Are you struggling to come up with ideas for your behaviours? Today I will be giving a few simple pointers on how to come up with ideas to write about, not for any specific behaviour.
Summarising your current stories
You may well have some examples already, write these down in a list, with the first column being the situation, the second being a combination of tasks and behaviours, see my example below. This way you will be able to see, at a glance, which stories cover which behaviours.
You may find that some situations lend themselves to a number of different behaviours. If this is the case use different rows for each task/behaviour combination. Remember, each task needs to really focus on the specific behaviour you are trying to demonstrate.
Situation | Task/Behaviour |
When I was running a team of... | Leadership: I had to lead my team through a major change, the introduction of Universal Credit... |
| Managing a quality service: I had to develop a way of dealing with... |
When opening a Youth Hub... | Working Together: I had to bring together two opposing teams to... |
| Communicating and Influencing: When opening sites, I had to frequently communicate... |
Generating new ideas
Try and think of things you are working on now, or have recently finished, whether they are projects, new ideas or simply investigations. Write them down in your table. Once you have these ideas written down in the situations tab, think about how you demonstrated the behaviours. Add the different options in the tasks. Notice how, in the above table, you may fit multiple behaviours out of the same situation.
Long term use
This is a good habit to foster, building a steadily expanding log of ideas to draw upon. This framework will pay off not only here, but also in the interview stage. There you will need to consider a wide variety of responses, given that the questions may focus, or exclude, different aspects of answers.
Moving forward, this will also help you to focus on areas where your progression is lacking. Perhaps you have plenty of leadership behaviour examples, but only a handful of developing self and others. Awareness here can pay dividends.
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