Developing Self and Others SCS Example — 750-Word Statement

SI joined the department as director general of corporate services two years after a capability review had warned that our leadership bench was dangerously thin. Of the 40 most senior roles below the executive committee, only seven had a credible internal successor, external searches were taking nine months and costing around £90,000 each, and the last three external hires into director roles had all left within 18 months. Meanwhile our own high-potential Grade 6 and Grade 7 staff were leaving for promotion elsewhere, citing invisible pathways. Every directorate could point to a favoured individual, but none could point to a system.

TThe executive committee asked me to lead the redesign of succession and talent across the department's 3,000 staff: a pipeline that would fill most senior roles internally within three years, whilst respecting open competition. I chose to sponsor the work personally rather than delegate it to HR, because talent decisions are leadership decisions.

AI started by making the problem undeniable. I commissioned a talent census across all directorates — skills, aspirations, mobility, readiness — and presented the executive committee with a single page: our 40 critical roles, their successors by readiness, and the cost of doing nothing. Several colleagues were uncomfortable naming names; I argued that anonymity was how organisations hid weak pipelines, and the committee agreed to honest mapping. From the census I designed a three-tier approach. For the top 40 roles, each postholder and I agreed a named successor with a tailored development plan — board exposure, a stretch posting, or a cross-department secondment — reviewed twice yearly at the talent board, which I chaired. For the next tier, roughly 200 leaders, we ran development centres so assessment was consistent rather than dependent on who your boss knew. For emerging talent, I launched a sponsored scheme pairing 40 high-potential staff with executive mentors, and I made sponsorship real by holding fellow executives accountable at each committee for what they had actually done for their sponsorees. I sponsored three people myself, all from groups underrepresented in our senior grades. One, a brilliant Grade 7 analyst, had been told in a previous role that she lacked presence. I gave her our toughest stakeholder environment to lead — the annual settlement negotiation — prepared with her beforehand, debriefed afterwards, and let the executive see what I already knew. She is now a director. The mechanics mattered less than the resistance. Two director-general peers saw central succession as favouritism and kept running their own informal pipelines; I confronted it directly at committee, with data on the outcomes their approach had produced. Finance challenged the £400,000 development budget during a spending round; I defended it with the external search costs we had already avoided. When development-centre results showed our Grade 6 pipeline was weaker than assumed, I slowed promotions rather than lower the bar, and invested in a nine-month readiness programme instead. I also put myself through the process. I asked our most senior civil servant and two external non-executives for annual feedback on my leadership, commissioned a 360 review, and took part in reverse mentoring with a young disabled colleague, whose monthly candour about how our buildings and meetings excluded people changed decisions I had been making for years. We communicated the whole design openly — criteria, process, outcomes — because secrecy feeds the suspicion that talent management is patronage. I answered questions at staff roadshows in four locations, including hostile ones, and published the first year's results internally, including where we had fallen short. Every six months I reported progress to the executive in the same one-page format, so success and failure were equally visible, and I handed the chairing of the talent board to a colleague in year three so the system did not depend on me.

RThree years on, 33 of the 40 critical roles have a credible internal successor, up from seven. Internal appointments to director and deputy director roles have risen from 30% to 65%, external search spend has fallen by £1.1 million a year, and average time-to-fill has halved. Voluntary turnover among identified talent has dropped from 18% to 7%, representation of women at director level has moved from 32% to 46%, and both disabled and minority ethnic representation are up by a third. Two of my three sponsorees now run directorates of their own, and two other departments have adopted the model. Internal survey scores for whether staff could see a career in the department rose by 19 points over the same period.