technology in design - my Leadership experience
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.
As a design and build architect, it is my responsibility to supervise projects, organize the teams and lead most interactions in every project. And in order to achieve that I have learned to lead myself first.
Throughout the last couple of years, I have worked with hundreds of stakeholders in 7 different countries, and that helped me develop a global mindset that made me achieve success in every project. I had to know what my strengths and my weaknesses are to be able to deal with diverse groups in every single project, I had to also know how to deal with my emotions, and what to expect from each individual.
In 2015, I founded RAW designs, a cutting edge design and build firm, that aims to learn and teach about the prospects of technology in design. Back then, I didn't have any significant financial assets. I knew that I had to invest my time and efforts in pulling together a powerful team of pioneers in varied aspects of design and fabrication. It took me great efforts and multiple trial and error attempts to eventually develop a team of a wide network of inspiring people. These have ranged from high-profile architects and academics in the UAE, USA, Germany and Jordan to illiterate craftsmen in refugee camps from whom I have learned skills passed down through generations.
This relationship have soon matured and my co-workers became my subcontracting partners, and together against all odds we have produced more than a thousand furniture pieces, fifty different local and overseas retail furnishings and designing projects and conducted independent projects and joint ventures with well-known local and international, academic and professional organizations. Crowning our success was sponsorship of constructing "Amman Design Week" one of the region's most famed design events. Despite the little pay at the end, I had to convince my team about the importance of such project for the growth and prosper of RAW, and our mutual future prospects and collaborations. Eventually five of seven teams granted me their full support in heart, motivation and work; realizing the vision we were all seeking together upon completing a project of that scale. This resulted in us being featured in a number of national and international publications.
These publications have afterwards granted us the opportunity of expanding our projects to a wider international scale and provided us with a platform for recent interactions with technologically advanced projects which is the first step towards our greater vision.
From this I learned that I had to know the extent of my abilities, and how to optimize my opportunities by delegating the right task to the right person.
