Deliberate review needed for leadership and influence chevening essay question

DARE TO TRY - facing challanges

Throughout my work at Pfizer, I was nominated and entrusted by the leadership team to be one of DARE TO TRY program champions to solve big challenges facing the organization. The challenge was how might we create a new medical education platform that increases Pfizer's market share with General practioners (GPs) doctors?

Unfortunately, I got a little help from my team; they felt frustrated and disappointed about this challenge. So, I decided never give up and worked on finding an inspiring and innovative solution. After focused innovation in a Dare to Try session, I was able to identify the problem with the GPs that was the lacking of medical information. Accordingly, I thought that the medical education on an interactive screen or tabletop on the surface of the GPs desk that will contain a virtual patient, who will mimic the interaction with the real one, would be a good idea to fulfill the educational needs of the doctors. Then, I shared the idea with my team and communicated with them the outcomes and the impact of the implementation of our project on the success of our company that will be a success for all of us as well. So, at the end I was successful to get them engaged and motivated once again. We worked very hard on our project and made a little amendment after getting the valuable insights of the rest of the team. Finally, on behalf of my team I presented the idea in front of the management team and they got impressed of the idea and adopted it and we awarded the best in practice idea in Dare to Try program at Pfizer.

Another example of my leadership and influencing experience was that when I volunteered with INJAZ Egypt (NGO) in partnership with the united nation, in a program called It is My Business (Entrepreneurship Program), to target the second preparatory students in different schools. My role in this program was to cultivate the entrepreneurship concepts in the students' minds. However, I faced a lot of challenges during the class sessions such as; lacking of resources and the large numbers of the pupils in the class that made distraction and less focus. So, I thought how to manage these difficulties and get those young people engaged with me in the class. I found that the idea of telling them the interesting stories of real successful entrepreneurs would be a good solution. In fact, they like it so much and become very interested and curious to learn more about the lives of entrepreneurs. Therefore, this approach helped me a lot to communicate effectively with them by identifying businesses they can start on their own and examine ways to apply the entrepreneurial characteristics to develop their own business plans.

So, by getting the chance to take part in this scholarship, I get to make a difference in this world. The country gets to take a progressive step towards the future.

Mohamed, forgo the civic aspect of your leadership and influencing skill. The prompt specifically calls for a professional setting for your leadership and influencing skills. The best thing for you to do will be to develop the discussion of your Pfizer experience instead. Your leadership presentation is not strong enough. Specially since you seemed to be a one man team at the start. You need to explain why your team was not inspired to help you with the project in a greater detail. Then, describe how you figured out that your team was finally inspired to complete the project by assisting you. Rather than saying that you presented the results of the work on behalf of your team, you should instead say that the team presented the successful project instead. It is alright to say the "team" in this instance because you did have to work to lead and inspire them to victory. Therefore, they should share in the credit, but not take all the credit for the success of the project.