Communicating and Influencing SCS Example Statement (750 Words)

SAs director for regional growth in a national public body, I led our relationship with the logistics sector, which employed 140,000 people across our region and faced a chronic driver shortage. Two years earlier a national funding programme had promised the sector 6,000 training places and delivered 900 before the money was withdrawn; industry leaders felt betrayed and had publicly refused to attend our events. When a new £30 million skills fund was announced, the sector's three trade associations issued a joint statement dismissing it before reading it, and two elected mayors, whose transport plans depended on the sector, told me privately they doubted we could deliver. I inherited the relationship with no trust, no shared facts, and a public narrative that anything we touched would fail. The chief executive gave me a year and one member of staff.

TThe chief executive asked me to rebuild the relationship from scratch and negotiate a signed compact, government, associations, mayors and employers, committing all parties to 8,000 training places within three years. Success meant the associations announcing the compact to their own members, not us announcing it to them.

AI decided early that the negotiation would fail if I treated it as a communication problem to be managed; the sector's distrust was rational, and my first job was to be worth trusting. I began with a listening tour with a twist: I asked each of the three association chairs to choose the venues and the guest lists, so I arrived as their guest rather than summoning them to mine. At each meeting I opened by acknowledging the broken promise in specific terms, 6,000 promised, 900 delivered, no excuses, which changed the temperature every time; leaders told me it was the first apology they had heard. I followed each visit with a handwritten note and a summary of what I had heard, checking they recognised their own words before I used them. Rather than defend our draft proposals, I published nothing for four months and instead agreed a shared fact base with the associations, their economists and mine in one room, arguing over the shortage data until everyone owned the same numbers. That shared evidence became the spine of the compact, and it disarmed the loudest critics, because attacking the targets now meant attacking their own economists' work. I also brought the training providers, colleges and private firms, into the design early, because a compact that ignored the people delivering the places would fail quietly after the cameras left. The hardest issue was clawback: the associations wanted binding guarantees that funding would not vanish again, and I could not legally bind future budgets. I was honest about that limit in every room, then offered what I could bind: published quarterly delivery figures, an independent chair for the oversight board chosen by the associations, and a named senior sponsor, me, whose resignation they could publicly demand if milestones slipped. Two mayors remained sceptical, so I invited them to co-chair regional boards rather than attend as consultees, trading a real share of control for their public endorsement. I kept every promise small and kept it visibly: papers sent when promised, answers within five working days, draft text to associations before my own ministers saw final versions. When one association's board rejected the draft compact weeks before signature, I asked to address them directly, took no slides, and answered questions for ninety minutes; they reversed the vote that evening. The final negotiation was not about money at all but about who announced first, and I gave that to the associations, because their members needed to see them win. Internally, I kept ministers and the chief executive aligned with a fortnightly one-page note, flagging the concessions I planned before I made them, so nobody at home was surprised by what I traded away.

RThe compact was signed by all five parties, eleven months after I inherited a relationship described as dead. Delivery ran ahead of schedule: 5,200 training places started in the first eighteen months against a target of 4,000, retention in the sector improved by nine percentage points, and both mayors cited the compact in their re-election materials. The oversight model, published figures and an independent chair chosen by the partners, has since been adopted for two further sector agreements, and the association chair who had led the boycott now opens our annual conference. An external review described the shared fact base as the decisive break from previous failed negotiations.