I develop my leadership skill in professional context since I became an intern in Crisis Centre

Leadership Essay

Hi friends, could you please help me to give a suggestion or correction in my last essay?any suggestion or correction will be highly appreciated, thank you in advance :)

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)

I develop my leadership skill in professional context since I became an intern in Crisis Centre and Community Development of Faculty of Psychology (PKPK), University of XX.. This was a very interesting experience since this organization was recently established and I was the first batch intern of those organization. So, we had to work extra hard to establish the internal management system as well as building our reputation as an organization. I was appointed as finance manager back then. We organized many community development events, such as reducing plastic bag use campaign in traditional market, raising awareness of reducing stigma towards mentally ill people, and the most memorable and challenging project was our collaboration with XX.

We were honored with a chance to be able to collaborate with XX in Educational Development Projects in several rural areas in XX Province. We had three projects done simultaneously. Due to my experience as an PKPK finance manager, I was appointed as a financial coordinator in this projects. I realized that it was a very challenging projects. Even though I worked as an financial coordinator in my organization, but I never had handled such projects with enormous funds. The main challenge was, I was the youngest and least experienced team members in this collaboration projects, yet I was trusted to handle a crucial role. I had a full control of financial issue. If I wasn't able to perform well, then all of the projects would be in a mess.

I realized the situation and made a move carefully. I came on every coordination meeting which were held. I decided to actively learned from XX financial team by asking his phone number and came directly into his office to learn directly. Such way, I could easily contact and made a consultation in every decision I made as well as asked help every time I encountered the hardships in managing the projects finance. I wrote down all of the knowledge I got and then formed a team consists of 6 people. I shared my notes and gave them a briefing. I assigned 2 persons in each projects and asked them to write down each difficulties they encountered so that we can discussed it and share it among our teams to prevent such events to happen again.

I conducted briefing every 2 weeks to monitor their progress and discussed the problems they had encountered. I always motivated my team, that we could went through this together by effective knowledge sharing and communication as we were all novice in this field. I involved all of my team members in any decision making process so that we all had a sense of responsibility in our team. With such strategies, our projects was progressing as its scheduled. There were no significant problems caused by financial issues, and final financial report were finished well.

(474 words)

Binari, I do not read any leadership role in this essay. It is an interesting essay but it depicts more of an independent role in the project that, while important, does not include leadership skills. Majority of the role that you performed had to do with your learning the ropes of the job, being cognizant of expenses, and information sharing within various departments implementing the project. There is no reference to problem resolution in your essay although you expected your people to report problems to you for resolution. While you did include the team in the decision making process, you did not show any real influencing skills in the essay. The last line of your essay is very telling as to whether or not this is a true leadership and influencing essay. A true leadership and influencing essay would never say, "There were no significant problems caused by financial issues, and final financial report were finished well." Any person who says this in a leadership and influencing essay is either delusional, because no job goes smoothly from beginning to end. There is always a problem, no matter how small, that requires a leadership and influencing skill to resolve. Or, the reviewer will assume that you do not have any true leadership role and you made up this whole essay to just respond to the prompt. Which is why you do not have any definite leadership and influencing situation to depict as a sample of your skills. In which case, you will lose your chance at the scholarship.

@Holt
thank's for your suggestion Mary. Honestly, I got confused while writing this essay. Should i gave one or two problems I had encountered and look at more details at it, or should I write it in a brief statement such the one I wrote before, than it turns out that a brief one doesn't work. I'll try to revise it as your suggestion :)

@bnrdhmsnt

there is no provision that you must include 1 or 2 problems, as soon you can describe and deliver the meaning correctly and meet the inquire of the prompt.

that would be easier if you tell the recent problem that you and your team faced. here are some guidelines: you can describe, how you solve the problem? is that any special method that you use to solve that problem?what is the situation?how do you manage your team to complete the task?

and don't forget to mention your final result, what do you gain from that problem?

Do some scanning to review and read other scholar's essay.
good luck, I hope that useful