My experience with leadership - I was selected as the marketing executive of a Cairo University

I am applying for the Chevening Scholarship and below is my answer to the Leadership and Influence Question and I would appreciate getting your feedback as the deadline is 8th of November, 2016.

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My experience with leadership started at the university, when I was selected as the marketing executive of a Cairo University student chapter of Society of Petroleum Engineers. I was responsible for leading around fifty students to achieve the marketing, fundraising, public relations, and community service plans that I created and developed later along with my teams. During this period, I have been through many situations that taught me how to lead, communicate, and deal with people having different backgrounds and objectives and how to resolve the conflicts resulted from these differences. Also, it taught me to look for the strength points among my team member and create a common objective for them that utilizes their strengths and is linked to their personal objectives.

Then, after graduation, I had the opportunity to utilize and develop the experience I gained during college since I worked as a site engineer that had to lead more than 50 workers through planning and supervising of their daily activities to meet the project plan. This was one of the toughest leadership challenges I faced since I was leading a group of workers that are having completely different mindset, backgrounds, and beliefs and I had to adapt my leadership and communication styles to cope with their backgrounds and beliefs.

Currently, for my demonstrated leadership skills, I have been selected as the youngest member of the project management team of one of the largest power generation projects that is taking place in Egypt as the mechanical project manager. In this position, I have to lead a huge team and to communicate with various entities internally and externally to plan the project and monitor and control its execution.

Throughout my experience, I faced many miscommunication, loss of motivation, and drops in productivity challenges that mainly arose from dealing with team members having different cultures, backgrounds, and goals. My trials to overcome these challenges taught me that applying the proper leadership style is a dynamic and adaptive process that depends on the situation. In most situations, my dominant leadership style was the participative one as I believe that the opinions and ideas of everyone within an entity should be respected and considered in its shaping the goals, objectives, and decisions.

My objective is to become one of the industry leaders and influencers in Egypt and the Middle East and to leave a footprint in this world as I believe that we were created to develop the community we are leaving in and to make it a better place.

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Thanks in advance for your kind review and feedback,
Ahmed

Ahmed, when you read the prompt for this essay, it asks you to provide solid evidence / experience for the claims you will be making regarding leadership and influencing activities you have participated in. While a summation of these activities allows you to include as much information as possible in the essay, there is a lack of proper development and clear evidence as to how you performed these tasks. That is why it is always best to present one or two (at the most) examples of leadership and influencing that you can. Normally, one strong professional example is enough. However, if your professional example is weak or you do not have any to speak of yet, then you present something you led while in college. The presentation needs to be a fully developed activity that has an end result which is based upon the actions that you had taken in order to complete the event/incident/project.

In your case, I believe that the most impressive example of this would be the current project you are working on. Develop a new essay that will name the organization, explain the project, and give examples of the difficulties that required you to lead a team, along with explanations as to why you had to inspire your team to overcome some obstacles. Since this is your most current work experience in relation to the prompt, I believe that you will be able to relay the prompt requirements in a highly impressive manner.