Chevening 'leadership' essay
In 2014, I joined X, an environmental organisation as a leader of the planning division. I indicated that the organisation faced a significant decreasing of members compared with the last few years. To view the problem, I conducted a public survey, and it showed only 17 per cent of correspondents willing to join our organisation and most of the respondents argued that it was not appealing enough to entice them for becoming the member.
I presented the data to our meeting for discussing the problem and find the best way to tackle it. Surprisingly, our head trusted and assigned my team and me to solve the issue, although I was one of the youngest members and new team leader. It was a challenging task for me as I led a group of 10 with some of the members who older than me. Hence, I always motivated my members to share their idea freely as they have more experience with the organisation.
I then led my team to design an effective strategy in promoting our group. As a result, the number of members will increase as well. I decided to conduct several activities that presenting our vision to act for environmental issues and discussed my plans in our internal meeting. Other senior members found that my plan will be effective and worthwhile. Therefore, they decide to implement my plan and help me to work with it. Despite pointing other divisions with particular duties, I listed anticipated constraints and supporting elements for our event. Hence, they can decide which tasks that suited their team the best as it motivated them to collaborate optimally.
Our event was "make our planet green again" consisted of several activities, namely seminars, bazaar, and tree planting. It opened to the public freely. Hence, I organised my team to collaborate with several parties, namely, professors, local government and other sponsors. It took months in planning events, especially in managed with funding and university permit.
With our collaboration, the event runs smoothly, and we got an appreciation from our university's rector, and he will root our organisation in the future. After the event, a growing number of the new member is occurring steadily. To improve our organisation's influence, I created a regular programme in weekly, monthly and annual basis for our organisation. I could implement the programme effectively through collaboration with other divisions and outsider, including local government and donors.
After graduating, I become a science teacher, and it helps me to improve my leadership and influencing skills as I interacted with my students. I motivated, guided and facilitated them as much as I could. As a result, they have a positive attitude toward the environment from an early age. I created a group called eco-warrior to facilitate them with activities to improve their environmental awareness and literacy toward current issues such as climate change.
In summing up, this experience showed me that someone should able to take the initiative to bring positive changes and an excellent collaboration required to increase a successfulness of plans and to present positive outcomes.