Leadership & Influence essay:
Question: Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.
Please help me to review the essay below. Thank you in advance.
In my student life, by winning the "Future Entrepreneurs" Contest, I had a great opportunity to meet and talk to Indra Nooyi in New York, former CEO PepsiCo Global who consistently ranked among the world's 100 most powerful women. I was inspired by her leadership style and leadership model that she shared with me - PepsiCo Leadership and Individual Effectiveness that defines key competencies and behaviors driving success at company:
Decision making
Innovating
Driving for results
Building talent
Motivating & Inspiring others
Collaborating & Influencing
It is very useful model that reminds myself of behaviors I should strive toward every day to enrich my leadership ability and contribute to my own success.
My first experience to apply leadership model was the environmental education project. There were short courses with interesting activities related to environment. Our mission was to raise children's awareness and responsibility towards environment. However, as a project leader, how to run project and spread out messages to community without cost was my challenge. I had to seek out solutions, leveraged all my resources and networks to drive for results. By persuasive proposal, I successfully convinced the board of management of school to allow us organizing this project. I also tried to approach leading Vietnamese's leading newspapers to influence them to offer free media exposure by showing my excitement and meaningful impact on environmental education aspect. As a result, my project is featured on leading newspapers and TV channels as well. Mr.Ngoc Trai - Former CEO PepsiCo-Vietnam stated:"The project proves Thy's leadership and influencing skills, especially her strong passion towards environmental education".
Another example demonstrates my leadership ability when I was a senior-assistant brand manager. My line manager had 6-months-maternity-leave, so I had a great opportunity to act as brand manager. It was also 6-challenging-months to perform my leadership skill and my competence as well. At that time, the brand's sales was decreased for half year, and 2017's revenue was expected to reach only 80% of target. However, I proactively proposed with Director that I wanted to set a more challenging goal delivering 90%. To begin with, I reviewed all marketing plans, cut inefficient activities and balanced resources to achieve goal. I approached other departments to share new KPI and adjusted plans. I always motivated and inspired them even after-work by small talk, motivational emails, incentive offers also, especially sales team who directly drive business' result. Consequently, 2017's revenue significantly achieves 100% of target. I cannot imagine how I can reach an incredible result without my team. Driving for results and influencing people are 2 key learnings to strengthen my leadership skills.
After 6-challenging-months, with good performance and strong leadership skills, I am promoted to International Marketing Manager, in charge of Vietnam & international markets. I consider this as an important milestone in my career until now, as from this, I have been given new professional responsibilities in bigger projects by company. The leadership skills really helps me map out specific development areas deigned to foster my growth both as a professional and a leader.
First, you need to reduce the number of words, your essay exceeds the 500-word requirement. The key competencies and behaviours you listed in the essay are not from you, and I don't think it's appropriate to list all of them using bullet point. You have given two very convincing examples to show your influencing skills, however, I don't see any leadership aspects in it. It seems to me that most of the works you did was 'one-man show' and you didn't lead a team to complete the missions. You may need to further elaborate this part. Hope it helps.
