The Senior Rater Potential Evaluation is key to identifying the AAW’s civilian future leaders.
Perspective from the
USAASC Director Craig Spisak
Nothing that I or any other leader within the Army Acquisition Workforce (AAW) does is more important than identifying and developing the AAW’s talent. The Senior Rater Potential Evaluation (SRPE) is one of our best tools for identifying individuals with future leadership potential and documenting that potential. The SRPE provides our civilian acquisition professionals with a view of where opportunities may lie from their senior rater—someone higher up than the person who supervises them on a day-to-day basis. Yes, doing the evaluations is more work for supervisors. But taking care of their people is the crux of what leaders do.
Years ago, the acquisition community recognized the need for professionals, both civilian and military, to perform certain functions. And so we created best-qualified boards, originally for the program management community, whereby military and civilian acquisition professionals compete for leadership positions. We knew we’d need civilian program managers in the future because we wouldn’t have enough military personnel to go around.
One of the earliest challenges we recognized was that officer evaluations had always been forward-looking, but civilian evaluations backward-looking. In the military, the officer evaluation has a senior rater section, which is widely recognized as the most important part, assessing not whether the officer has done a good job but whether he or she has developed the skills and the potential to do a good job at the next level. It’s really the best way the Army can identify future talent as well as an individual’s potential for increased responsibility.
If I’m trying to pick somebody for the next level of responsibility, a backward-looking evaluation might not give me enough information to decide whether someone has the skills to take on this more complex role. Regulations govern the content and execution of civilian performance appraisals and prohibit the assessment of potential in addition to performance. The answer to this dilemma was to create the SRPE to measure civilian acquisition professionals’ potential.
WHAT IT IS AND ISN’T
Over the years, we’ve modified the SRPE to mirror the evolving officer evaluation system. In July 2015, the director of the Army Acquisition Corps signed a policy mandating SRPEs for all GS-12 through GS-15 (or payband equivalent) civilian acquisition professionals. This mandate took an iterative approach. For FY15, it required GS-14 civilian acquisition professionals to have a completed SRPE. In October 2016, the mandate expanded to include GS-13s and their payband equivalents. In October 2017, the requirement for a SRPE will expand to GS-12s, and in October 2018 to GS-15s. By 2018, all civilian acquisition professionals from GS-12 to GS-15 will have one or more completed SRPE.
Remember: The SRPE and the annual civilian performance evaluation reports are not the same and are not linked to each other. The SRPE is a talent management tool to evaluate the potential of civilian acquisition professionals at designated points in their careers, to perform in positions or opportunities of increased responsibility. The various performance management systems evaluate the employee’s performance in his or her current duties and contributions to the mission, as measured against the employee’s performance standards for a given annual rating cycle.
SRPEs, like officer evaluations, are what we call “managed profiles.” Less than half of the population profile can receive the top block of excellence. SRPEs are not used to determine tenure, plan reductions in force, make selections for awards or anything of that nature. The SRPE requires the senior rater to distinguish who the top acquisition professionals with potential are compared with their peers, which then allows selection boards to find civilians ready for the next level of responsibility.
A major initiative within the AAW Human Capital Strategic Plan, under the goal of leader development, is use of the SRPE. This focus on talent management will ensure that as we grow, develop and groom civilian acquisition professionals, we consider opportunities to broaden their leadership skills at every level of their careers. Just as the individual development plan is a good tool for a first-line supervisor to discuss with an acquisition professional all career development goals and planned initiatives, the SRPE is a good tool for a senior rater to discuss leadership potential with acquisition professionals, then coach and mentor them as they move forward.
HONESTY IS CONSTRUCTIVE
Not everyone can be the best. Having candid conversations about talent and potential is not easy work, but it needs to be done. In my experience, civilian supervisors have not done a great job of conducting frank and honest conversations about performance and potential. There has been a tendency just to tell everybody they’re doing well, and unfortunately the data exist to back that up when most people are rated in the very top block of excellence.
Anyone who understands data and statistics at all knows full well that the “best” of a group cannot be a majority. We need more distinction. Additionally, not all who perform well in a job have the desire or potential to perform well at higher-level positions or opportunities with greater responsibility.
However, if you want people to grow, develop skills and be able to take on new, more complex responsibilities to lead and manage people in the future, you have to be able to identify their strengths as well as their weaknesses and have honest, constructive conversations with them: “You’re really good at this, but you need some work at that. You’re great at what you do, but maybe you’re not cut out to be the next ACAT I project manager.” And that’s OK. There are 36,000-plus civilian professionals in the AAW. Not every one of them is going to be a Senior Executive Service member. Only a small percentage are.
In the past, SRPEs were required only for civilian acquisition candidates before a selection board. But if a candidate with just one SRPE goes before a board along with other candidates who have multiple SRPEs, that’s a big disadvantage. Someone evaluating the group of candidates is going to have greater confidence in a group of data points on one candidate’s potential versus just one data point for another candidate. And military acquisition professionals have many years of senior rater potential blocks on their evaluations. In a best-qualified board, a history of SRPEs can make or break a selection.
With SRPEs instituted across the whole acquisition community, civilians who decide they want to pursue a more challenging position will have a history of these documents on potential as well. They’ll have multiple opportunities for someone to have said, “Hey, I think Jane walks on water, and here’s why. She’s ready for the next opportunity.”
CONCLUSION
With this new talent management tool come challenges for senior raters. It forces them to have tough, honest yet positive conversations to articulate to an individual their strengths and weaknesses. That senior rater will have to be able to say, for example, “Look, first of all, this has no negative impact on your career. I’m not saying that you’re not doing a good job today. And if you don’t aspire to something bigger, then this document will never really even be used. But if you do aspire to something bigger and better or more complex, here’s why I said where your strengths were and what you’re suited for. This is where I think you need to work and develop your skills so that the next time we do one of these, you might be ranked higher compared with your peers.”
Although these conversations will be difficult at times, at the end of the day, you’ll help your people much more effectively than those raters who just give everybody the same pat on the back and say, “You’re doing a good job, keep going.” I don’t know how we as a community get better if we don’t truly make an attempt to use an analytical tool that enables us to provide constructive criticism.
We recently concluded our second iterations of SRPEs for the AAW, and I’m eager to see the positive impact on our upcoming best-qualified boards. I anticipate that we will continue to see a larger percentage of civilians with exceptional or high-potential ratings on their SRPEs—the acquisition community’s “best and brightest”—selected in head-to-head competitions for high-level career positions and leader developmental assignments. And I expect to see an increased interest in the centralized acquisition education, training and leadership development opportunities managed by the Army DACM Office.
I understand the concept of rating civilian potential is a culture change. It will take time for our acquisition community to realize the SRPE’s full and positive impact on the talent management of our civilians. It is an exciting opportunity for the civilian acquisition professionals of the AAW, as there is now a mandatory tool to ensure that senior raters are taking the time to have those discussions that are so important in developing our professionals to their full capacity.
Senior leaders can and should impart their wisdom and guidance to the next generation of senior leaders. Although it may create extra work in the interim, over the next several years it will become part of our culture and ultimately support Army readiness, as those of us in leadership positions groom the next set of acquisition leaders. We should always strive to leave the acquisition community in a better place than we found it. SRPE is one initiative to ensure that we do.
This article is published in the April – June issue of Army AL&T Magazine.
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