The 7 Civil Service behaviours, one paragraph each
The Civil Service uses nine behaviours across all grades, but any given role assesses against a subset — usually 3 to 5 for a sift, sometimes up to 7 for senior assessment centres.
This is what each of the seven most commonly assessed behaviours actually means, in plain language, with what assessors are scoring against.
Seeing the Big Picture
This is the behaviour about understanding context. The assessor is checking whether you can describe a piece of work in terms of why it matters — to the department, to the public, to the wider system — not just what you did. A weak example talks about completing a task. A strong example talks about understanding why the task existed, what was riding on it, who would be affected, and how it fit into a bigger picture you were aware of even though it wasn't your job to set the strategy. At higher grades, this behaviour expects you to have shaped the bigger picture yourself, not just understood it.
Changing and Improving
This behaviour is about whether you make things better, not just deliver them. Assessors are looking for evidence that you've noticed something working badly, taken responsibility for changing it, and seen it through. The trap is that candidates describe improvements that happened around them rather than improvements they drove. Strong examples have a clear "before", a clear intervention you led, and a measurable "after". At higher grades, the scale matters more — improving a team process is HEO-level evidence; improving a department-wide process is Grade 7 evidence.
Making Effective Decisions
This is the behaviour assessors find easiest to score, because the evidence is concrete: did you make decisions, and were they good ones? They want to see decisions that were yours to make, weighed against trade-offs, made in conditions of uncertainty, and defensible afterwards. A weak example is a decision that had an obvious right answer. A strong example is a decision where reasonable people could have chosen differently, and you can explain why your call was the right one. The structure that works: name the options you considered, name the criteria you weighed them against, and name the call you made and what you'd do if facing the same decision again.
Leadership
Not just management. Not just having a team report to you. The assessor is looking for evidence that you've taken responsibility for an outcome that depended on other people's work, set direction, dealt with conflict or low performance, and developed people around you. At HEO/SEO, this can be informal leadership — leading a project across teams, mentoring a colleague through difficulty. At Grade 7 and above, it expects formal leadership: people you've line-managed, performance issues you've handled, teams you've shaped. The behaviour is not assessed for many junior roles, so check the JD before spending words on it.
Communicating and Influencing
The honest version of this behaviour: did you change someone's mind, or get them to do something they wouldn't otherwise have done? Strong examples involve a specific person or audience, a specific gap between where they were and where you needed them to be, the specific moves you made (drafting a paper, framing it differently, sequencing the conversations), and a specific outcome. The behaviour scores low when candidates describe "presenting to stakeholders" without showing whether the presentation changed anything. It scores high when candidates describe a conversation, paper, or piece of work that visibly moved someone's position.
Working Together
The Civil Service depends on collaboration across teams, departments, and political administrations. This behaviour assesses whether you can work across boundaries effectively — with people who don't report to you, who have different priorities, who might be hostile to your work. Weak examples describe being a "team player" generically. Strong examples describe a specific collaboration where you had to navigate a difference (in priorities, in approach, in personality) and the work succeeded because of how you handled it. The behaviour rewards specificity about the human side of working in big organisations — how you read the room, how you built credibility with someone who didn't know you, how you handled disagreement without breaking the working relationship.
Delivering at Pace
This behaviour is about whether you ship things, reliably, against a deadline that mattered. It's the behaviour where candidates over-describe what was difficult and under-describe what they did about it. Assessors want to see realistic scope, tight prioritisation, decisions to drop or defer lower-value work, and outcomes that landed on time. They are highly skeptical of examples that describe "long hours" or "working through weekends" as the mechanism for delivery — that reads as poor planning, not good delivery. Strong examples describe restructuring the work, escalating early when something was at risk, and protecting the critical path.
A note on the other two
The two behaviours not covered above — Developing Self and Others and Managing a Quality Service — are less commonly assessed at sift, but appear at interview for some roles. They're both straightforward: the first is about whether you actively develop people (including yourself), and the second is about whether you deliver services to a high standard with the customer in mind. Both follow the same scoring logic as the others — specific evidence, your actions, measurable outcomes.
How many behaviours to expect
For a typical CS sift, you'll see:
- EO / HEO / SEO: 3–4 behaviours assessed
- Grade 7: 4–5 behaviours
- Grade 6 / SCS: 5–7 behaviours, often at assessment centre rather than sift
The JD or candidate pack lists which behaviours apply and what word count you have per behaviour. Read this carefully before drafting — answering five behaviours when the application asks for four is a common waste of effort.
The one piece of advice that applies to all of them
Every behaviour is scored the same way: how specific your example is, how clearly your actions are described in first person, and how directly the outcome ties back to what you did.
The behaviours sound different, but the scoring rubric underneath them is the same. Once you can write one behaviour example well, the others follow.