Communicating and Influencing Grade 6 Example Statement (500 Words)

SAs head of workforce services for a large public body, I was responsible for moving three directorates onto a single rota and payroll system. Each directorate ran its own legacy process, employed its own administrators, and guarded its way of working. Two previous attempts at sharing services in other parts of the organisation had collapsed into turf wars, and the three directors barely agreed on meeting times, let alone systems. The prize was significant: £450,000 a year in duplicated licences and administration, and a 20 percent agency overspend caused by poor rota visibility.

TThe chief executive asked me to get all three directors to sign up to one shared service, on equal terms, within the financial year, and to keep services running while we did it.

AI knew a top-down mandate would produce compliance on paper and sabotage in practice, so I built the coalition before I built the case. I spent the first month in one-to-one meetings with each director, not selling the shared service but asking what they feared losing; all three said control, and each meant something different by it. I shaped the proposal around those answers: one directorate kept approval rights on rotas, another hosted the new team, and the third, the most resistant, got the pilot, which meant first say on how the system was configured. Trading concessions felt uncomfortable, but each cost the organisation little and bought a director's public support, which was the real currency. With the directors privately aligned, I ran a joint session where their own operations managers presented the pilot results rather than me, because a sceptic convinced by a peer stays convinced. When the finance directorate questioned the savings, I opened my workings to their analysts for two weeks and published the assumptions; the scrutiny improved the model and, more importantly, made the finance team a co-author of the number. When one director briefed against the plan at a leadership meeting, I asked for half an hour with him the same day, restated his own conditions, and showed they were still met; he withdrew his objection before it spread. Communication with the 90 affected administrators mattered as much as the boardroom: I wrote every all-staff message myself in plain terms, held open question sessions at each site, and answered the hardest question, about job losses, honestly, with the redeployment guarantee spelled out. I kept the chief executive informed with a fortnightly one-page note so she could steady nerves at her level, and I asked her to say nothing publicly until the directors announced the change jointly, which made it their decision, not hers.

RAll three directors signed the agreement in month nine. Twelve months later the shared service was saving £470,000 a year, agency overspend fell from 20 percent to 6 percent, no compulsory redundancies were needed, and the organisation adopted the joint-announcement approach for two further change programmes. Staff survey scores in the affected teams rose slightly through the change rather than falling.