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. (100-500 word)
A great leader can take others' hands to become agents of positive change. During university, I was chosen to be the deputy finance minister for the Student Surveyors of Kyambogo University in 2017 through which I made many decisions of both positive and negative impacts and later as the Surveyor's representative on the Kyambogo University Students Engineering Committee.Trained with Uganda National Roads Authority (2017) with little or no power to make decisions on the project then joined National Forestry Authority for Graduate training under which I engaged in forest-surveys and conflict resolutions during surveys. After a couple of months as an assistant surveyor with Newplan Engineers, I requested to be moved to the position of Project Surveyor who is always the team leader on most projects which they agreed to due to my patent achievements. As a leader at age of 23, my first experiences in that position were incredibly challenging and full of struggle due to the intimidation by more experienced people that I was to lead. I started making decisions so as to become a better surveyor, and in the process, I gained an incredible amount of empathy and learned alot especially about risk-taking, client-care and team building. It laid a strong foundation for all the incredible achievements attained in my career.
As project-surveyor, I have faced a couple of challenges due to the complexity of humans since my work mainly revolves around handling vulnerable project affected people and rural communities which involves judgement-call decision demanding situations with the outstanding having been the occasion during one of the data-collection activities of the Oil pipeline Survey and valuation assessments in which the surveyors were congregated by hostile people due to concerns of trespass arising from inadequate sensitization done by the community liaison officer. They were sat down and dispossessed of their survey equipment creating tension amidst the team. As the leader, I intervened and conciliated the crowd. I justified our existence and apologized for the inadequate communication flow between us and the community which provided answers to their queries. After about twenty minutes, they said to us "Okay, you can go ahead." I sighed with relief and the team went on to work that day without any interruptions till completion and the community too was happy and supportive. From then on, the team learnt how to deal with such situations and avoid them by practicing the communicate-first approach. I introduced the stakeholder-engagement protocol for Resettlement Action Plan Projects before access to someone's property for survey and assessment which the company adopted in its mode or operation and has since then been used on many other projects and the results have been positive. Since then, my superiors have always engaged me in all project decision-making process and this has given me more confidence and urge to grow my career and be a better person in my profession which got me thinking about pursuing a masters degree in Land surveying.
One at a time.
