the tacitly acknowledged reality that aid and social affairs officers have almost no chance of promotion to the HOP or EX-3 levels of the department. This not only contributes to the career dissatisfactions of a significant percentage of officers; it also limits the department’s ability to identify and promote managerial talent from the widest pool of officers within External Affairs.
Turning to the three options for streaming presented to PAFSO, the third option; of amalgamating the trade and political streams is the most short-sighted.
Such an amalgamation might assist management’s immediate needs in implementing restraint measures relating to personnel growth. It would tackle the second liability listed above, albeit only for the two streams concerned, by removing all barriers to cross-stream assignments between these two functional areas. It does nothing to address the problems with initial assignment to streams; and it would in fact accentuate the perceived ’caste system’ between streams by creating one master stream that led to virtually all the senior management positions, supported by two small and professionally marginal streams. Even within the one master stream, without a redefinition of the promotion criteria, it could lead, for example, to a perceived ’fast track’ of economic policy jobs which the new structure would be assumed to have been created to facilitate. Simultaneously, there would be a further downgrading in the professional esteem of jobs that are distant from prevailing departmental priorities e.g. consular, cultural and public affairs. Capable officers who had followed career paths that did not qualify them for assignment to economic policy jobs would feel particularly frustrated by such a mid-career change in the rules of the game. The assignment process would become further politicized.
In the short run, the first option proposed by ADD in its draft stream management paper is the option preferred by PAFSO. A new policy permitting permanent cross-stream transfers as well as more cross-stream assignments would compensate for our arbitrary procedure of assigning officers to streams. A new recruitment policy (which need not come into effect until at least 1987) should begin streaming later – after a period of short assignments in different areas of the department that would allow a review board to better assess new officers aptitudes. Once a stream assignment had been made (perhaps after nine to 12 months in the department) officers could be given the specialized training required for their first overseas posting. A new policy liberalizing cross stream assignments could remove some of the rigidities that streams impose. One approach might be to create an amalgamated personnel bureau without stream specific divisions that are perceived jealously guarding their lists of positions. This would allow assignment to job on the basis of relevant experience, without necessary reference to the officer’s stream. Streams would thereby retain their identity as promotion pools but not job pools. Such an approach could be coupled as ADD suggests with a new policy permitting officers that had performed jobs in different functional areas to stand for promotion in more than one stream. At the same time, the concept of each stream, particularly aid and social affairs, might be broadened to include elements of the other main streams (for example, aid-trade or trade promotion and social affairs). The result could be especially advantageous to Heads of Post in small posts where greater flexibility is often required
In the long run there may be advantages for both management and the members of PAFSO if streams are phased out altogether. From PAFSO’s point of view there would be two essential pre-requisites for such a system to work fairly in the interests of all members. The first would be that all officers were appraised against a standard set of performance criteria and promoted by a common promotion board. The appraisal criteria would have to be applicable to the entire range of assignments within the foreign service, although obviously they would not apply equally to every job. Furthermore, the criteria should be divorced, in theory and practice, from the substantive foreign policy priorities of the day. Obviously management will always want to assign the most promising officers to the most important jobs. However, an officer’s qualifications for promotion should not be based on the importance of the issues he has worked on but rather on the qualities he had displayed in the job to which he has been assigned.
Two universal criteria applicable to every job in the foreign service are: an ability to build on previously acquired knowlege to increase one’s effectiveness; and an ability to manage financial and personnel resources. Other criteria could be identified and their relative importance for promotions to each level should be specified (e.g. managerial ability assuming greater importance as one moves into the EX categories). By broadening the promotion pool to include all officers at a current level, appraised by a common set of criteria, the real challenges involved in many of the less popular or prestigious jobs would come into view. Officers who had done those jobs well would stand an equitable chance for promotion.
The second pre-requisite would be a strong personnel system able to assist officers to plan their long-term career development and help the department in nurturing the skills necessary to respond to current or future priorities. Better developed training and counselling services would be important elements of such a system. Once streams were phased out, favouritism and ad-hocery could not simply take over as the methods of determining officers’ assignments. For the good of both the officers and the department, every officer would have to be given an opportunity to develop a professional specialization through a pattern of related assignments. However, many more specializations could be identified and encouraged than those defined by the present four stream system. Some would include tacitly recognized by under-rewarded specializations such as consular or public affairs; others could include new specializations, such as regional expertise based on a knowledge of hard languages, that would cut across the current streams. The fostering of specializations through the assignment process would still have to be tempered by a determination to vary the pattern of an officer’s assignments from time to time; otherwise officers could become too parochial in their professional outlook and inequities could occur in the distribution of ’hardshipjobs’. The attraction to officers of this system of multiple specializations within one common stream is that it expands the individual’s ability to identify and pursue his own career path through the incredible variety of jobs available within the foreign service. This freedom could greatly enhance officers’ possibilities for career satisfaction in a time of diminished opportunities for promotion.
If such a system were established it could provide the management of External Affairs with the flexibility it desires from the assignment process while addressing the promotion and career satisfaction concerns of PAFSO members.
PAFSO looks forward to the opportunity to discuss further with the department all of the issues that have been raised above in conjunction with the stream review exercise.A
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 30–31. Read the rest of this issue →
