Being a leader for challenging situation - those experiences have given me problem solving skills

Leadership and Influencing Essay for Chevening

Being a leader requires the ability to manage various activity and people, the ability to communicate well, the ability to adapt with changes in different situation and condition, the ability to have critical thinking in developing strategic plan and the ability to solve the problem or case. Those skills are gained after facing many kind of challenging situations at work. One of my experiences, On March 2017 I just moved from X City to Y City, the Capital City of Z Province. That moment, I was placed in a new division called Integrated Processing and Dissemination Data (IPDS). The main duty is data processing of census and survey, program and software installation, website and IT related things. It was so challenging for me because It was a new place, I had never been in this division before, I had no IT background and there was neither Head Division nor the staff, so I was the only person in charge for the division.

The first task I got was Data Processing of Semester Survey, Social Economic National Survey (SUSENAS) on March 2017. SUSENAS is the mother of survey at Statistics Indonesia because of the complexity of variables, thickness of documents and the important data for Indonesia Development Planning as the output. The problem I faced in processing SUSENAS was the big amount of samples/ documents in Y City compared with other cities/ regencies, while the provided Personal Computer was only 2 PCs and we had to validate 760 documents. Because of that, I created my data processing team, set the effective target and estimated the added laptop. Then I directed and managed my team, monitored and gave the daily target for each one of them as a challenge. My main strategy was mapping strengths and weakness for each one of my team member. Based on that mapping and analyzing. I slowly changed the work allocation burden based on their performance. This strategic worked really well, the work progress got quicker and the quality of the task got better because I put the right person in the right place based on their capability and performance. In the middle of the process, periodically I also gave feedback to my team and announced the member who had the best performance and gave reward to motivate my team to work better. For keeping the quality of documents, I also collaborated with Social Division as the survey executor.

Because of the strategies I had, the lack of PC, huge amount of documents and the complexity of data validation was no longer the problem. As the result, my team was the first one touching the finish line beating other cities and regencies in Province Z. Our rank for SUSENAS also increased from 472 on Semester II 2016, becoming 47 on Semester I 2017 which was ranked among cities/regencies in Indonesia and On September 2017, for the first time ever, Statistics of Y got the first place for SUSENAS assessment. This was such a great achievement for me who was counted as a junior and a newbie.

Dear @Holt please kindly comment on my essay. Thank you very much.

Sherly, your definition of your leadership skills is unwarranted in this essay. Instead of that opening, you might want to reformat it to relate your leadership ascension in the government agency instead. If you can show how reliable you are as a leader and that you have an admirable leadership insight that has led you to be a strong influencer from the start of your career, then by the time you become the leader of the Data Processing of Semester Survey under SUSENAS, you will have established yourself as an upcoming leader in your profession who is admired by your co-workers and relied upon by the higher leaders.

Your influencing story is a bit incomplete. Surely you had to do more than just give feedback and rewards to those who performed well on your team. You might want to consider telling a story about how you motivated / influenced one of your subordinates who was underperforming or proving to be a problem in achieving the group goals. That would sound like a stronger influencing story in relation to your leadership abilities that what you have presented at the moment. Right now, the influencing skills are very weakly implied in your essay.

Your closing paragraph is acceptable and works well as a strong conclusion. You just need to strengthen the aforementioned parts of your essay in order to create a very strong presentation.

Thanks a lot for your feedback and revise @Holt, I am working on it. I hope you have a great day.