Working Together: Getting Past "I Am a Team Player"
Working Together is the Behaviour candidates evidence least. See the AA/AO and EO descriptors and a weak vs strong worked example from the framework.
Working Together is the Behaviour candidates write the most about and evidence the least. “I am a team player.” “I work well with others.” “We collaborated closely to deliver the project.” Every sentence is plausible. None is evidence.
The deeper problem shows up a paragraph later, when the answer stops naming a person at all. Everything becomes “we”: we discussed, we agreed, we delivered. An assessor reading that sentence cannot find the candidate inside their own example.
This post quotes what Working Together asks for at Administrative Officer and Executive Officer grade, the levels most external applicants are assessed against, then works through why the strongest examples usually come from a relationship that was difficult, with a matched weak and strong answer against the same prompt.
What Does “Working Together” Actually Ask You to Demonstrate?
Working Together asks you to show that you can build a relationship that gets something done, not that you are pleasant to sit near. The official definition, published in the Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours guidance, reads: “Form effective partnerships and relationships with people both internally and externally, from a range of diverse backgrounds, sharing information, resources and support.”
Two words carry most of the weight. “Internally and externally” means the relationship can be with another directorate or someone outside the Civil Service, not only your own team. “Diverse backgrounds” means evidence of building a relationship with someone whose perspective or needs differ from yours.
Working Together 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, and how the five elements fit together is set out in the job description, so check what your advert names before assuming this is the Behaviour you need.
Why Does Every “We” Sink the Answer?
Because “we” describes the team, and the framework is scoring the individual. “I am a team player” and “we collaborated closely” survive because both are true of almost everyone and neither requires proof.
The dissolve usually happens gradually. A candidate starts an example naming themselves, then slides into “we discussed the options”, “we agreed a way forward”, “we delivered ahead of schedule”, and by the final sentence the writer has vanished into the group. Read an answer like that back and ask one question: could any other member of that team have written the identical sentence about themselves? If yes, it has evidenced the team, not the candidate.
This is the specific failure Working Together falls into more than any other Behaviour, because collaboration is, by definition, a group activity. The task is to keep your own actions visible inside a story about other people, not to pretend you worked alone.
What Does the Framework Expect at AA and AO Grade?
At Administrative Assistant and Administrative Officer grade, the published descriptors for Working Together ask you to “proactively contribute to the work of the whole team and remain open to taking on new and different roles”, to “get to know your colleagues and build supportive relationships”, and to “listen to alternative perspectives and needs, responding sensitively and checking understanding where necessary.”
The same descriptors also ask you to “ask for help when needed and support others when the opportunity arises” and to “understand that bullying, harassment and discrimination are unacceptable.” That last descriptor is not decoration. It sits inside the Behaviour itself.
Notice what is absent. Nothing asks whether people liked working with you. Every descriptor points at an action, which means an AA or AO example has to show something done, not a mood.
What Changes at Executive Officer Grade?
At Executive Officer grade, the bar moves outward from your own team. The EO-level descriptors ask you to “develop a range of contacts outside own team and identify opportunities to share knowledge, information and learning”, to “show genuine interest when listening to others”, and to “contribute to an inclusive working environment where all opinions and challenges are listened to and all individual needs are taken into account.”
The same level asks you to “change ways of working to aid cooperation within and between teams in order to achieve results.” Most EO answers miss this one, because it asks for evidence you adjusted how you worked, not that the other party did.
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 match it against the grade named in your own advert rather than taking this article’s summary of it on trust.
Why Should Your Strongest Example Come From a Relationship That Was Difficult?
Because ease hides the behaviour and difficulty reveals it. A relationship that worked well from the first conversation rarely needs building. One you had to repair, or built with someone you had no authority over, forces descriptors like “listen to alternative perspectives and needs, responding sensitively” and “contribute to an inclusive working environment where all opinions and challenges are listened to” into the open. Both assume disagreement exists somewhere in the story.
There is a simple test, uncomfortable to run against your own draft: describe what you did that a less collaborative person would not have done. If someone who simply waited for the other team to come round would have reached the same result, the example is not evidence of Working Together. It is evidence that things happened to go fine.
What Separates a Weak Working Together 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 built or repaired a working relationship with someone you had no authority over.
