SEO Working Together interview questions test whether you can build productive relationships across teams, create shared ownership and keep collaboration effective when people have different priorities or pressures.
At Senior Executive Officer level, the panel is looking for more than being a helpful colleague. Strong answers show how you established professional relationships, shared information and resources, encouraged different perspectives and protected respectful working while still delivering a shared result.
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The complete HEO/SEO preparation pack includes current examples across all nine behaviours, with 350+ sample interview answers.
What Working Together means at SEO level
🤝 Build professional relationships: invest time in stakeholders inside and outside your immediate team.
🔗 Join up teams: share information, resources and support across organisational boundaries.
🎯 Create common focus: help people understand the shared outcome rather than protecting only their own team's priorities.
🌍 Seek different perspectives: actively include people with different backgrounds and experiences.
🧠 Support wellbeing: consider workload and individual needs when pressure increases.
💬 Protect respectful working: set clear expectations for professional behaviour and constructive challenge.
SEO Working Together interview questions
❓ Describe a time you worked across teams to deliver a shared outcome.
❓ Tell us about a time you had to manage conflicting priorities between stakeholders.
❓ Give an example of how you built trust with a difficult or sceptical stakeholder.
❓ Describe a time you actively sought views from people with different perspectives.
❓ Tell us about a time you had to address behaviour that was damaging team collaboration.
❓ Give an example of how you supported colleagues when workload or pressure increased.
How to answer with B-STAR
💭 Belief: briefly explain your approach to collaboration.
📍 Situation: describe the shared goal and what made cooperation difficult.
🎯 Task: state your responsibility for bringing people together.
🛠️ Action: show how you built relationships, shared information, managed differences and kept people involved.
📈 Result: explain what improved because collaboration became stronger.
Example answer: resolving cross-team disagreement
Belief: I believe strong cross-team delivery comes from understanding why people disagree, creating one shared outcome and making responsibilities visible.
Situation: I was coordinating a service improvement involving operations, digital colleagues and an external supplier. Each group agreed the service needed to improve, but they disagreed over who owned recurring defects and which team should absorb the additional work.
Task: I needed to rebuild cooperation so the service could improve without the discussion becoming a blame exercise.
Action: I met each group separately first to understand their pressures and concerns. I then brought them together around one shared outcome: reducing repeat failures affecting users.
I created a joint action log showing issue, owner, dependency and target date. I also made sure evidence from frontline staff and quieter team members was included rather than allowing the most senior voices to dominate. When one discussion became personal, I stopped it, reset expectations around respectful challenge and moved the group back to evidence and user impact.
Where capacity was genuinely constrained, I worked with team leads to resequence work rather than expecting one group to absorb all the pressure.
Result: Ownership became clearer, repeat defects reduced and relationships between the teams improved. The joint review continued after the immediate issue because stakeholders found it useful for resolving dependencies earlier.
Practise more HEO/SEO interview questions
Use the complete preparation pack to compare Working Together answers with examples across the other Civil Service behaviours.
What interviewers are looking for
✅ Evidence that you built relationships rather than only attended meetings.
✅ A genuine difference in priorities, viewpoints or capacity.
✅ Examples of information or resource being shared across boundaries.
✅ Clear evidence that different perspectives affected the approach.
✅ A result showing stronger delivery or more effective cooperation.
Good scenario ideas
💡 Resolving disagreement between delivery teams over ownership or priorities.
💡 Coordinating several teams around one service or project outcome.
💡 Improving collaboration with an external supplier or partner.
💡 Supporting colleagues through a period of high workload or change.
💡 Bringing different stakeholder perspectives into a policy or service decision.
Common mistakes
❌ Making the answer about being friendly: show how collaboration improved the result.
❌ Using “we” throughout: keep your own contribution visible.
❌ Ignoring disagreement: strong Working Together evidence often includes a real difference to resolve.
❌ Claiming inclusion without evidence: explain whose perspective you actively sought.
❌ Forgetting wellbeing: show how you considered sustained pressure where relevant.
For written evidence, see the Working Together 250-word statement example.
Prepare across all nine HEO/SEO behaviours
How to answer a Working Together conflict question
Do not spend most of the answer describing the disagreement. Explain what each side needed, what you did to create a shared focus and how you kept the discussion constructive.
A stronger SEO answer also shows what changed because of your intervention, such as clearer ownership, better information flow or an agreed way of resolving future dependencies.
