Developing Self and Others SEO Example Statement (250 Words)
At SEO, assessors expect you to create the conditions for a team to grow. Show a diagnosis — a skills audit, survey results, performance gaps — then the plans, programmes or coaching you put in place, and the measured improvement. Individual mentoring stories are too small unless they sparked something team-wide.
Example statement
SI led a 15-person casework team. Our staff survey results landed and development scored 41% positive — the lowest in the directorate — with comments saying training was random and careers went nowhere.
TAs team leader, I owned turning that around within the year, without a budget increase.
AI held thirty-minute development conversations with all 15 staff, asking what skills they wanted, where they wanted to be, and what was blocking them. Three themes emerged: nobody understood the promotion competencies, two felt too old to train, and the only offer was e-learning nobody finished. I built a simple development plan for each person with one qualification or skill target and one stretch task. I negotiated six funded places on the casework quality course with our training team, and won agreement for two staff to shadow the policy team they aspired to join. For the two who felt too old, I found a part-time accreditation route and shared my own experience of returning to study at 40. I made development a standing agenda item in our monthly one-to-ones so it survived busy periods, and I published progress to the team quarterly. When one plan stalled after a course cancellation, I arranged mentoring with a retiring colleague instead, capturing her expertise before she left.
RA year on, development scored 68% positive, 12 of 15 staff had completed or started formal learning, two secured promotion, and our team's error rate fell 23%; the directorate adopted my conversation template for its other 9 teams.
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
- Starts from evidence (survey at 41%) and diagnoses through structured conversations — exactly the planned, team-level development SEO requires.
- Individual barriers handled individually (age anxiety, cancelled course), showing development is tailored, not a programme dumped on people.
- Results prove culture change: survey up to 68%, 12 of 15 in learning, two promotions, error rate down 23%, template adopted by 9 teams.
What SEO level requires
| Grade | What assessors expect |
|---|---|
| HEO | 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 ← this page | 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. |
| Grade 7 | At Grade 7, Developing Self and Others means championing learning across a business area: building a culture where development is planned and protected, growing future leaders, and aligning skills with what the organisation needs next. |
Common mistakes at this level
- Claiming the whole team improved with no baseline and no measure
- Ignoring your own development — senior grades still expect visible self-awareness
- Presenting HR's development offer as your own achievement
Frequently asked questions
Yes — it is one of the strongest SEO openings, because it shows you responding to evidence about your team's development needs. Describe the score or comments, the conversations you held, the plans you built, and the movement in the next survey or a proxy measure.
Briefly, yes. The behaviour covers self and others, and self-awareness stays in the descriptors at every grade. One or two sentences on a development need of your own — feedback from your manager, a course you applied — rounds out a team-focused statement without diluting it.
Diagnosis and durability. A 4 shows you arranged development and it helped. A 6 shows you found the need yourself through evidence, built something tailored, involved the team in shaping it, and left a system — plans, matrices, programmes — that kept working after the initial push.
Next step
Get the free SEO statement template pack — the same STAR structure used in this example.
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