I would like to improve myself with further education to be a better leader for my country

Leadership and Influence Essay for Chevening

Hi all. Please review my leadership and influence essay for Chevening scholarship. I am trying to apply for business consulting.

Leadership means to me that an ability helping people to take out their potential and passion to move to a higher place from the current one and making people as a team to achieve ambitious goals and to overcome challenges expected and unexpected.

When I worked at Myanmar Marketing Research and Development Company (MMRD) as a Project Manager, my first project is a research study about pharmaceutical market in Myanmar including both quantitative and qualitative methods. The sample size of this project is 700 and I have to work with about 15 interviewers as a team. As the sample size is too big comparing to the team size and nearly all of my team members are non-experienced people, we had faced lots of challenges and difficulties. Doing fieldwork is very struggle and difficult and so after 2 or 3 days, most of the people gave up and resigned from the team. At that time, I also understood that if the project will be delay even one or two people resigned from the team. Therefore, I set up a short team meeting every morning and then tried to listen to their voices. Based on the facts that I learned from these meetings, I showed and taught them how to overcome their challenges and difficulties, and at the same time, I encouraged and motivated them to feel proud for being an interview. If required, I went together with them to the field and taught them in practical. As a consequence, there are some people from my team, who are currently working at the MMRD at supervisor and team leader positions. This made me to realize that good leadership and influencing can help people to move to a higher place.

As a freelance market and consumer insight specialist, I have to work with different teams for different projects. It is not much difficult for me to lead and manage a team organized with non-experienced people. However, I noticed that it was very difficult for me when I worked with a team which has sufficient experiences in the market research industry. In that kind of situation, I always try to influence them first because according to my experience, if I cannot influence them, it is not possible to lead them. I believe that the best way to influencing people is to listen their voice. Therefore, I always try to listen their voice before starting and during the project. So, we can gain trust each other and I also can lead and coach them to achieve the project goals even some projects are in tight schedule.

In summary, being a great leader and influencer is not easy. I had invested many painful experiences. Then in my country, we need many good leaders who can participate and lead in the country building process. Therefore, I would like to improve myself with further education to be a better leader for my country in the future.

Hello! Let me advise you a little bit.
There're a lot of project managers who work with teams, motivate them, hold meetings and etc. This experience doesn't show you as a leader. Try to be more specific on how exactly you used your leadership skills. Give a specific example of how you as a leader influence your team and that helped with your project.

Hope this will help.

So, this is a tremendously weak L&I essay because you spent most of the essay defining what you think leadership is all about then you went on to showcase your communication skills as a leader. Sadly, communication skills are not the only basis of being an effective leader. An effective leader would be able to explain, within the essay. how communication is the start of leadership because it leads to an understanding of the team problems, that leads to collaboration regarding solutions, with the final decision regarding how to handle the problem coming from the team leader. That is where the inspiration or influence of the leader comes in directly.

Based on the first situation you presented, it appears that all you have to do is better develop this example for the L&I essay. The second sample isn't really effective as it does not show any true potential for L&I discussion within it. Being a freelancer means you do not have the time to develop the professional relationship and camaraderie that a long time member of the team or office would have which could lead to a highlightable L&I example.

That is why I believe you should highlight only the first instance of L&I for this essay. Expand on the problems encountered, employee relation difficulties, and your ability to resolve issues through inspiration and leadership. The presentation touches on those points, it just needs to be developed further.