Communicating and Influencing SEO Example Statement (250 Words)
At SEO, assessors look for influencing beyond your own team: peers, senior managers, external groups. Your example should show a deliberate approach, mapping stakeholders, choosing channels, handling organised scepticism, and achieving adoption or change you can measure, not a single persuasive meeting.
Example statement
SI led a business support team in a council's adult social care directorate when a new case-recording system went live. After a month, usage sat at 40 percent and five team leaders openly called it unworkable.
TMy manager asked me to turn attitudes around and get all 60 staff recording cases properly within three months.
ARather than sending another instruction email, I visited each team and watched them use the system for an hour. They were right about three real faults; saying so to the project team earned me credibility with the leaders. I ran ten-minute slots in existing team meetings rather than adding new ones. Instead of presenting, I asked each team to list what slowed them down, then showed how two features removed items from their own lists. Where the system genuinely could not help, I said so, fed it back to suppliers, and published that list so people saw their comments had travelled. I recruited one respected sceptic per team as a champion, trained them first, and let them answer their colleagues' grumbles in their own language. I wrote a one-page guide with screenshots for the five tasks people hated most, avoiding the software's own terminology. Weekly I sent leaders their usage figures framed as progress, not surveillance, and phoned any whose figures stalled to ask what was blocking them.
RWithin ten weeks, usage reached 95 percent and duplicate paper records stopped. The directorate asked me to repeat the approach for two further system roll-outs.
Use this as a model, not a script. This is an original example written for this site. Adapt the structure to your own experience — copying it word for word risks plagiarism and will not reflect your evidence.
Why this scores well
- Influences sideways across five teams without line authority, the core SEO expectation for this behaviour.
- Builds credibility by admitting the system had real faults, then turns sceptics into champions rather than overruling them.
- Uses evidence both ways: user feedback travels to suppliers, usage data travels to leaders, ending at 95 percent adoption.
What SEO level requires
| Grade | What assessors expect |
|---|---|
| HEO | At HEO level, Communicating and Influencing means communicating with impact across teams and external contacts, building an evidence-based case, and handling challenge constructively to win people over. |
| SEO ← this page | At SEO level, Communicating and Influencing means winning support across teams and stakeholders without line authority, shaping messages for senior audiences, and turning sceptics into supporters. |
| Grade 7 | At Grade 7, Communicating and Influencing means shaping understanding at organisational level: briefing senior leaders and ministers, negotiating with external partners, and setting the terms of difficult conversations. |
Common mistakes at this level
- Pretending there was no opposition: SEO statements gain credibility when you name the scepticism and show what you did about it.
- Using 'we achieved buy-in' language that hides your personal design of the approach from the assessor.
- Forgetting the senior-audience element: at this grade, briefing or advising senior managers well is often part of the picture.
Frequently asked questions
A 5 is a solid, complete example of influencing across teams. A 7 adds sophistication: you anticipated resistance and designed around it, used multiple channels deliberately, brought senior people with you, and your result shows durable change such as adoption figures months later or your approach being reused elsewhere in the organisation.
It helps. Briefing or advising senior decision-makers is part of the level expectation, so an example where you shaped a senior audience's understanding, as well as influencing peers, covers more of the descriptor. It is not compulsory: cross-team influencing with real stakes still scores well if senior handling appears elsewhere in your application.
Most departments ask for 250 words per behaviour at SEO, though some allow more, so check the advert. It is tight for a stakeholder campaign: choose one campaign, compress the context hard, and spend your words on the three or four moves that show strategy and the measured result. Depth beats breadth at this grade.
Next step
Get the free SEO statement template pack — the same STAR structure used in this example.
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