Need more EO Making Effective Decisions examples?
The dedicated statement guide gives you additional worked EO examples for this behaviour.
Making Effective Decisions: Civil Service Behaviour at Executive Officer Grade
The behaviour Making Effective Decisions is about using evidence, sound judgment, and clear reasoning to reach outcomes that support organisational priorities. At Executive Officer (EO) grade, you are expected to gather relevant information, weigh up options, and make fair decisions that are consistent with policy and guidance.
This behaviour shows that you can think logically, consider the wider context, and explain your decisions clearly. It involves assessing risks, seeking input where needed, and ensuring your choices are based on facts and analysis rather than assumptions.
When preparing a 250-word statement for this behaviour, aim to demonstrate:
⚖️ A belief statement showing your commitment to fair and evidence-based decisions.
⚖️ A situation where you were required to make or support a decision.
⚖️ The actions you took to gather information, analyse options, and apply reasoning.
⚖️ The results, which should evidence good judgment, positive outcomes, or strengthened confidence in your decision-making.
The B-STAR method gives you a clear way to present your example, guiding you to set the background, describe the task, explain the actions you took, and outline the results achieved. Strong examples will highlight your ability to remain objective, use evidence, and ensure your decisions add value to your team and organisation.
The image above provides a full example statement for Making Effective Decisions at EO grade. Use it as a guide to frame your own example, focusing on how your actions led to clear, consistent, and reasoned outcomes.
Making Effective Decisions at EO level
The existing guidance gives you the basic structure. At EO level, your example should show how you gathered evidence, compared options and considered the effect of the decision on users or colleagues.
📊 Gather relevant evidence: use the information that helps you understand the problem rather than relying on assumptions.
⚖️ Compare realistic options: explain what choices were available and why one was stronger.
⚠️ Consider risk and implications: think about cost, service impact, fairness or other consequences relevant to the decision.
👥 Seek input where useful: involve colleagues or specialists when their view improves the decision.
✅ Take responsibility: make or recommend the decision clearly and explain the reasoning.
🔄 Review outcomes: check whether the decision worked and learn from what happened.
What a strong EO statement looks like
Keep the context short and use most of the 250-word limit on the decision itself. The assessor needs to see what evidence you gathered, how you compared the options and what made the final choice reasonable.
Avoid writing that you “considered all options” without naming them. Two or three realistic choices with clear trade-offs usually give much stronger evidence.
Example of the level of evidence to aim for
I believe good decisions come from gathering enough evidence to compare realistic options and being clear about the impact on users.
While supporting a customer-processing team, I noticed repeat delays every morning when a scheduled system task competed with live case activity. My responsibility was to recommend a practical improvement without creating avoidable service risk.
I reviewed incident timings, system-performance data and feedback from colleagues. I identified three options: increase system capacity, move the scheduled task to a quieter period or leave the process unchanged while monitoring it.
I compared the options against cost, implementation effort and customer impact. Increasing capacity could help but required additional cost and lead time. Leaving the process unchanged would continue the morning delays. Rescheduling the task could be tested quickly and reversed if it caused problems elsewhere.
I checked the proposal with the technical owner and operational team, then recommended moving the task overnight with monitoring in place.
The change reduced morning delays and repeat incident tickets without creating a new service issue. I recorded the outcome and agreed a later review of whether extra capacity was still needed.
Quick statement check
✅ Is the decision clear?
✅ Have you shown what evidence you used?
✅ Are the options visible?
✅ Did you consider the people affected?
✅ Is your reasoning easy to follow?
✅ Does the result show whether the decision worked?
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