Scholarship / 'A leader from the ground' Leadership Essay [CHEVENING] [3]

Below is my leadership essay for CHEVENING Leadership/Influencer question. Please kindly help review it and I am more than welcome for any suggestions!

A leader from the ground

In my early age, being a leader in the class was one of the things Thai kids were afraid of. In fact, this type of idea has been deeply rooted in Thai culture since I can remember. If you are the one to raise your hand in the public, you will be likely deemed as a show-off by surrounding people, which is not the nicest thing you would expect from the society and in my opinion, is one of the first national problems needed to get fixed. As I grew up, I learned to aware of how important being able to influence people from my own experiences, it all started during my senior year at university where our group had encountered a chilling machine malfunction in the middle of the night, thankfully I noticed that the beverage shop had ice seller contact glued to the wall, so we survived that crisis as I could successfully convince my teammate to ditch the machine and go back to cooling the liquid with ice. It was the time when I really realized decision-making is crucial, otherwise the project would have been further delayed. In my working experience, I began my career as an investment consultant at Maybank Kim Eng Securities (Thailand) where my leadership started to directly impact my life. Working as investment consultant had been always fun, I had to analyze all sort of data to create an investment plan to offer customers a practical and profitable strategy. However, acquiring customers can be done neither sitting in front of the computer nor selling ideas on phone, that was when I thought of doing an intimate customer approach, so I published the idea of setting an exhibition booth at a crowded office building to introduce the company's products to my manager. The experiment came out successful and I did a lot of things in order to achieve corporate target, nonetheless, greater than the number of customers and experiences we gained, the task had me realized how much we would have lost if nobody would be willing to lead the team to initiate something selflessly and let the opportunity passed by. Which in this case, I am grateful that I happened to be the person to lead the team. To sum up, my leadership has been evolving from the ground and it will strongly continue to strengthen over time. With opportunities coming in my life, I hope I could develop my knowledge, communication skills, creativity, and become the person who can be an inspiration to the society with wisdom, bravery, and ethics.

Nat

Scholarship / [CHEVENING LEADERSHIP AND INFLUENCER] GREAT LEADER IS THE ONLY SOLUTION TO UNDERDEVELOPMENT [3]

"Being a leader does not require a title"

Over the last sixteen months, I have been working as a commercial analyst who has a hand in company's hedging activity, which is truly a high-pressure task and overwhelmingly requires guts of taking risks and an ability to make quick decisions. Apart from fundamental skills that are essential to developing a sharp strategy, conveying information as an intelligible media, yet practical and effective, to a work group in order to bring minds together is deemed to be way more difficult.

As cliché as it sounds, however, the phrase "Being a leader does not require a title" remains one of my all-time favorite quotes due to the fact that it always makes hearers feel motivated and uplifted, thus becoming pumped to create something meaningful. In reality, despite not being in a management team, I have been a critical person to analyze data, interpret and communicate through the team to enhance understanding of the situation as to why the decision is made at certain times. Moreover, although convincing the team to believe and follow the action plan was not an absolutely easy thing to do, I eventually managed to accomplish the aim with good cooperation from the team. Regardless of the aforementioned difficulty, it is needless to say that the effort paid off nicely, the hedging performance of the products that I was in charge of turned out truly impressive, in that it was the most profitable amongst hedged products and, at the end of the day, met the objective of the hedging committee.

Personally, I have a strong belief that a leader should be able to turn complex knowledge into functional action and translate to the public effectively, so subordinates or beneficiaries can process further which will totally lead to success or change. As a Thai person who has been involved in many government actions or public hearings, specifically in energy department, I witnessed that a lot of information, plans, and analysis that are vital to people's living have generally been criticized or known among insiders, which could be the reason that hinders nation's development due to the lack of basic understanding from people. By receiving Chevening scholarship, I am wholeheartedly committed to utilizing the opportunity to gain as much knowledge in the field of interest and coming back to fix the flaws I have been seeing for a long time.