There is a question most people never think to ask before a Civil Service application: what is the assessor actually marking?
Not your career. Not your years of experience. Not whether you are a good person or a hard worker. They are marking a specific thing — the quality of a decision you made, the leadership you showed in a moment of real pressure, and whether you can describe it at the level the grade requires.
Most behaviour examples fail because they answer a different question entirely.
The description trap
Here is how a failing behaviour example usually reads:
"I was part of a team managing a large project with a tight deadline. We worked together to identify the key priorities and divided the tasks between us. I took responsibility for the communications strand. We delivered on time and the client was pleased."
Everything in that paragraph is true. It probably happened. But it does not answer the question. It describes a situation. It does not show a decision.
The assessor reads that and thinks: where were you in this? What did you actually do? What changed because you were there rather than someone else?
What they are actually looking for
Civil Service Success Profiles assess behaviours at specific grades. At EO level, they want to see you managing your own work and making sensible decisions within your lane. At HEO, they want to see you influencing others and navigating complexity. At Grade 7, they want to see you leading through ambiguity, managing risk, and producing outcomes others could not.
The same story can work at any of those levels. The difference is which part of the story you surface and how precisely you describe the decision-making behind it.
The fix is not adding more detail
Most people, when told their examples are weak, add more context. They make the situation longer. They explain the background more thoroughly.
That is the wrong instinct. The problem is almost never too little context. It is too little decision.
Ask yourself this: in the example you have written, can you point to the moment where you made a call that changed something? Can you name the specific thing you decided to do, and the specific thing you considered but chose not to do?
If you cannot, the example is not ready.
How to find the decision
Take your example and answer these three questions about it:
One — what would have happened if you had done nothing?
Two — what was the alternative to what you actually did, and why did you reject it?
Three — what changed in the situation because of your specific action?
The answers to those three questions are the behaviour example. Everything else is scene-setting.
Grade level matters more than most people realise
If you are applying for an HEO role and your example reads like an EO answer, you will not pass sift. Not because the story is bad. Because it is positioned at the wrong altitude.
An HEO example should show you influencing people who do not report to you, navigating a situation where the right answer was not obvious, and producing an outcome that required your specific judgement. If your example could have been written by anyone doing an admin role, it is not at HEO level.
The positioning is the work. The story is just the raw material.
One practical step
Take your weakest behaviour example and read it back. Find the most important sentence — the sentence that describes what you actually did. Now ask: does that sentence contain a verb that only a decision-maker could use?
Not "I helped." Not "I was involved." Not "I contributed to."
"I decided." "I overruled." "I escalated against the team's preference because." "I restructured the approach when it became clear the original plan would not hold."
That is what a behaviour example looks like when it works.