Scholarship / Telecom Company Specialist - Chevening leadership question [3]

the art of motivating

It is worthy to mention that leadership in a simple definition is the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal. Based on this definition I can claim that I had a good background in leading and influencing people in different levels and steps in my life.

As a product specialist in one the biggest telecom company in middle east (MTN Irancell) I am in charge of so many products and projects and the most important one is self-care application named "MyIrancell" which is the most important channel for customers to manage their bill, account, packages and stuff like this. The workflow for this application is like this: Requester from different departments should send their requirements to me and my manager to validate and assess the items and prioritize them for the development. Next step is to draw a mock up and clarify the requests to IT and development team. After developing I should test and check end to end of the feature with Quality Control team and after launching the service I should communicate with brand team to promote and advertise the new change in different channels like TV, billboard, digital channels and so on. As it can be drawn from the process I need to debate, discuss and communicate with professionals with a set of skills different to mine, therefore, my first goal was to attain ways to communicate effectively with different teams from IT resources who have technical point of view to high level managers who have strategic and cost-benefit approach. Me as a coordinator will manage and handle all requests which come from high level managers. I will get all details and their needs, then I will explain all facilities and limitations we have in system to form the idea, and sometimes I totally convince them that the feature is useless or unnecessary at the time being, so somehow it shows my capability on inspiration and influence on managers. In the next step I should simplify the requirements to the developers. Working with IT man who are very strict and have zero-one approach is really challenging and hard but I always have warm and friendly and the same time very professional relations with them to handle the project smoothly with all tiredness and exhaustion which agile projects would have. Afterwards i should define test-cases and explain them to Quality Control team to test new feature end to end in order not to have any issue. Managing and handling quality control test-case are really time taking and vital because this tests should cover all aspects of security, user experience, functionality and IT guys mostly focus on technical point and its my responsibility to lead them to test comprehensively. Finally I should brief the idea and service to brand team to create proper materials for different type of campaigns and channels. All this process is really energy taking and very sensitive which I really did handle them smoothly and professionally without any serious challenge or conflict with different experts and managers in the company.

The "MyIrancell" application now has more than 2 million daily users which at the first day I accept the responsibility the figure was near 100 thousand per day. Being gold performer in the department also is somehow indicators of this leadership and influencing skills.

Scholarship / The more communication you make, the more growth you will find in your networking and career [3]

chevening Networking question

In my opinion, the more communication you make, and the more you respect to various beliefs, more growth you will find in your networking and career. Because of this approach, I always could find friends and make relations with different type of characteristics, religions and beliefs.

Now I have a great opportunity to showcase my networking skills in an international IT based company which resources from India, Pakistan, China, South Africa, Nigeria, Lebanon and different cities of Iran work in it. I'm an introvert and I needed to improve my communication skills, so it was not easy to speak in public and in new environment. Nevertheless, I was prepared well and overcame my unease. As a result, I established a good networking with different people. Moreover, I made a community comprises Indian and Pakistani who have a historical, political and religious problems together. I invited them all to go mountain climbing and playing cricket and after few weeks we became really fantastic group of friends and even now I still keep in touch with them while most of them had left Iran because of sanctions.

Also in my career position which I should get some orders from high level managers and requests from different professionals and then manage and handle a technical team to implement the project, concrete networking is highly required and I am quite well-networked. Due to my manager's -M.s. Grace, the senior manger of product in marketing department- acknowledgement I had a great relations with high level managers,other departments, colleagues and my team.

As a leader of development team, I always try to have friendly and accordingly professional relations with my subordinates and then do my best to broaden my network with different departments and divisions in order to smooth the process of the approval, development, testing and launching a feature or service or shorten the time of fixing and resolving issues. As a evidence, I can mention a case when there was a big mistake from my team which could lead to huge revenue lost, I tried to keep clam and instead of accusing resources, tried to resolve issue very soon. I got informed at night after work-time, so immediately I asked my team to just probe the issue and extract the route cause. After figuring out the reason, I called different resources and experts from Finance, Marketing, IT and vendors and find the best solution and then I contacted Chief Marketing Officer at midnight to get his approval to proceed the solution. So we were succeed to block the revenue leakage in a short time.

My personal goals and career strategy motivated the strong professional network relevance. As a Chevening awardee I would have a possibility to collaborate with the best scientists in UK and work on high international level. I plan to cooperate with foreign scholars to present our insights on different cultural prospective integration and learning UK culture with it's century traditions and history. I want to be a part of the strong network of young leaders from all over the world to bring solutions for world issues. Sharing my dreams and exchanging perspectives with them will broaden my horizon and shape my future goals.