Communicating and Influencing Grade 7 Example Statement (500 Words)

SAs programme lead for a regional employment support scheme, I needed five partner organisations, two councils, a health trust, a college and a charity consortium, to share client data so people stopped repeating their stories to every service. A year of talks had stalled: each partner's legal team had different concerns, trust between the organisations was low, and two partners suspected the largest council wanted control of their data. The scheme served 8,000 people a year, and frontline staff estimated they spent a day a week chasing information the partners already held.

TI was asked to break the deadlock and get a data-sharing agreement signed by all five partners within six months. I reported monthly to the chief officers' joint board.

AMy first move was to stop negotiating by email. I met each chief officer one to one, listened more than I talked, and wrote down what each actually feared: not data breaches in the abstract, but being blamed in public if one occurred. I realised the technical argument was finished and the emotional one was not, so I changed strategy from persuasion to shared risk. I put my own organisation first in the draft, volunteering us for the strictest audit clause, because leading by example cost me little and bought trust. I drafted a one-page set of principles saying what we would share, what we never would, and who would say sorry if something went wrong, and I tested it privately with the two most sceptical partners before showing the group, so they shaped it rather than received it. When the joint workshop came, I asked the partners' communications leads, not just lawyers, into the room, and we worked through three real breach scenarios together; agreeing the public response in advance removed most of the fear. Two partners then raised competing demands on governance, so rather than force a vote I proposed a rotating chair, which let both save face. I logged every concession so no partner could later claim surprise, and summarised each meeting within a day in the same plain language as the principles. Throughout, I sent short weekly updates in plain English to all five chief officers, celebrating each signature publicly, which built momentum and made delay visible without blaming anyone. The charity consortium held out longest over cost; I could not offer money, so I offered the college's training places for their staff instead, a trade their chief executive could sell to her board. At the final meeting I brought a printed agreement, five signature pages, and a photographer, because a signature photographed is a commitment made public.

RAll five partners signed within five months, one month ahead of the deadline I was set. Within a year, shared referrals rose by 30 percent, clients told their story once instead of five times, and the agreement's plain-English principles were reused by two neighbouring regions. The health trust's chief officer told the board the process had rebuilt her confidence in joint working.