CHEVENING Leadership and influence essay - Leader as a team player

Chevening is looking for individuals 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 answer.

(minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

I strongly believe that to be a good leader is not necessary to hold any title, taking a leading position or born to be person. A great leader could be a man who wish to see the tomorrow world better than today and have a strong positive power to inspire team and other people, motivate and make them sharing the same goal.

In 2011, when I was a freshman. There was a big change in admission rule and regulation for undergraduate student in Thailand in the year before. Student in my ages suffer from lack of information and guidance about university admission. To alleviate this problem for junior high school student, I set up a team with 40+ freshmen member to share some experience and provide educational guidance at my high school. The feedback was impressive. Comparing post-test to pre-test result, student had better understand about new admission system and basic information about faculty that they were interested in. I am also happy to hear that generation after me had seen benefits from this campaign and also set up a team to provide help for their junior.

After graduated from X University in the major of Mechanical engineering in 2015, I started to work as a process engineer at X. One of my work was large fan improvement project focus on reducing power consumption of main process fan across all X Cement plant in Thailand and regional country. The conventional ways to assess room for improvement was to go on-site investigation and evaluating machine performance on my own. To make a change, I decide to set up working team consisting of production engineer and technicians from each plant to conduct preliminary site investigation. I held a brief workshop to share an idea of fan performance assessment and point out how much they can save money for their factory. With this way of implementing project, I could not only save almost 700k$/year, but also able to transfer technical knowledge which previously were concentrated in engineering office to teams, encourage them to have accountability in what they're going to save and they can see benefit of improvement themselves. Furthermore, they can apply it to improve others minor machine.

Currently I am working with X as a pilot trainee. Since COVID-19 outbreak, the training process has been halted, and I was sent to work with different department since March 2020. I've seen that many manual data entering process can be automated. Moreover, plenty amount of data collected was not utilized to generate business insight and to support decision making. This unforeseen problem could be a contributing factor in bankruptcy of X which will lead to thousands of job losses in the near future.

Knowledge and experience gained from business analytics program would allow me to participate in rehabilitation team, provide actionable insight which lead to data-driven decision making. And finally, brings X back to the sky to be pride of Thai once again.

You can skip the college reference as it is not really conclusive in proving your leadership and influencing skill. The reviewer will be more interested to learn about how you accomplish the leadership and influencing aspect within your profession. The larege fan improvement focus sounds like a good project. You should start at the beginning with that discussion. Explain how you came to the head of the team. Where did you start? How did you eventually end up in the leadership position? What sort of leadership skills were required for you to become successful in the end? Considering your influencing skills, What were the most effective influencing methods that you used? Why did you opt to use these methods? What type of team did you have to deal with? What were the difficulties you had to overcome? Combine your leadership and influencing skills in the discussion as best as you can. Your reference to being a pilot trainee does not reflect any leadership or influencing skills. It only reflects an observation that is not needed in the presentation. You can remove that paragraph as well. Revise the last paragraph to better reflect a summary of your skills instead, based on the leadership and influencing skills paragraph you provided.

@Holt Thank you for your swift respond, I've found it very useful to read your comment in other threads. I'll give it some tweek and repost for further discussion. I am aware that reference to being pilot trainee does not reflect any leadership and influencing skill, but I just want to point out my current career and how it would relate to the future. Could you suggest something that would serve as a connection between my past job as an engineer, my current job and my future goal.