Our Values and Behaviours
In our drive to champion and protect England's historic places we are defined by the people and culture of our organisation. Diversity is key to our success; however, we have identified some core behaviours or characteristics that enable us to be successful in our aims.
Whichever role you take on within Historic England you will ideally be able to demonstrate a range of the following behaviours. Click on the links below to find out more.
Contents
Passionate
- Showing enthusiasm
- Using evidence to establish credibility
- Explaining why what you are talking about matters, to inspire action
- Delivering high standards and taking pride in the quality of your work
- Encouraging others to share what they care about
- Celebrating success
- Using Historic England’s vision, purpose, values and corporate plan as the context for your work
- Being generous and supporting people who take the initiative
- Making criticism constructive
Curious
- Taking responsibility for keeping your skills and knowledge up to date
- Enabling others to learn and support them through cascading opportunities, constructive feedback, mentoring and coaching
- Finding out about the wider context for your work, other parts of Historic England and seeking out others’ knowledge and experience
- Being confident about your own skills and knowledge, and being willing to share them with others
- Seeking feedback on your strengths and weaknesses, and learning from your mistakes
- Reviewing and reflecting on successes and failures and sharing your insights
- Being open to making changes and doing things differently
- Understanding and addressing your unconscious bias
Collaborative
- Agreeing common objectives and being willing to amend your own priorities
- Being clear about the benefits of collaboration and keeping processes proportionate
- Involving the right people at the right time
- Understanding when to delegate and when to escalate
- Doing what you say you will do to time, budget and agreed standards
- Communicating progress, challenges and changes to stakeholders
- Making timely decisions
- Supporting decisions agreed collectively
- Recognising the efforts of others and saying thank you
- Being aware of the impact you have on other people
Open
- Seeking, using and responding to feedback
- Admitting mistakes and changing things if they don’t work
- Being honest when you need help and being supportive if someone asks you for help
- Listening to and understanding your audience, and finding out what they want and need
- Engaging new audiences e.g. by enabling image descriptions
- Actively seeking new perspectives, being respectful and making an effort to understand others’ motivations and practices
- Being open to new ideas and ways of working e.g. digital collaboration tools
- Understanding your audience: communicating creatively and accessibly, and adapting your style where needed
- Explaining your decisions
- Using plain English
Responsible
- Putting our stakeholders at the centre of what we do and being polite and helpful
- Maintaining respect and appreciation for others at all times, no matter what their role, specialism, age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, disability, educational or religious background is
- Being fair and consistent
- Leading by example and role modelling good practice
- Challenging poor behaviour and supporting others to do so
- Complying with the law and our own rules – know it, apply it, monitor it
- Providing value for money for the tax payer – spending every £ as if it was your own
- Taking courageous decisions and supporting others to do the same
- Using the public value framework to increase the impact of your work
- Being an ambassador for the whole of Historic England
- Keeping your diary up to date, making it available to others and turning up on time
- Maintaining a good work life balance, and looking after your own and others’ wellbeing
Next steps
-
Search all jobs
See the latest jobs available at Historic England.
-
Historic England on LinkedIn
Connect with us on LinkedIn.
