Grade 6 Making Effective Decisions Behaviour Statements

Grade 6 behaviour statements
Write a Grade 6 Making Effective Decisions statement around a clear senior responsibility
At Grade 6, Making Effective Decisions is about reaching clear, defensible decisions from complex evidence while keeping ownership at the right level and remaining open to challenge. The strongest examples show what you personally decided, how you led through others and what changed beyond your immediate team.

Making Effective Decisions is about reaching clear, defensible decisions from complex evidence while keeping ownership at the right level and remaining open to challenge. For a Grade 6 role, this usually means making or recommending decisions with significant delivery, financial, policy or reputational consequences, often with incomplete evidence and competing stakeholder expectations.

A strong example should make clear the decision you personally owned, the evidence and options you tested, and how you handled uncertainty or disagreement. The result should show a timely decision, clearer accountability, reduced risk, protected value for money or delivery that continued despite uncertainty.

What are the Making Effective Decisions criteria at Grade 6 level?

The official senior-grade behaviour guidance contains 7 points for Making Effective Decisions. Your vacancy may assess only selected parts, but the statement should make the relevant wording easy to see in your evidence.

Criterion 1
clarify your own understanding and stakeholder needs and expectations, before making decisions
Define the decision and clarify what stakeholders need before moving into analysis or options.
Criterion 2
ensure decision making happens at the right level, not allowing unnecessary bureaucracy to hinder delivery
Keep important decisions at the proper level while delegating routine judgement and removing unnecessary approval steps.
Criterion 3
encourage both innovative suggestions and challenge from others, to inform decision making
Invite ideas and challenge early enough to affect the choice, not after the recommendation is fixed.
Criterion 4
analyse and accurately interpret data from various sources to support decisions
Use several credible sources and explain how you tested data quality, assumptions or conflicting evidence.
Criterion 5
find the best option by identifying positives, negatives, risks and implications
Compare genuine options and make the trade-offs, consequences and residual risks visible.
Criterion 6
present reasonable conclusions from a wide range of complex and sometimes incomplete evidence
Reach a defensible conclusion where evidence is complex or incomplete, without pretending uncertainty does not exist.
Criterion 7
make decisions confidently even when details are unclear or if they prove to be unpopular
Take accountable action when more information would create harmful delay, including where the decision is unpopular.

How to structure your statement

Use a simple structure: Situation, Task, Action and Result. Do not place these labels in the final statement unless the application specifically asks for them.

Situation

Use one or two sentences to set the context. State the service, programme, policy or professional area and the problem that made the example important.

Task

Make your accountability explicit. For Making Effective Decisions, the task should identify the decision you personally owned, the evidence and options you tested, and how you handled uncertainty or disagreement.

Action

Give most of the words to the decisions and actions that demonstrate Making Effective Decisions. Explain how you used evidence, led or involved others and responded when the situation changed. For this behaviour, keep the action centred on the decision you personally owned, the evidence and options you tested, and how you handled uncertainty or disagreement.

Result

Show what changed because of your action. A strong result may include a timely decision, clearer accountability, reduced risk, protected value for money or delivery that continued despite uncertainty. Use accurate measures where they help, but keep the result tied to the behaviour.

Subscribers can unlock practical guidance for turning the official criteria into a high-scoring Grade 6 Making Effective Decisions statement, plus three complete examples written around Grade 6 accountability and impact.

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