Scholarship / Leadership Essay: The Silent Trials and Burdens of Being a Leader Today [2]

Hi guys, I'm a Chevening hopeful and I'd really appreciate you taking a look at my essay.

Leadership can be learnt

According to Peter Drucker's The effective executive, Leadership like many things can be learnt. My final year in University taught me how to work under pressure, between running two businesses, battling with course work and our meetings with the Vice chancellor, I learnt my very first lesson in leadership, Time management. This was the first time I had to be in multiple locations on short notices, sometimes at the same time.

The effects of being pulled from separate directions forced me to experiment with delegating some of my responsibilities. I approached a former roommate with a preposition to sell a few Tshirts (initially), because of my increasingly busy schedule. While he wasn't thrilled with the idea at first I persuaded him to give it a try. After accompanying me on several sales pitches, through lots of trial and errors and a little guidance from me, he got comfortable enough to make sales on his own. While at times frustrating I've had to find creative ways of motivating him to deliver, from giving him a free shirt in every batch to wear and show off to friends, to using food and drinks as reward schemes once he's met his weekly quota, I was able to motivate him into making more sales than I ever had, and after sharing a percentage of the proceeds with him, he felt like a stakeholder in the business and made it one of his top priorities.

Being a leader demands seeing things from many different perspectives, it also requires that you use those perspectives to inform your daily interactions with diverse groups of individuals. The entertainment industry is notoriously difficult to break into, especially within the west African market. We had just started Sunset Drive Entertainment Limited and I was it's Executive Officer. After our first few months of operation I came to the realization that if we were to have any chance of survival we would have to make a lot of friends and make them fast. I aggressively pursued strategic partnerships, the combined objective being to capture a larger share of the market by offering greater value at a lesser cost to the consumer.

I have, on many occasions had to justify the need for combining forces as most companies operate on a strict "what's in it for me" basis. This gave me a broadened sense of commercial motivations and sharpened my situational awareness of the corporate interests for different businesses. Business is simple, however getting potential partners to see through the "I win - you win lens" can be challenging. It took us many months to meet the MD of a car dealership and many more months to convince him of our value preposition.

This opportunity will put me on the road map to being a better leader. As a young leader, I'm committed to doing my part in developing human capacity. It is my hope that Chevening will allow me plant seeds of inspiration for those who will later follow.