Danger Room: Spies Forced to Share

Noah Shachtman over at Danger Room points out that “information sharing skills” will now be incorporated into performance appraisals for intelligence community employees.

Phew, now all of our problems will be solved!  This sounds like one of those IC rules that are well-intentioned, but have little impact on performance. 

Note to current/future employers: Please ignore the following sentences.

If I had a nickel for everything on my DoD yearly evaluation that inflated my job performance, I’d be a stinking millionaire.  In DoD/IC, it’s in your boss’ interests to show her/his employees are doing a great job. That’s because it makes your boss appear more competent to her/his boss.  Without an independent bottom line (”ah, I see you netted us 10% profit this year”), the only job evaluation is what’s written down.

To make sure we all looked good, essentially I got to write my own performance evaluation.  Every year, I’d send an email to my supervisor detailing my exquisite accomplishments from the previous twelve months. 

I’d attend “strategic meetings” at the CIA, I’d detail the “excessive cross-agency product editing”, I’d elaborate the “multitude of interagency conferences” I’d attended. 

Does this sound like information sharing to you?  You bet.  It did to my boss and to her boss.  Was it?  Sometimes, on occasion, I had a great working relationship with analysts at other agencies.  But my notes probably didn’t independently evaluate what the government intended.