Incident with a mobile phone showed my leadership skills - Chevening essay

Chevening Scholarship- Leadership skills essay

I will be grateful for constructive feedback on my essay I have prepared for the Chevening scholarship.

In 2015 when I was working at (organization name) I had won a competitive research grant from WHO AHPSR as the lead investigator. During that time, I frequently visited the Finance Department to expedite the process of budget code finalization and get the activity running. On one of such visits, I entered into their office to find a few people with worried faces standing in groups and one employee hysterically repeating how she had left her mobile phone near the printer, ventured back to her desk for two minutes and returned to find it gone. Standing their as an outsider I saw their senior manager was returning to his room with several other staff following suit.

"Wait!" shouted I. "Are we just going to let this incident go? Can we have everyone's bags and desks checked?" The senior manager replied that according to Human Resource policy we cannot force people to have checked on suspicion. "Well, I am sure this is something we don't want to happen to ourselves and that at workplaces we need to be able to trust our colleagues. That cannot be ensured if such incidents are dismissed without some immediate action. Would everyone present in this office be willing to volunteer to have their belongings examined?" Surprisingly, everyone agreed to this suggestion including the manager. I requested him to select three people from his staff who would go around and check everyone. They had their bags checked by each other first. They did an efficient search for the mobile phone was found and returned to the owner. The fate of the mobile grabber remained with the senior manager and the HR department.

The manager came over and thanked me for handling the situation so neatly and commanded his staff to always prioritise my project related tasks! Until that incident I saw leadership as it came with my job responsibility- securing grants, creating work plans, delegating tasks, ensuring work integration and timely outputs. Trainings and workshops arranged by HR taught me a lot of things- how to manage conflicts in the team, how to manage a project, or run a new data analysis software. But these do not always equip us for responding to such random events. Through this incident, I discovered myself in a new light. I had the presence of mind to go beyond the established protocol without violating it and motivate people, even without any authority over them, to work towards a common goal of achieving something good that is beneficial for most people. Albeit this was in a small sphere, but exposing myself to more experiences and taking up more advanced roles I believe I can only strengthen these abilities to apply them in more profound matters related to governance of institutions and health systems in my country.

Rubana, this is a very effective leadership essay. However, it does not reflect greatly on your influencing style. While your leadership did lead to the apprehension of the burglar, the events that led to it wasn't really reflective of a leadership and influencing style. That is because the employees readily agreed to be inspected because they wanted to clear their names and not be suspects in the crime. That has nothing to do with your leadership nor your influencing skills. It had more to do with the fact that the people did not want to be seen as criminals by their peers, nor did they want to suspect one another from that point on every time something similar happened in their workplace. Sure you took up the leadership cudgels by instigating the voluntary inspection. You should be admired for that. The problem is, that wasn't leadership in the sense that Chevening is looking for.

What you showcased here was a leadership based on a strong personality but no influencing style due to the reasons I stated above. The Chevening scholarship committee is not looking to draft a police officer or a law enforcer. They are looking to sponsor a person who has true leadership and influencing abilities in line with the scholarship mission, objectives, and goals. Elements that you made light of at the end of your essay by indicating that you do not believe that those are as important as it should be.

While I believe that you can use this essay to portray leadership skills, it does not carry the weight of proper influencing traits due to the reasons I mentioned. So this narrative doesn't gel well with the requirements of the prompt. At least in my opinion. The leadership and influencing skills should not deviate from what they are looking for in a workplace leader and influencer. That is because the leadership and influencing skills you portray must be supportive of your networking style in the next essay. So the essay needs to be work related instead of workplace incident related.

Of course I cannot influence your decision to use this essay as if you wish to do that. Should you decide that you want to use this essay, you need to build up an influencing presentation in it that veers away from the obvious factors that led to the cooperation of your workmates. One that shows how you had to influence them into submitting for inspection when they did not want to do so. Only then will this essay be a little bit aligned with the Chevening leadership and influencing essay requirements.