Communicating and Influencing: What Assessors Are Marking
Most answers evidence communicating and stop. See what the framework actually asks for, with a worked weak vs strong Communicating and Influencing example.
You wrote a good example. A presentation that landed well, a report that was praised, a briefing that cleared up confusion the whole team had been carrying for weeks. You wrote it clearly, checked it against the Behaviour title, and submitted it feeling reasonably confident.
An assessor reading that answer against Communicating and Influencing sees half a Behaviour. The communicating part is there in full. The influencing part, the part that actually carries the marks, is missing, because nothing in the story shows anyone doing or deciding anything differently as a result.
This is the single most common gap in this Behaviour, and it is an easy one to close once you can see it. This post sets out what the framework actually asks for, in its own wording, and shows the difference between an answer that only communicates and one that also influences.
What Does “Communicating and Influencing” Actually Ask For?
It asks for two separate things, not one. The official definition, in the Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours guidance, reads: “Communicate purpose and direction with clarity, integrity and enthusiasm. Respect the needs, responses and opinions of others.”
Read those two sentences separately. The first is about the message: is it clear, honest, delivered with some enthusiasm behind it. The second is about what happens after the message lands: are you actually taking in someone else’s needs, responses and opinions, or are you just broadcasting and moving on. That second sentence is where influencing lives, and it is baked into the definition itself, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Communicating and Influencing is one of nine Civil Service Behaviours, and Behaviours is only one of five Success Profiles elements a vacancy can assess, alongside Strengths, Ability, Experience and Technical skills. Not every advert tests every element, so check the element named in your advert before you assume this is the one you need an example for.
Why Do Most Answers Only Evidence Half the Behaviour?
Because communicating is the half that is easy to describe well, and influencing is the half that requires something to have genuinely changed. Communicating is about the message landing: people understood you, people said it was clear, people felt informed. Influencing is about a position moving: someone did something different, decided something different, or agreed to something they had not agreed to before, and it happened because of what you did.
An answer built entirely around a well-received presentation, with nobody doing anything differently afterwards, has evidenced the first sentence of the definition and left the second one untouched. It can be beautifully written. It is still only half the Behaviour, and an assessor scoring against the descriptors below is looking for the second half specifically.
What Do Assessors Look For at AA and AO Grade?
At Administrative Assistant and Administrative Officer grade, the bar is set on how you handle everyday exchanges, not on formal persuasion. The published descriptors ask you to “put forward your views in a clear, constructive and considerate manner”, to “use an appropriate method of communication for each person”, and to “listen and ask questions to ensure your understanding.”
Notice that audience-adaptation already appears at this level, not just further up. Choosing email over a phone call, or the other way round, because of who you are talking to and what they need, is explicitly part of what the framework asks for even at entry grade. The same descriptors also ask you to “remain honest and truthful when explaining opinions” and to “consider the impact of language used on different groups of stakeholders”, which is the definition’s “respect the needs, responses and opinions of others” made concrete.
What Changes at Executive Officer Level?
The bar shifts from getting a message across cleanly to shaping how it lands with a specific audience and holding a conversation that does not go your way. The EO-level descriptors ask you to “take time to consider the best communication channel to use for the audience, including making the best of digital resources and considering value for money”, and to “handle challenging conversations with confidence and sensitivity.”
Adapting the message to the audience is not a nice-to-have at this level, it is a named descriptor. So is the ability to “respond constructively and objectively to comments and questions”, which only means something if someone has actually pushed back on what you said. A story where everyone nods along from the first sentence to the last has no comments or questions to respond to, and no channel decision to have made. Choose the story where someone had a different view first.
PublicServicePathway is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the UK Government or Civil Service. Every descriptor quoted in this post comes directly from the published framework, so check the wording against your own advert rather than taking this article on trust.
Can You Influence Someone You Have No Authority Over?
Yes, and for most Civil Service roles that is the only version of influencing available. Look back through the AA/AO and EO descriptors quoted above and none of them mention a direct report, a job title or a line of authority. What they describe is a person adapting how they communicate, listening properly and holding their ground in a conversation, all of which you can do to a manager, a colleague in another team, or an external stakeholder you have no formal standing over.
