To be seriously considered for a Senior Executive Service (SES) position, your application must demonstrate your experience, qualifications and accomplishments through the five Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs.) The first Executive Core Qualification is Leading Change, where a candidate must demonstrate creative vision, external awareness, flexibility, resilience, strategic thinking and vision.
THIS LEADING CHANGE EXAMPLE ECQ IS ONLY A PARTIAL STORY AND HAS BEEN MODIFIED. EACH LEADING CHANGE STORY IS UNIQUE AND NO TWO STORIES ARE EXACTLY ALIKE.
As the Director of Financial Management (GS-0301-15) at the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2021, I lead our organization through change with a clear purpose and sense of direction. I deeply value the long-lasting positive effects of change in the corporate federal community. As Director of Financial Management, I gained expertise in instituting organizational change at an executive level. When the Chairman of the agency was looking for an executive to create a stronger administrative and financial management within the agency, I fulfilled the job and was reassigned from Deputy Director to Acting Director.
The scope of my department consists of eight regional offices and our headquarters (HQ). When I first became Acting Director, I realized that our department lacked a budget-planning process and senior executives took little responsibility for financial planning and budgeting overall. Our department was still adjusting to recently implemented rules from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prevent waste and fraud, and our budget officer and senior executives were struggling to adapt.
The greatest challenge I faced was developing an agency-wide budget-planning process that would better focus our efforts to meet strategic objectives. The task became more complicated after our budget officer abruptly left and Members of Congress forced the agency to provide our three years of budget planning and staffing data in only two days. Our 2012 Fiscal Year (FY) mid-year budget allocations and budget call were due at the same time. Despite the pressure we faced from Congress, our pending internal requirements and the sudden loss of our budget officer, I maintained a positive and confident outlook that allowed me to focus on rising to the challenge. I had been chosen by the Chairman to organize the department’s budget plan, and I was determined to rise to the challenge.
To tackle this crisis, I studied the rules recently implemented by the OMB and examined other agencies’ budget programs before seeing what changes could be made to our existing budgeting processes. I developed a viable budget for the next fiscal year by soliciting training assessments and budget-planning documents from administrative officers and senior executives. In my research, I found that previous executives had little prior exposure to budget planning. I then quickly convinced the senior executives that the department would be more successful if I was in charge of the budgeting process. Then, I used my position to educate senior executives about budgeting and strategic planning.
To address the upcoming FY 2020 budget, I developed a senior executive budging training with a team of budgeting and management specialists.
Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs) are the competencies required by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to apply for a Senior Executive Service job. The five ECQs are specifically chosen characteristics and attributes intended to showcase a candidate’s executive experience and nontechnical expertise. For a candidate to become a part of the Senior Executive Service, they must demonstrate their success through these five elements:
When you’re writing your ECQ about Leading Change, you must demonstrate how you brought innovation to the organization that you lead. Choose examples that highlight your creative thinking, strategic capability and resilience in the face of opposition or adversity. Six segments comprise the Leading Change ECQ:
Visit our examples page to read examples on Leading Change ECQs and Leading People ECQs.
As always, the most important thing about ECQs is clearly and thoroughly addressing the competencies within the different essays. But you also need a starting point, the beginning of a career story.
Here are some potential ideas and scenarios that others have used to write highly successful Leading Change narratives:
✓ Designing/implementing new, streamlined policies or business processes to align operations with strategic goals; institute a new mission, approach, or service.
✓ Developing a long-term vision and strategic plan that challenged conventional ways of thinking and addressed shifting requirements, such as economy and political environments.
✓ Standing up a new organization from scratch or changing/expanding a division or group that represents a new capability/service.
✓ Developing a new vision for an organization in disorder and shifting the culture and operations to a more positive environment, while overcoming resistance and using innovative approaches.
✓ Other situations in which your efforts brought about impactful change in support of strategic goals within and/or outside your organization.
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