Changing the traditional business management system (AAS)

How have you contributed to solving a challenge and to implementing change or reform? (Be specific and include: what aspect/s of your leadership knowledge, skills and practice you consider to be well established and effective; which people or organisations you worked with to solve the problem; and what creative methods were used.)*:

This is one of the AAS essays. Pls kindly give me feedback on my essay.

Changing the traditional business management system

I confronted a great deal of challenges in my family's small business enterprise. I believe that other small-business enterprises would have confronted those challenges.

The obvious challenge was traditional business management system which was leading to limited productivity, poor customer services, and ineffective budgeting plans and so on. This challenge resulted in limitations to grow the business and to make competitive advantage with other rivals. This was because my parents did the business with the same way they performed in the past three decades. The business was not improved so far and was not popular compared with the same ones although the life span of the business is over three decades. Seeing the slow progression of my family business, I observed our business's strengths and weaknesses in comparison with other competitors. After that, I gave advice to my parents to change the way of managing the business.

This was introduced by counselling with my parents and elder sister to implement step by step changes. As a first step, I listened to the customers' voice and comments to meet their needs and wants. Then, I motivated our employees to involve in delivering fast and reliable services and the best quality control of products. I explained them that our business's success is also their success to have shared goals and high performance working in our business. I also suggested my parents to reward employees for their best services and performance and to train them so that they would engage in our change process and their productivity would increase. Besides, I also explained my parents about the importance of budgeting plans for the business's success and initiated to develop budgeting plans.

Consequently, the small business has become improved among other competitors because of good services and best quality. We got more competitive advantage than others by having more new customers and existing customers' loyalty. We can also give more incentives to our employees and they are, in turn, more involved and committed to the business's success. Finally, we got chances to expand the business for the future.

The response is running a bit long. You should limit this to 2000 characters with spaces. that means, you should write no more than 250 words for your response. While the narrative is good, it falls short when referring to what aspect/s of your leadership knowledge, skills and practice you consider to be well established and effective. The sens of dialogue is good, but it is not the only method of leadership that the AAS is looking for.

You need to be more active in the description. In truth, your response sounds more like you functioned more in an advisory, rather than leadership capacity. That is because you were merely assisting your parents rather than taking the leadership role from them. You were representing your parents to the employees, which is different from your leading the employees. It also isn't clear in the essay if you are not at the helm of the family run business or if you are still functioning in an advisory capacity. In which case, the example you gave isn't a real leadership skill that contributed to a real change or reform in the business.

There are no real creative methods used to lead the team. Again, discussion and explanation are good, but it is not a real leadership trait. Your leadership skills, due to your advisory capacity isn't really that strong in this essay. It would be better if you could somehow convince the reviewer that your parents turned over the business to you and you had to implement actual reforms, that resulted in a creative leadership role for you as the head of the company.

Dear Holt,

Thank you very much indeed for your helpful feedback. You can really point out the key facts I missed to add in.
I will revise this essay as you suggested.

Best wishes,
Julia