Dear experts, please review my essay on leadership and influence which I wrote with a view to submitting it for the Chevening scholarship. Your valuable input will highly appreciated and your comments on my essay will be regarded as guidelines for me.
Chevening is looking for people who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answers.
I believe that my intent to accept challenges as opportunities and to be able to empathetic towards others define me as a self-driven and compassionate leader.
To begin with, starting my career with the 4th ranked pharmaceutical company in Bangladesh was a real boost for me that reflected initially on my confidence to give an instant speech on the very first day at my work on the orientation program for the new employees. However, when I was appointed as the acting in-charge of the analytical validation team I accepted the challenge as an opportunity to excel my expertise in my passionate field of work. At that time, validation team was not functioning effectively by not meeting deadline for different methods validation. After interacting with co-workers and from past few years' experience, I figured out the underlying reasons: one is the lack of proper distribution of works with proper accountability and another one is the deficiency in motivation among the team members. After consulting with my supervisor, I arranged a team meeting where I outlined team's next one-year goal and breaking down it to per month tasks where four of us were well assigned our duties. I allowed everyone to express their fear and reservations about the goal and I sold my vision to them and also tried to encourage team members highlighting how our work is directly related to company's growth which in turn related to individual's career development. They felt valued and everyone accepted my plan. This worked very well that made the team efficient and proactive. Furthermore, besides performing validation, team got additional responsibilities of "Instrument Calibration" considering its performance and I was awarded promotions in following two consecutive years. I learned from this that employees get motivated when they feel as an active part of the organization and have a definite goal ahead of them.
Earlier, while being involved with an educational organization where I used to teach chemistry to secondary school students, I launched a campaign along with my students for collecting warm clothes for destitute families in our community during a winter season. I motivated the students by pushing them to think about the other part of the society where people cannot afford to protect themselves from cold weather whereas some of us have old redundant clothes. I also instigated them to spread the message using Facebook by creating a page for this purpose and involve community people to participate in the humanitarian act. It was resulted in a huge response from the locals and I anticipated that whole success of the program was largely dependent on successful distribution. Therefore, two groups were made with respective team leaders and clothes were successfully distributed to the poor families living in slums in our locality. This campaign resulted in positive impact on the participated youths and on the society at large. I feel guilty for not being able to pursue the campaign on following years.
With Chevening Scholarship, it will broaden an avenue for me to learn from more advanced society, their proven way to deal with poverty and, on individual level, how leadership is linked with integrity and effective planning.
Chevening is looking for people who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answers.
a self-driven and compassionate leader
I believe that my intent to accept challenges as opportunities and to be able to empathetic towards others define me as a self-driven and compassionate leader.
To begin with, starting my career with the 4th ranked pharmaceutical company in Bangladesh was a real boost for me that reflected initially on my confidence to give an instant speech on the very first day at my work on the orientation program for the new employees. However, when I was appointed as the acting in-charge of the analytical validation team I accepted the challenge as an opportunity to excel my expertise in my passionate field of work. At that time, validation team was not functioning effectively by not meeting deadline for different methods validation. After interacting with co-workers and from past few years' experience, I figured out the underlying reasons: one is the lack of proper distribution of works with proper accountability and another one is the deficiency in motivation among the team members. After consulting with my supervisor, I arranged a team meeting where I outlined team's next one-year goal and breaking down it to per month tasks where four of us were well assigned our duties. I allowed everyone to express their fear and reservations about the goal and I sold my vision to them and also tried to encourage team members highlighting how our work is directly related to company's growth which in turn related to individual's career development. They felt valued and everyone accepted my plan. This worked very well that made the team efficient and proactive. Furthermore, besides performing validation, team got additional responsibilities of "Instrument Calibration" considering its performance and I was awarded promotions in following two consecutive years. I learned from this that employees get motivated when they feel as an active part of the organization and have a definite goal ahead of them.
Earlier, while being involved with an educational organization where I used to teach chemistry to secondary school students, I launched a campaign along with my students for collecting warm clothes for destitute families in our community during a winter season. I motivated the students by pushing them to think about the other part of the society where people cannot afford to protect themselves from cold weather whereas some of us have old redundant clothes. I also instigated them to spread the message using Facebook by creating a page for this purpose and involve community people to participate in the humanitarian act. It was resulted in a huge response from the locals and I anticipated that whole success of the program was largely dependent on successful distribution. Therefore, two groups were made with respective team leaders and clothes were successfully distributed to the poor families living in slums in our locality. This campaign resulted in positive impact on the participated youths and on the society at large. I feel guilty for not being able to pursue the campaign on following years.
With Chevening Scholarship, it will broaden an avenue for me to learn from more advanced society, their proven way to deal with poverty and, on individual level, how leadership is linked with integrity and effective planning.
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