GOV.UK defines this behaviour as: "Form effective partnerships and relationships with people both internally and externally, from a range of diverse backgrounds, sharing information, resources and support." (Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours, GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0.) The scoring weight sits on effective and relationships — panels want partnerships that produced something, built on relationships that survived friction, not politeness that happened to be plural.
This page banks the behaviour’s main question forms with four marked model answers across its range: joint working across organisational boundaries, an external partnership, a strained relationship repaired, and joining an established team at speed. The marking guidance shows the follow-ups each answer invites — read those before choosing your own examples.
The commonest failure mode is worth naming upfront: answers that describe working near other people. If your example would read the same with the other party replaced by a shared drive, it is not evidencing this behaviour.
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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. Panels listen for genuine jointness — shared goal, divided labour, mutual dependency — and for your specific contribution to making the partnership function, beyond your share of the tasks.
A run of cases my team assessed kept stalling at the same point: they needed housing status confirmed by the local authority before we could complete, and the requests sat in a generic inbox for anything up to three weeks. Their team, it turned out, had the mirror-image complaint about information they needed from us.
I asked their team leader for half an hour and came with our stalled-case list rather than a proposal — we counted the mutual dependency first, which changed the meeting's temperature entirely. Together we designed a small exchange: a named contact on each side, a shared fortnightly list of pending items in both directions, and an agreement that anything on the list twice got a phone call, not another email.
Our average stall dropped from about three weeks to four days, theirs improved similarly, and the arrangement survived both of us changing roles — the named contacts just changed names. What made it work, I think, was starting from the mutual count: neither side was asking a favour, so neither side could quietly deprioritise it.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: The external form — different incentives, different vocabularies, no shared management chain. Panels score how you handled the difference: what the partner needed that your organisation wouldn't naturally give, and how you built trust across the boundary.
Our service needed to reach a group our own channels consistently missed, and a small local charity already had their trust — decades of it. The naive version of the partnership was 'they refer people to us'. Their coordinator was politely lukewarm, and when I asked why, she was direct: previous public-sector partnerships had extracted their credibility and given nothing back.
So we designed it as an exchange with their costs at the centre. Referrals came to a named officer — me — on a direct line, never a call centre; I went to their drop-in one morning a month so their clients could meet the service as a person first; and we gave the charity a quarterly summary of what happened after each referral, because 'we never find out what happened' was their sorest point. In return they told us, bluntly and usefully, why our standard letters frightened their clients — which fed a rewrite.
Referrals from that route went from almost none to a steady monthly flow that held for the two years I was in post, and the coordinator became the person other charities rang to vouch for working with us. The partnership cost me one morning a month and a quarterly summary; it bought the service a channel money couldn't have built.
Marking guide
Partnership stories get probed for the friction
'What did it cost you?' 'Where did you disagree?' — panels push past the harmony to find the behaviour. A live aurate session runs those follow-ups against your real examples and marks the answers on the same four criteria used above. Two free sessions. No credit card.
Try it freeWhy it's asked: The friction form, asked directly. Panels want ownership of your side of the breakdown, a concrete repair move, and a working relationship at the end — not a friendship. Answers that make the other party the whole problem fail quietly.
After a system outage, the relationship between my operations team and the infrastructure team went from cool to hostile: our incident report had named their change as the cause, they felt ambushed by the wording, and within a fortnight both teams were communicating through tickets alone — which was slowing every joint task we had.
I started with my side of it. Re-reading our report, the technical content was right but one sentence read as blame in a way I hadn't intended and wouldn't have accepted about my own team. I went to their lead in person, said exactly that — right findings, wrong sentence, my signature on it — and asked what would make joint work workable again rather than proposing my own fix.
Her ask was simple: sight of anything naming her team before it circulates. We agreed a 24-hour courtesy review — comments advisory, facts non-negotiable — and I offered the same in reverse. The ticket wall came down over about a month of it working; the real test came at the next incident, which we wrote up jointly from the start. That report went out with both names on it and no courtesy round needed.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: The integration form — common for career movers and anyone whose CV shows recent arrival. Panels want a deliberate method for earning trust fast, and evidence you adapted to the team you found rather than the one you expected.
I joined a nine-person project team on a six-month secondment, mid-delivery, into a role whose previous holder had been popular — a combination that usually buys a cold month. I decided to spend my first fortnight deliberately: I asked each person for 20 minutes and two questions — what should I keep doing exactly as she did it, and what's the one thing you'd change if the new person happened to be changeable.
The answers redrew my picture of the team. Two processes I'd have modernised were sacred for good reasons I'd never have guessed; one report everyone assumed everyone else valued turned out to be valued by nobody. I kept the sacred things visibly — and said whose advice that was — and used the worthless report as my first change, because retiring it cost nothing and proved the listening had been real.
By week six I was getting the informal early warnings that are the actual currency of a team — 'you didn't hear this from me, but' — which the project manager told me had taken my predecessor a year. The secondment was extended twice, and my handover note to my own successor began with the same two questions.
Marking guide
Why it's asked: The generosity form of the behaviour — 'sharing information, resources and support' asked at face value. The differentiator is cost: what the sharing took from your team's time or advantage, and why you judged it right anyway.
Why it's asked: The diversity-of-background clause in working form: analysts with operational staff, policy with frontline, civil servants with contractors. Panels score whether you treated the difference as expertise to be used rather than translation overhead.
Why it's asked: A situational form testing partnership under strain: diagnose before escalating (capacity, clarity or will?), protect the relationship while naming the gap, and know the point at which the courtesy stops and the formal route starts.
Why it's asked: Working together is not agreeing together. Panels want the disagreement surfaced early and worked on its merits — evidence you could hold a professional dispute without it becoming a relationship dispute, and land on a way forward both sides could execute.
Why it's asked: The strengths-format variant — under a minute, honest about your grain (the connector, the finisher, the challenger, the person who notices who has gone quiet), with one quick moment that shows it. Panels cross-check the claim against how you interact with them.
It is the Success Profiles behaviour about forming effective partnerships and relationships — internally and externally, across diverse backgrounds — and genuinely sharing information, resources and support. Panels score interdependence, what you contributed, how friction was handled, and whether the relationship lasted.
Difficult examples usually score better, because friction is where the behaviour becomes visible. A partnership with a named disagreement, a repair, or an unequal start demonstrates relationship skill; a frictionless one demonstrates luck. Keep the difficulty professional rather than personal in the telling, and end on the working relationship, not the grievance.
They overlap, but the scoring focus differs: communicating and influencing is scored on the message — clarity, audience design, legitimate persuasion — while working together is scored on the relationship and the joint outcome. The same project can serve either; choose based on whether your strongest evidence is what you conveyed or what you built.
Look at the edges of your solo work: the people you hand over to, depend on for inputs, or share systems with. Building a reliable exchange with a downstream team, improving a handover, or repairing a strained interface all evidence the behaviour — the partnership does not need to be a formal project.
Yes for the experience-based forms — with the Action section carrying the relationship work specifically: what you learned about the other side, what you gave, how friction was handled. Close the Result with durability where you can; the other party returning by choice is the strongest final beat this behaviour has.
Two free sessions. No credit card.