Leadership as an avenue to inspire and mentor others

My leadership opportunities

Hi please critic:

As a leader, one should be able to inspire others to do more and even mentor them to surpass their own achievements.

While I was still in my first year at xxx Kenya(big 4) I was appointed a team leader for a consultancy engagement that involved execution of enterprise risk management for an insurance company. As a consultancy that recruited in cohorts, it was rare that an associate in their first year got to lead engagements. The norm was that senior associates led. Being the youngest in the team of four, I encountered opposition from my mates who assumed I did not have adequate experience and the capacity to lead. I contacted the head of risk at the client company to build rapport and request her to brief the staff on the exercise to ensure staff cooperation when we got there. On the first project kick off meeting, the team were impressed by how I already knew key people. At the end of the engagement, we held a training and feedback session in which it was evident many had a good experience with us, the consultants. It was this experience that developed my liking for risk engagements. When the new cohort of consultants were recruited during my second year, I was assigned three new associates and through my influence, they developed a particular liking for enterprise risk management and even went further ahead to take up ERM certification training. At the end of their first year, during performance reviews, they were rated highly effective and continue to be among the best risk consultants even after I left the company.

I was recently appointed the chief point of contact for the implementation of the new business plan and three year strategy at XXX (current company). Working with the different teams involved to drive the project forward has developed my leadership skills further. The project involved engaging business leaders within the company as well as external stakeholders such as intermediaries, banks and the regulator. It was not easy getting especially the external stakeholders to collaborate with the consultants we had engaged to drive the project. Given that we had a month to deliver, I sent communication to ensure that all the parties involved understood the importance of the project. Managing people of different personalities and backgrounds who were not mandated by their job descriptions to cooperate with my project was a difficult task. However, by speaking to the heads of the companies and aligning them on the importance of the exercise to UAP and in turn to the customers, they were able to offer total cooperation. The project and business plan was ready in time and all stakeholders bought in and were excited for its implementation. This led to improved staff morale and customer experience. Revenues for the period improved by 20% as compared to the previous year.

My leadership opportunities have given me a chance to own projects, execute them efficiently by bringing together different parties involved and leave a mark.

Tell them what you have done that makes you the right person to be the team lead.
"As a consultancy that recruited in cohorts, it was rare that an associate in their first year got to lead engagements"
The first tense would be better by saying: The consultancy recruites in cohorts.......

"Being the youngest in the team of four, I encountered opposition from my mates who assumed I did not have adequate experience and the capacity to lead"

This didn't flow with the previous sentence and the sentence that follows

"It was this experience that developed my liking for risk engagements"
This could be better by sayin: it was this experiences that developed my interest for risk management engagement

Try to restructure your essay, especially the first paragraph and for the second paragraph restructure too and give a proper break-down

Doreen, you are not writing a job application cover letter. You are writing a leadership and influencing essay. Sadly, those are the two factors that are severely missing in this presentation. Your leadership is more of a duties and responsibilities listing rather than you showing off actual leadership skills and styles based on uncontrollable factors that came to exist during these projects. There is no sense of how you handle stressful situations and problematic team members, which is what professional leadership is all about.

In reference to your influencing skills, there wasn't any. Saying that your trainees succeeded because of your mentoring does not mean you influenced them towards success. That just means you are a good teacher. Influencing is based on leadership during a time of crisis. How you get the team to function during times when they may be questioning your leadership or handling of the situation is when your true influencing abilities, how you make these people believe in your leadership so much so that they follow your directions, is what influencing is all about.

Consider presenting your most trying work situation when you led the team. Outline the presentation first. List your project objectives, then your leadership requirements, then the leadership obstacles, then the solutions you thought of, then the presentation to the team, then how you influenced the team to believe in your leadership and project direction. That is how you develop this type of essay.