Communicating and Influencing Grade 7 Example — 500-Word Statement

SAs head of a policy team in a central government department, I was responsible for our work on flood defence funding. Six weeks after a difficult winter of flooding, the director general was called to give evidence to a parliamentary select committee about our response. The hearing would be televised, the minister would watch the coverage closely, and several members of the committee represented flooded constituencies, so the questioning was likely to be hostile and personal. My team held most of the relevant detail.

TI was asked to prepare the director general: the written brief, the likely questions, and a rehearsal, so she could answer confidently, honestly and consistently with the minister's public position.

AI began by watching recordings of the committee's previous hearings to understand each member's style, because a brief that ignores the questioners serves the witness poorly. I mapped every member's constituency against our flood data and identified the three local cases each was most likely to raise. The department's instinct was a ninety-page submission; I persuaded the evidence team to cut it to a two-page core brief with the detail in numbered annexes, arguing that a witness who reads survives, a witness who drowns in paper does not. I wrote the core brief in the director general's own voice, short sentences and no acronyms, after listening to how she actually spoke in meetings. The hardest conversation was over a mistake: our initial payment scheme had paid out slowly, and the evidence team wanted that buried in an annexe. I argued, in writing and then face to face with the deputy director, that the committee already knew and that a candid admission with a recovery plan would play better than visible defensiveness; he agreed, and the admission went on page one. I then built a question bank of forty likely questions, drafted honest answers, and ran two mock hearings where I played the most aggressive member myself, interrupting and following up as the recordings showed he did. After the first rehearsal I saw the director general was memorising statistics rather than messages, so I reframed the brief around three messages with one killer statistic each, which she could hold under pressure. I colour-coded the annexes so she could find any figure in seconds, and drilled her answers to under ninety seconds. I also prepared her for the personal angle: one member's own constituency home had flooded, so we agreed she should acknowledge that experience directly if he raised it. Finally I briefed her private office and the press team so the public lines, the briefing and the press notice all told the same story.

RThe hearing ran for two hours with no correction to the record required afterwards. Committee members quoted our figures accurately, and the slow-payments admission was reported as a strength in two national papers. The director general asked me to lead briefing preparation for all future hearings, and my three-message format became the department's standard template for select committee appearances.