The startup culture leads to be very specific criteria of leadership. Chevening essay

Question: 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.

switch from a business firm to start-up

The recent development in business sector has been beginning to switch from a well-known business firm to start-up actually. An organisational change occurred globally, including Indonesia, in which development of startups have been fully supported by the government. Indonesian Startup Report said that it has occurred a rapid increase of startups as 22% in 2016. In addition, the number of startups will be increasing until 2020, for approximately 6 times compared to 2016.

In my view, development startups influence profoundly in styles and approaches of leadership due to different-organizational model. Inevitably, every single type of organization has different approaches. Business sector, for example, has a control on hierarchical organizational model, while startup cultures lay on teamwork and emphasis on collaboration, curation and communication.

The startup culture leads to be very specific criteria of leadership. First and foremost, a major criterion of startup leader has to encourage teamwork to be engaged on internal team and to contribute in any collaboration with other organizations. Members of teamwork feel more open with the situation and could express any idea, when they are empowered and involved actively in any activity. Second, leadership should be fluid and flexible due to created a shared culture. In fact, employees are invited to contribute in developing their potential and creating toolkits in order to become successful in a project. There is no doubt that unpredictable changes occur immediately in a project, therefore the leader should be ready to make a change fast. Finally, another skill that might be considered is stress innovation. If the leader could maintain the stress innovation correctly on the team, it is likely to give team members an opportunity in making a difference to expand the company, and they will learn from each member and find out their strengths as well.

Based on my personal experiences as a program officer of a start-up, engaging in environmental issue, I led a national project of Zero Waste Movement in 2016. During the project, I had just under 3-month preparation with 4-member team at the first becoming 15 in the second month. My team then was designed to promote and invite as many as communities to be a part of the national event. My team did successfully collaboration with many institution and communities in which for about 1000 institutions joint in this event, representing in every province in Indonesia. This occurred because I did some matters as long as I led the team. First, I always had an intense discussion regularly with my team either face-to-face meetings or using application-message group. Second, I put trust on them to tackle some obstacles as the result they learnt to face the difficult situation. Third, I shared a job based on the strength of every member, and it might be an efficiency drive for completing the assignments. Furthermore, we attempted to collaborate with large communities first and they helped promote this event actively. Finally, I attempted to be flexible and make my team to deal with changes occurred.

Via, you are not being asked to present a long winded explanation of your point of view about leadership, startups, and business in this essay. You are being asked to focus on only 2 topics that go hand in hand in this essay, proof of your leadership and influencing skills. Instead, what I got is a long explanation of your point of view about leadership, start up cultures, and international business development. Definitely not the response that should be found in this essay. When you do somewhat get to the point, you spend less than a whole paragraph explaining your leadership and influencing skills. Definitely the best way to get your application thrown out by the reviewer. I want to make this essay work as much as you do for your application so I need you to listen to me with regards to the revision requirements of this essay.

You will need to start over. I know, it hurts to think about having to write a new essay but that is what you have to do. From the very first paragraph, you need to catch the reviewer's attention so that he will know that your response will be on track with the prompt expectations. You can define what you leadership and influencing means to you based upon your professional experience if you wish. What you can't do is discuss world business in the essay.

After you define what leadership and influencing means to you, then you can launch into a transition sentence towards the end that will allow you to explain a time during your professional career when you were called upon to display leadership and influencing skills. These could be in the form of a project, a work related problem that your boss was experiencing at the time, or a challenge that was posed before you. Whatever the scenario is, make sure that it has you handling people or developing solutions that required you to exercise a degree of negotiation skills in order to fulfill the work requirement. To make it easier for you, you don't have to present the leadership and influencing narrative in just one incident presentation if it is not possible. You can present them as 2 separate incidents if it will be easier for you to do that.

What is important is that you focus on showing your leadership and influencing abilities rather than explaining it away in a single paragraph as you did in this essay. Proof of leadership and influencing abilities needs to be presented in a manner that the reviewer can verify. The presentation you have at the moment isn't going to allow that to happen.