GOV.UK defines this behaviour as: "Understand how your role fits with and supports organisational objectives. Recognise the wider Civil Service priorities and ensure work is in the national interest." (Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours, GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0.) In interview terms, panels are testing whether you connect your own work to the reasons it exists — the strategy, the public, the taxpayer — or whether your evidence stops at the edge of your desk.
This page is a question bank for the behaviour: the forms the question takes, four marked model answers at different levels, and the follow-ups panels use to check whether the connection you claim is real. Read the marking guidance as closely as the answers — it shows you what the assessor was listening for.
Grade calibration matters more here than for most behaviours. At EO, 'the big picture' can mean knowing why your process exists and who is downstream of it. At Grade 7 it means weighing local wins against national strategy — and sometimes stopping good work because it points the wrong way.
Practise these questions out loud with a live AI interviewer — free. Start with Try Me
How the marking guidance works
Each model answer below is marked against the four criteria a live aurate session scores:
See how a full session is scored
aurate is a practice tool. Marking guidance describes what strong practice answers show — it isn't an employability assessment.
Why it's asked: The headline form of the behaviour. Panels want the pivot to be concrete: what you were going to do, what the wider context turned out to be, and what you did differently because of it. Answers with no change of course are describing awareness, not the behaviour.
In a service-centre role I was asked to tighten our team's handling of incomplete benefit applications — the plan I inherited was simply to return them faster, which would have hit our processing target. Before locking it in, I read the operational guidance behind the target and sat in on the fortnightly call with the policy team.
What I learned changed the plan: returned applications were the single biggest driver of repeat calls into the contact centre, and the department's stated priority that quarter was reducing avoidable contact. Returning forms faster would have made my number better and the system worse.
So I redesigned the approach around completion instead of return: a checklist of the three most common gaps, and a proactive call for anything that could be fixed in five minutes. Our processing time rose slightly — I flagged that to my manager upfront with the reasoning — but returns dropped by around a third, and the contact-centre lead wrote to thank us for the quietest month on that queue in a year.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: This form tests the uncomfortable half of the behaviour: what you do when the big picture costs your own team something. Panels listen for an honest account of the tension — answers where everyone happily agreed suggest the conflict was never real.
I ran the consultation analysis for a local transport scheme that our unit had championed for two years. Midway through, the department published a new appraisal framework that weighted regional connectivity over local journey-time savings — and under the new weighting, our scheme's case weakened while a neighbouring authority's strengthened.
My job was the analysis, and the temptation in the unit was to present the old framing alongside the new and let the ambiguity do the work. I didn't think that survived contact with scrutiny. I wrote the assessment under the new framework straight, showed clearly what had changed and why, and included one page on what would need to be true for our scheme to score competitively — realistic scope changes, not cosmetic ones.
The scheme was paused rather than approved, which was the right call under the framework, and the scope note I wrote became the basis of the revised bid the following year. My director used the assessment as an example of how to handle a framework change without losing credibility.
Marking guide
Knowing the big picture is not the same as saying it under pressure
Panels probe this behaviour with follow-ups — 'so what did it cost?', 'who disagreed?'. A live aurate session runs those follow-ups against your actual examples and marks the answers on the same four criteria as the guidance above. Two free sessions. No credit card.
Try it freeWhy it's asked: A common form for candidates joining from the private sector or another department — the panel is testing whether your outside experience connects to their context, rather than being recited at it. The trap is presenting your old world as self-evidently better.
When I moved from retail operations into a government digital team, my instinct was to import the weekly trading review we ran in retail — every metric, every week, everyone in the room. I quickly realised that transplanting it wholesale would fail: the service's cycles were monthly, and half the room's 'metrics' were statutory duties that don't flex the way sales do.
So I took the one element that genuinely transferred — a standing question, 'what did users do differently this week?' — and attached it to the team's existing monthly governance instead of creating a new meeting. I paired it with a one-page summary drawn from data the team already collected but rarely discussed.
Within three months the monthly review had shifted from reporting progress against plan to discussing what the service's users were actually doing, and two of the changes it prompted were adopted by a neighbouring service team. The head of service described it as the first time an import from outside had made the existing rhythm better rather than competing with it.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: The senior form of the behaviour. Stopping work is harder than starting it — panels want evidence you can make that call on strategic grounds, communicate it to people invested in the work, and hold the decision under pushback.
I inherited a programme of six workstreams, one of which — a locally popular reporting dashboard — consumed two of my nine staff. It was well built and well liked. It was also, when I traced it back, answering a question the organisation had stopped asking: the performance regime it served had been replaced a year earlier.
I tested the conclusion before acting on it. I asked the three teams who received the dashboard what decisions it fed; two gave examples that the standard management information already covered, and one used it out of habit. I took a closure recommendation to the programme board with that evidence, a two-month wind-down, and a plan that moved both staff onto the workstream supporting the new regime.
The hardest part was the team who built it — I told them directly, explained the reasoning face to face, and made sure the board minute credited the dashboard's quality rather than framing closure as failure. Six months on, the redeployed pair had cut the new regime's data lag from three weeks to one, which was worth more to the organisation than the dashboard had ever been.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: A habits question — panels want a mechanism, not a value statement. Strong answers name the routine that reconnects them to context: reading the operational plan when targets change, a standing agenda item, a monthly conversation with the downstream team.
Why it's asked: The research form. Panels are checking you've read the room you're trying to join: the outcome delivery plan, recent announcements, what the role's team actually owns. A candidate who can connect two named departmental priorities to the job description has done the behaviour live, in the interview.
Why it's asked: The interdependency form — closely related to working together, but scored here on the noticing. Strong answers catch the downstream effect early, quantify it, and adjust course before being asked to.
Why it's asked: A situational form testing judgement structure: escalate blindly and you look junior; decide silently and you look reckless. Strong answers weigh both priorities, form a recommendation, and take it to the right owner with the tension made explicit.
Why it's asked: The strengths-format cousin of this behaviour. It is scored on authenticity and energy rather than STAR structure — answer in under a minute, honestly, with one brief example of when that connection to public outcome actually pulled you through a hard patch.
It is one of the nine Success Profiles behaviours: understanding how your role supports organisational objectives and wider Civil Service priorities. In an interview it means evidencing a moment where the wider context — strategy, policy intent, public impact — genuinely changed what you did, not just what you knew.
Use the structure of the behaviour rather than a government setting: a time you changed course because of company strategy, customer impact, or a downstream team. Panels score the connection between context and action — the setting can be a shop floor, a school or a software team, provided the wider view demonstrably steered the decision.
At EO and HEO, panels usually want awareness that changed a task: you knew why the work existed and adjusted accordingly. From SEO upwards they increasingly test trade-offs — balancing local against national, reallocating effort, or stopping work — and expect you to have communicated those calls to the people affected.
For the research-style questions, yes — read the department's outcome delivery plan and recent ministerial statements before the interview, and be ready to name two priorities the role serves. For behaviour examples, the priority you cite should be the one that actually applied at the time, told accurately.
Yes, and you should for the 'tell us about a time' forms. The beat to protect is the link between Situation and Action: the wider context you describe must be the reason your action changed. If the story works without the context, it isn't evidencing this behaviour.
Two free sessions. No credit card.