What do they want?
How do I show my brilliant example in the best light?
Basic Advice
Before we start, it is helpful to understand what is the point of using Behaviours to demonstrate our ability and suitability to get to HEO. When we talk about behaviours, what we are doing is showing that we are behaving at the right level, in this case HEO, and are capable of dealing with situations which will arise in the role you are applying for. It does not mean you need to have the skills or knowledge for a particular role, for example, being able to use a particular piece of software.
That means that what we need to do in these behaviour statements is show that we can and have dealt with similar situations before. An example would be an application to become an operations manager. These managers will receive information, such as statistics about their team, they need to be able to interpret that and react appropriately, this ties into the Making Effective Decisions behaviour. To demonstrate that you can do that, you will need to talk about how you have used similar information appropriately in the past.
The most common problem with people's behaviour statements is that they do not talk enough about the particular behaviour. The most common behaviours asked about are
Leadership
Delivering at pace
Making effective decisions
Communicating and influencing
Working together
Occasionally you may be asked for
Seeing the bigger picture
Managing a quality service
Changing and improving
Developing self and others
Explanation and Breakdown
This section will act as a litmus test for your statements, are they actually answering the question?
Leadership
This would be a situation where you are demonstrating 'leadership'. You are creating a positive vision and sharing it with everyone. You also make an effort to include other people in that vision.
Breakdown
Ensure colleagues and stakeholders have a clear understanding of objectives, activities and time-frames.
Take into account different individual needs, views and ideas, championing inclusion and equality of opportunity for all.
Consider the impacts of own and team's activities on stakeholders and end users.
Role-model commitment and satisfaction with role.
Recognise and praise the achievements of others to drive positivity within the team.
Effectively manage conflict, misconduct and non-inclusive behaviour, raising with senior managers where appropriate.
Delivering at Pace
This is where you are delivering something in a timely manner to a high enough standard.
Breakdown
Show a positive approach to keeping the whole team's efforts focused on the top priorities.
Promote a culture of following the appropriate procedures to ensure results are achieved on time whilst still enabling innovation.
Ensure the most appropriate resources are available for colleagues to use to do their job effectively.
Regularly monitor your own and team's work against milestones ensuring individual needs are considered when setting tasks.
Act promptly to reassess workloads and priorities when there are conflicting demands to maintain performance.
Allow individuals the space and authority to meet objectives, providing additional support where necessary, whilst keeping overall responsibility.
Making Effective Decisions
This is where you are making a decision, gathering information and considering options, implications and risks.
Breakdown
Understand own level of responsibility and empower others to make decisions where appropriate.
Analyse and use a range of relevant, credible information from internal and external sources to support decisions.
Invite challenge and where appropriate involve others in decision making.
Display confidence when making difficult decisions, even if they prove to be unpopular.
Consult with others to ensure the potential impacts on end users having been considered.
Present strong recommendations in a timely manner outlining the consideration of other options, costs, benefits and risks.
Communicating and influencing
This is where you are communicating something and taking into account your audience.
Breakdown
Communicate in a straightforward, honest and encouraging manner, choosing appropriate styles to maximise understanding and impact.
Encourage the use of different communication methods, including digital resources and highlight the benefits, including ensuring cost effectiveness.
Ensure communication has a clear purpose and takes into account people's individual needs.
Share information as appropriate and check understanding.
Show positivity and enthusiasm towards work, encouraging others to do the same.
Ensure that important messages are communicated with colleagues and stakeholders respectfully, taking into consideration the diversity of interests.
Working Together
Where you are forming partnerships and relationships, both internally and externally to your team or organisation, sharing information and support.
Breakdown
Encourage joined up team work within own team and across other groups.
Establish professional relationships with a range of stakeholders.
Collaborate with these to share information, resources and support.
Invest time to develop a common focus and genuine team spirit where colleagues feel valued and respect one another.
Put in place support for the wellbeing of individuals within the team, including consideration for your own needs.
Make it clear o all team members that bullying, harassment and discrimination are unacceptable.
Actively seek and consider input of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
Seeing the bigger picture
Where you demonstrate an understanding of how your role fits within your office, wider group of offices and organisation as a whole. With that understanding, do something that supports not just you, but some or all of those other elements within the organisation.
Breakdown
Understand the strategic drivers for your area of work.
Align activities to contribute to wider organisational priorities.
Remain alert to emerging issues and trends which might impact your area of work.
Seek out and share experiences to develop knowledge of the team's business area.
Understand how the strategies and activities of the team create value and meet the diverse needs of all stakeholders.
Managing a quality service
This is where you do your work, but you make sure you do it to a high standard. This can be measured in terms of professional excellence, expertise, efficiency or taking into account diverse customer needs.
Breakdown
Develop, implement, maintain and review systems and services to ensure delivery of professional excellence. Work with stakeholders to set priorities, objectives and timescales.
Successfully deliver high quality outcomes that meet the customers` needs and gives value for money.
Identify risks and resolve issues efficiently.
Involve a diverse range of colleagues, stakeholders and delivery partners in developing suggestions for improvements.
Establish ways to find and respond to feedback from customers about the services provided.
Changing and improving
This is where you find ways to improve something and make suggestions. This could either be in terms of ways of working, getting feedback from others and giving your own feedback.
Breakdown
Work with others to identify areas for improvement and simplify processes to use fewer resources.
Use technology where possible to increase efficiency.
Encourage ideas for change from a wide range of sources.
Clearly explain the reasons for change to colleagues and how ti implement them, supporting individuals with different needs to adapt to change.
Encourage an environment where colleagues know that they can challenge decisions and issues safely.
Take managed risks by fully considering the varied impacts changes could have on the diverse range of end users.
Developing self and others
This is where you are demonstrating a commitment to your own development and that of others.
Breakdown
Identify capability gaps for self and team.
Ensure development objectives are set and achieved to address any gaps and enable delivery of current and future work.
Take time to coach, mentor and develop other colleagues to support succession planning.
Promote inclusiveness by respecting different personal needs in the team and use these to develop others.
Reflect on own work, continuously seek and act on feedback to improve own and team's performance.
Basic structure of a behaviour
Remember that the point of a behaviour statement is to show that we can do one of the aspects of the new role. In terms of structure, that has two focus points, actually demonstrating that we can do the behaviour, and demonstrating the right behaviour. This means we need to talk about the right thing, hopefully the preceding explanations will help you to make sure that what you are actually talking about is the right behaviour.
Effectively demonstrating behaviours
We are going to use STAR to demonstrate that we can behave properly in the new role. This is a tried and tested method of easily explaining. Remember that you have to make it as easy as possible for a sifter to give you marks.
Situation
Task
Actions
Result
Situation describes where you find yourself, it should set out the scale of your behaviour. This should be one sentence.
Task focuses what you are going to talk about to a specific behaviour. You should be able to see that any of your actions are obviously linked to your task. This should be one sentence.
Actions are where you show that you have met the evaluation criteria. You demonstrate what you did, why you did it and how you did it, perhaps even how you know something was effective. It is not good enough to assert that you did something, demonstrate forethought and evaluation too. This should be the vast majority of your statement.
Result is where you get to hit home with the scale of your behaviour. You don't need to include a number, especially for the sake of it, however improvement percentages and the like can be used. This can be one or two sentences.
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