Chevening is looking for individuals that 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.
Leadership plays a pivotal role to achieve a goal. I believe that leadership is more about the actionable to create sustainable change to benefit not just me but the most important people in my surroundings.
It was challenging to run a small business at the beginning. I have started my own business, XXX, offering craft, and creative products. My business extremely depends on paid traffic to bring potential customers because my business just provides an online store. After a while, I have really needed bigger teams, especially in the dealmaker department to help my customers meet their solutions. One of my successful journeys was a year after my business was established, I have 7 employees in my business, expanding employment in my surroundings. Moreover, my business does not always go stagnant, we have ever dealt with an unhappy customer due to a wrong-handled product from the delivery agent. My dealmaker team coped with this customer by sending them back for a new product, but she still felt a surge of anger. At the time, my team told me about this then I decided to take this complaint into my consideration by initiating to contact my unsatisfied customer directly asking for an apology. After having a deep conversation for two minutes by phone, I realized that the way my customer became querulous was because she ultimately needed the product as a gift to their relatives. I promised to deliver the new product on this day with the same-day delivery. The following day, she thanked us because of our quick response. As a result, it reminds me of Bill Gates "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning". This also has made an evaluation lesson for me and my team that the customer needs not only our apology but also a valuable solution.
My passion for persuading people finally brought me to volunteer in XXX I was given a chance to contribute to this free event "revolution of distribution" in 2019. I managed to lead this workshop aiming to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Semarang to find the solutions to meet the needs of their problem. I remembered that we had some problems because we just had less than 3 weeks to prepare. I tried every possible way to provide a place for 300 participants in next to no time. Fortunately, we were in collaboration with UNIMUS (Muhammadiyah University) making arrangements for negotiation to have a win-win solution. We can make use of their auditorium and they will send 30 student delegations to broaden their horizon regarding business.
As seen, based on my experience, I believe that a leader should have good impacts on their surroundings and how they carry out some actions into a positive result. Thus, I would like to continue my education through the Chevening scholarship so that I also could have a good impact on people from the other side of the world.