Specifically address ethics, diversity, collaboration and motivation.
In my opinion, leadership is about taking ownership to create excellence. Acquiring leadership skills is a key aspect of an individual’s growth. A true leader is a one who motivates his team to bring out their best. My Journey as a class monitor in grade 5, a head girl in grade 10, a class representative in college or a team lead at Philips gave tons of opportunities to showcase my leadership skills. I would like to choose the following experience to highlight my leadership skills since I gained substantially from it.
While leading a five-person team to perform verification for a project, I faced the challenge to reduce the customer defects ratio to less than 5% with my young and inexperienced team.
The three new faces in the team had just joined as interns. Being new to the corporate world, they required special guidance and motivation to start contributing effectively. As a first step, I concentrated on training sessions and to making them comfortable at work. I made them see me as a buddy who they could come to anytime for any issues or concerns. To make sure that they were constantly learning, I often sat with them and talked about the company and our processes.
Simultaneously, I involved my other two senior team members in making plans and taking decisions, as I did not want any difference in opinions later to delay project delivery. I made them come up with plans to train interns, create verification estimations, and generate verification reports. