Developing Self and Others HEO Example Statement (250 Words)
At HEO the spotlight moves to other people. Assessors expect a structured effort to develop a colleague or the team — a mentoring plan, coaching sessions, a skills matrix — adapted as you went. Your own learning still matters, but it should sit in a sentence or two, not lead the statement.
Example statement
SI coordinated a 14-person dispatch admin team in a regional distribution centre. Every absence caused chaos because only one person knew each key task, and holiday requests turned into arguments about cover.
TI decided to map the team's skills properly and use the map to plan cross-training, so any two people could cover every critical task.
AI listed the 22 tasks the team performed and rated each person's confidence against them in short one-to-ones, asking them to self-assess honestly rather than prove themselves. The matrix showed three tasks only one person could do, and five people with no development at all in the past year. I shared the matrix at a team meeting and asked for volunteers to learn the exposed tasks, then paired each learner with the current expert for two hours a week. I asked the experts to teach in steps and sign off competence only when the learner completed the task unaided twice. To keep it alive, I added a five-minute skills slot to our monthly meeting, where one person taught the rest a shortcut. When two people said the pairings favoured friends, I rotated the pairs and published the schedule. I reviewed the matrix every quarter and updated the training plan from it.
RWithin six months every critical task had at least two fully trained coverers, absence-related missed dispatches fell from 9 a month to 2, and all 14 staff had logged new training — up from five the previous year.
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
- The writer diagnoses the capability gap themselves and builds a tool (the matrix) to fix it — creating a learning opportunity, the heart of HEO-level evidence.
- Development is structured and fair: self-assessment, volunteer pairing, competence sign-off, rotated pairs after feedback about favouritism.
- Results span resilience (two coverers per task), service (missed dispatches 9 to 2) and people (all 14 training, up from five).
What HEO level requires
| Grade | What assessors expect |
|---|---|
| EO | At EO, Developing Self and Others means actively building your own skills, sharing knowledge across the team, giving colleagues helpful feedback and coaching them through tasks when needed. |
| HEO ← this page | At HEO, Developing Self and Others means deliberately making time to develop others — coaching, mentoring and arranging learning — while showing you act on feedback about your own performance. |
| SEO | At SEO, Developing Self and Others means planning development for the whole team: auditing skills, building development plans, mentoring future talent and creating learning opportunities rather than just using them. |
Common mistakes at this level
- Keeping the mentee anonymous and passive — no response, no progress, no independence
- Claiming credit for team development that your manager actually led
- Missing the result: no measure of how the person or team improved
Frequently asked questions
Narrate your decisions. Why you chose that approach, what you noticed about how they learn, what you changed when progress stalled, how you handed over gradually. The other person is the subject, but you are the protagonist — every Action sentence should still start with or centre on 'I'.
Usually not well. SEO expects team-level planning: skills audits, development plans for several people, talent spotting, budgets or programmes. A single one-to-one mentoring story tops out at HEO unless it grew into something the whole team used — and then that growth is the SEO story.
Most departments ask for 250 words per behaviour, though some ask for 500 — check the advert. In 250 words, hold the proportions: about 15% Situation, 10% Task, 60% Action, 15% Result. The mentoring structure and the measured outcome must both survive the cut.
Next step
Get the free HEO statement template pack — the same STAR structure used in this example.
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