'the flexibility and openness to adapt are the keys' - LEADERSHIP & INFLUENCE QUESTION

According to my experience I believe that the flexibility and openness to adapt are the keys when comes to leadership, however being truthful and trustworthy and having conviction is an essential leadership competency. To be a leader is an art of influencing and motivating others on willing to do something that the leader is convinced that should be done, in addition, leadership is an art of connecting all stakeholders to achieve a goal.

One of my recent professional leadership experience is when I was working as Small Scale and Marketing Garden Agronomist at Vanduzi Company (Mozfoods, S.A) one of the Mozambican company which export fresh vegetables to UK. Most of the vegetables exported across countries by this company came from small farmers where I was the agronomist and working with almost 350 small holders most of them with low education levels sometimes even with those who do not know how to write their own names but with a lot of farming experience.

Despite their farming techniques and low levels of education which were affecting directly on the yields and produce quality, my leadership approach changed the situation. In eleven months, the yields increased 53%, the pack house produce quality increased 17% in general, and in twelve months, the amount of small farmers increased to 500 members.

For this stunt to happen I had to adapt my leadership approach to fit small holders and my team to achieve the goal, by building relationship, demonstrate values and ethics, encouraging and inspiring trustworthy.

i am not an expert but what i have understood from reading several essays on this topic before i wrote mine, was that they want you to write specifically in details about your leadership qualities. this incident you mentioned, you wrote more about what was the problem and less about how you changed it and showed your leadership skills. I think you should elaborate more on what you exactly did and how you used your leadership abilities in leading your team towards success.

hope this helps. :)

Carlos, you need to be more specific about the leadership skill that you presented in your essay. You claim that your being an agroomist for a period of time resulted in a higher yield of crops for harvesting. Prior to presenting that information, you must give a background of what the harvest amount was previously like. What were the problems related to crop growth and harvesting, and how you decided to approach the problem. The leadership aspect will come from the way that you convinced other farmers to give your ideas a chance by implementing them. The influencing part, will be represented by the change in the mindset that you effected upon the other farmers upon the success of your proposed solution. Relating these information will also help to increase the length of your essay which, at the moment, is too short and does not really accomplish the task of proving your leadership and influencing skills.