Showing Leadership without official authority - Chevening Scholarship essay

Hi All,

I am applying for the Chevening Scholarship and would appreciate your evaluation on my essay for leadership and influence :

capable of influencing and generate change and impact

I always believed that to lead, you needed to have a team under you. And this was not the case for me as my position is with no official authority. But in time I realized as well said by Woods, "No matter what position you hold in your company, you have the opportunity to be a leader, influence others, solve problems for those around you and become an expert resource for your organization or team."

To start working as a management information analyst (also known as data analyst) in the Retail Collection and Recoveries department was very challenging as I hadn't directed know-how guidance on my tasks but already had to deliver them. Through hard work and building relationships with my colleagues, began succeeding and started receiving new assignments.

Besides data extraction and report building, I became responsible for some operations management. One of them was key for the Collection and Recoveries Performance, which was loans instalment earmarking. This was under the one IT responsible before being handed over to the department. This operation automatically holds the instalment from the client salary ensuring payment on a set date. My task was to upload on time, the files needed to earmark the instalment based on the eligibility.

The fact that the files were manually generated and were dependent on available updated data in the data warehouse (backup of the live database) had a great toll on our performance and reputation, leading to uncollected instalments and double charge complaints, and reversing this would sacrifice the time of my colleagues.

Something had to be done and we usually would leave it entirely to the IT since he had the knowledge, risking this issue to be postponed due to priorities. To get the necessary help, I had to more than just upload files. I had to understand the process from A to Z and having IT background helped a lot. The solution was to auto-generate and upload the files, and I was able to help with the first part of auto-generation as it involved creating data queries that extracted the information for the files in exact format.

Giving this head start helped to engage the IT to support the idea, especially in the second part of auto-generation and uploading. With this work in progress, we managed to reduce significantly the number of complaints and uncollected instalments our clients and also reduce the workload on the collection team.

This showed me I was capable of influencing and generate change and impact with what I do. Improving this capability would mean bigger possibilities.

Thank you for your time.

Tassio, you have shown that you know how to take the initiative to perform tasks beyond those assigned to you. That initiative does not equate to leadership and influencing unless you actually took the initiative to take the reins of a project that had a group of people as its staff that were looking for leadership and the influence of a leader to help get the job done.

Note that all of the information in your essay relates only to how you perform your tasks and resolve problems related to your assignments at the office. There is no leadership, only initiative. There is no influencing skill used, only an analysis of what you have to do on your part. Therefore, you cannot pass this off as a leadership and influencing essay. It does not contain the required parameters.

Please remember that a leader can only be called a leader if he has people looking to him for direction, instruction, and inspiration. Without those qualities, one cannot be looked upon as a leader. Your essay proves that you are a good worker who can work with little to no supervision but nothing more.

Thank you Holt for your feedback!

will start focusing on what you said.