That is the ordinary shape of Civil Service work. Influencing upward, to get a manager to reconsider a decision, and influencing sideways, to get another team to change how they do something that affects yours, come up far more often than influencing anyone who reports to you. If your best example involves you changing your own team’s mind rather than someone senior to you or outside it, that still counts, provided a position genuinely moved. The same half-evidenced trap that catches Communicating and Influencing answers shows up in Changing and Improving too, in its own form.
What Separates a Weak Communicating and Influencing Answer From a Strong One?
The two answers below respond to the same illustrative prompt. Both were written for this article to show the difference in practice. Neither is a real candidate’s submission, and neither should be copied.
The prompt
Tell us about a time you communicated something in a way that changed what someone else did or decided.
A weak answer
“Our team’s process for handling a particular type of request had become confusing, so I put together a short briefing explaining the correct steps and the reasons behind them. I structured it clearly, used a simple diagram to show the workflow, and sent it round with a summary at the top so people could skim it if they were short on time. I presented it at our next team meeting and answered a few questions afterwards. Feedback was positive, several colleagues said it was the clearest explanation of the process they had seen, and one asked if she could keep it as a reference document.”
A strong answer
“Our team’s process for handling a particular type of request had become confusing, and one colleague in particular had been quietly working around it in a way that caused errors further down the line. Rather than send a general briefing, I asked to talk her through it directly, because I knew from previous conversations that she found written guidance easy to skim past. She pushed back at first, arguing her method was faster and had never caused a problem for her personally. I walked her through two recent cases where the workaround had created rework for another team, and asked what would make the correct process easier for her to follow day to day. Based on what she said, I adjusted the briefing to include the two steps she found most awkward and talked her through them again. She agreed to change how she handled the request type, and the error rate from that part of the process dropped in the following weeks.”
Why the strong answer clears the bar and the weak one does not
The weak answer is genuinely good communication. It is clear, well-structured, and adapted for a busy reader, which covers “communicate purpose and direction with clarity” from the definition and “use an appropriate method of communication for each person” from the AA/AO descriptors. But nothing in it moves. The positive feedback describes the message landing, not a position changing, and no individual’s behaviour is shown to be different afterwards. It answers the first sentence of the definition and stops before the second.
The strong answer keeps the same starting situation but does the thing the weak one skips. It names someone whose position was different from the writer’s, adapts the channel specifically because of what the writer already knew about that person, which is the EO descriptor’s “best communication channel to use for the audience” in practice, and shows the pushback rather than editing it out, which is what “respond constructively and objectively to comments and questions” actually looks like on the page. It closes with the colleague agreeing to change how she worked and a result that followed from that change. That is a position moving, not just a message landing, and it is what “respect the needs, responses and opinions of others” means when someone’s needs and responses genuinely differ from yours.
FAQ
Does the person I influenced have to disagree with me at the start? Not necessarily, but the story needs to show a position that was genuinely open or different from yours before your actions changed it. If everyone already agreed before you spoke, there is no movement to evidence.
Can a written report count as evidence for Communicating and Influencing, or does it have to be a conversation? A written report can count, provided you can show what happened after it was read: a decision made differently, a process changed, an approach adopted. Without that, a report evidences the communicating half only.
Does the person I influenced have to be more senior than me? No. Influencing a peer, a colleague in another team, or someone junior to you counts equally, as long as their behaviour, decision or view genuinely changed because of what you did.
Is it a problem if I did not fully succeed in changing someone’s mind? No. A partial or eventual shift, reached through how you handled the pushback, still evidences influencing. What is missing from a weak answer is not full success, it is any evidence of movement at all.
Read Your Draft Back for the Missing Half
Take the Communicating and Influencing example you already have and check it for a moment where someone’s position, decision or behaviour was different afterwards because of what you did, not just because they understood you. If that moment is not on the page, the example is not weak, it is unfinished, and it is worth going back to before you submit it.