leadership and influencing skills essay
Chevening is looking for individuals that 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: 50 words, maximum word count: 500 words)
Leaders are those who inspire and lead others with their heart, empathy and provide innovative solutions. Leaders also have influencing skills where they can communicate their innovative solutions to the team and also other people.
At the beginning of my current project, I was the only person working to develop the website interface. Then, another colleague joined our team. I welcomed him and explained in details about the project to him. However, he often faced difficulties in completing his task, due to unfamiliarity with the project. I could understand his situation, and I was always there and ready to help him. I approached him and communicated with him about the problems that he faced. I gave some hints to enable him to think and have a better perspective on how a solution could be achieved. As a result, he gradually understood better and could finish his task efficiently.
A few months later, our stakeholders wanted the web application to be bilingual: Indonesian and English. The request was quite all of a sudden but we only had less than a week to upgrade our website before it was being presented to the potential investors from Thailand. At that time, the website was only in Indonesian and was already big and complex enough, yet we had to translate everything from login to the settings page. As the lead of web development, I tried to accommodate the request by first researching the technique to have a bilingual version on the website. Then, I informed the team about the solution and delegated some translation tasks to my teammates so that the job could be finished faster. It was tough to understand and implement the translation technique and ensure all the features on the website work properly, however, we managed to complete the task within the stipulated time. Finally, our website now has a bilingual feature. This has helped our product to be potentially marketed in other countries, such as Thailand and receive funding from Bangkok Bank for further development.
I noticed that people at work cannot speak English fluently. However, English communication skills are essential. I wanted to help them improve their English skills and speak English with more confidence. Thus, I initiated to have our daily 15-minutes meeting to be in English. At first, people were reluctant and not willing to agree with the idea. Nevertheless, I tried to convince them that they could speak English, they just needed to try. Finally, they accepted my suggestion and we implemented the English daily meeting. Consequently, until now we still have a daily meeting in English. It also has been implemented by other employees in different teams and divisions. It had helped the employees to be more confident in speaking English.
In summary, I have demonstrated leadership and influencing skills by helping my co-worker on facing his challenges at work, leading the website transformation into bilingual version and also encouraging people to speak English daily.