Chevening Leadership Essay - Leading Ourselves And People

Hello everyone, I need your help to review and give a feedback for my Chevening Leadership Essay. The question is :

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)

Here is my answer:

Leadership is not only about leading others to achieve a goal but include the capability to direct ourselves towards our dream. Meanwhile, persuading others is highly required skill since decisions are often in other's hands. The following are instances of my significant leadership and influencing skills.

First, I took my two kindergartens, four elementary schools, and three universities in different cities to obtain an undergraduate degree. I faced many obstacles, such as multiple personas, both for teachers and classmates, different cultures, and regulations. These require high adaptation skills and persistence that I can manage, but I had an enormous undergraduate study problem. I study at IPB, a reputable university. Despite my best, I got four subjects with no final exam score because my attendance was inadequate as I often came late and counted as absent. It was because my office is 1.5 hours from the class. I am depressed for weeks as I need the money from my job to pay my living and the tuition, but retaining the situation will drop me out. I persuaded myself to rebuild my motivation to pursue my dream and transfer my study to a university near my office, despite not as reputable as IPB. Ultimately, I lead myself to obtain a degree that enables me to get a better career.

Second, in 2019, I am working as a Senior Technical Consultant. There was a project opportunity in a rail transportation company with many stations and needs solutions to connect them with reliable and efficient WAN connections. I ask to lead the opportunity because I have the answer named SD-WAN solution. So I performed multiple presentations to either the customer's BoD, which I give the specific presentation about the business benefits to persuade them, and the Network Engineer team, which I present the easiness of SD-WAN operation. The railway company eventually asks to perform PoC(proof of concept) of the solutions in their three stations with their production environment for at least a month to prove my presentation. I negotiate to give three months minimum as it will run in the production, which requires careful steps. Then, I invite two implementation engineers with their superior approval, which I need to persuade him because PoC is actually a Technical Consultant's primary job. We had many debates regarding the concept of the PoC and other technical stuff, as this technology is new for us. So, I direct to find the official documentation for our baseline. As there were many additional requirements, concept changes, and misinformations from the customer, I conduct weekly meetings and constant discussions with the customer to solve those. Finally, we successfully did the PoC, the customer was satisfied with our job, and we get the project, which becomes my office's first project in SD-WAN and our first project in this railway company.

In conclusion, I have performed leadership and influencing skills, whether in my own life and the professional area, so I believe that I am a potential future leader and influencer.

Hi linduputra16, actually I am currently also a Chevening applicant. But I'll try my best to give feedbacks from what I learnt from previous experience.

first paragraph: I don't have many comments, but I suggest you to check for grammatical error, you could check on google docs or grammar. I'm not a very capable on this, but I spotted little mistake such as "is highly required". I think the correct one will be "persuading others require blabblabla". I wont comment on the content for this.

second paragraph: I suggest you to change the story with a concrete leadership example. I understand what you mean by leading yourself, but I think what the committee want to find is can we demonstrate how we lead others to a certain task. maybe after this you can check several competitive leadership essay examples that Holt (one of contributor of this forum) said already complied to the Chevening Standards, most of them will talk about leading other people. And to ease your framework, I'd suggest to use the STAR method as suggested by the Chevening and most people, eventho it's not a mandatory.

3rd para: dont forget to check the grammar, since it happened in the past so you must use simple past. while this para already used the STAR method (actually I couldn't comments on the process since I wasn't working on your field), but I think you need to make it simpler. For instance,

S: (give one or two opener sentence). There was a project in my office to install WAN connectivity for a rail transportation company. The rail company needed solution for a reliable and efficient WAN connections.

T: In order to have those qualities, I need to do blablabla (general task you need to do).
A: I proposed a different solution called SD-WAN. I performed presentations to the company's BoD how easy to operate SD-WAN. tell your proposal for the three months testing (give conflict about how they requested performance testing for one month and how you persuade them). tell all your actions.

R: you persuaded or convinced them to test the performance for 3 months and tell how satisfying the result was.
close the paragraph with the lesson learnt.

close the essay with general conclusion.

goodluck! enjoy your scholarship journey!

There is no need to define leadership nor influencing in this essay. You can omit that definition at the start. What is important is to show how you embody leadership and influencing skills in the workplace. Your second paragraph is irrelevant to the discussion and should be removed. Instead, focus on developing your leadership and influencing explanation based on the third paragraph. That is the most relevant, useful, and impressive part of this current presentation. You need to separate that discussion into two paragraphs. One focused on the influencing aspect. Then another one discussing how the problem developed your leadership skills as a part of the influencing requirement of the job. Successfully presenting those information should help you create a more relevant discussion in this essay.

wow, I never thought having this complete review.
I really appreciate it dude, and I will revise it again.
Thanks a lot.


Thanks a lot sir, I will try to revise it again.