A weak answer
“We had to work closely with another team to deliver a shared project, and at first there was a bit of friction between us because our priorities did not always line up. We made time to get to know each other better and built a good working relationship over the following weeks. We communicated regularly, respected each other’s workload, and supported one another whenever we could. By the end of the project we were working really well as one team, and we delivered everything on time. I really value being a strong team player and believe that building good relationships with colleagues is one of my biggest strengths.”
A strong answer
“A colleague in a team we depended on for data kept sending it in a format ours could not use without hours of manual rework, and she had told a previous manager of mine, bluntly, that reformatting it was not her job. I asked to meet her rather than raise it through our managers, because I suspected the previous approach had felt like an instruction rather than a conversation. She was right that the reformatting sat outside her role, and I said so early on rather than arguing the point. I asked what made the current format easiest for her team to produce, and worked out that a small change on our end, adjusting how we imported the file, would remove almost all the rework without asking her to change anything. I tested it against three of her old files before proposing it, so I was not asking her to trust an idea that might not work. She agreed to flag any future format changes to me directly instead of going through the wider distribution list, which meant I heard about problems before they reached my team. The rework stopped, and six months later she was still flagging changes to me first.”
Why the strong answer clears the bar and the weak one does not
The weak answer is warm and believable. It is also entirely “we” from the second sentence onward, and the one sentence that names an individual, “I really value being a strong team player”, is an opinion about the writer, not an account of anything she did. Nothing in it shows “listen to alternative perspectives and needs, responding sensitively” from the AA and AO descriptors, because no alternative perspective is ever stated. Friction is mentioned, then it is gone, with nothing in between to show how.
The strong answer keeps a difficult relationship difficult for most of its length. It names a specific disagreement and states the other person’s position accurately rather than as a strawman, “she was right that the reformatting sat outside her role”, which is what “listen to alternative perspectives and needs” looks like when the perspective is inconvenient. It shows the EO descriptor “change ways of working to aid cooperation within and between teams” directly, because the writer adjusted her own import process rather than asking the other person to change first. It closes with a changed working arrangement that outlasted the original problem, evidence the relationship was actually built rather than smoothed over for the length of one project. A less collaborative colleague could have escalated the format complaint through management and probably still hit the deadline. This answer shows what happened because the writer did not.
Where Do You Find a Working Together Example in Your Own Work?
Look for a relationship that crossed a boundary you had no authority to remove, not a moment your own team pulled together. The Civil Service Careers guidance confirms an example does not have to come from your current job: it can come from “work experience, volunteering, in connection with a hobby”, provided you “explain in some detail what you personally did.” A less successful outcome still works “if you can demonstrate the lessons learned and how errors would be avoided in future.”
A few places this tends to hide in an ordinary week:
- A colleague or team whose priorities genuinely conflicted with yours
- A disagreement you handled by asking a question, not escalating it
- A working arrangement you changed on your own side, not someone else’s
- Someone you had to build trust with from nothing, with no authority to draw on
Working Together and Delivering at Pace often collide, because a deadline is frequently what forces contact across a boundary. If your example leans more on the date than the relationship, Delivering at Pace Without Sounding Like You Cut Corners works through what that neighbouring Behaviour marks.
FAQ
Can I use an example where the other person was more senior than me? Yes. Working Together does not require equals, as long as you can show what you personally did.
Does the relationship have to have started badly? No, but the strongest examples usually involve some friction, because that is what makes the behaviour visible. A relationship that was easy from the start rarely gives you anything specific to describe.
Can I write about a team I was only part of temporarily? Yes. The official guidance confirms an example can come from work experience, volunteering or a hobby, provided it shows what you personally did.
What if my example does not end in full agreement? That is fine. A partial improvement still evidences the behaviour, provided you can show what you did and what changed.
Is it a problem if my example involves disagreeing with someone rather than agreeing with them? No, the opposite. Descriptors at both grades ask you to listen to alternative perspectives and respond to challenge, which only means something if disagreement existed in the story.
Turn Every “We” in Your Draft Back Into “I”
Take the Working Together example you already have and go through it sentence by sentence, marking every “we”. For each one, ask what you specifically did that made it happen, and rewrite the sentence around that action instead. What is left after that exercise, however small, is closer to what an assessor can actually score than a paragraph about being a team player ever was.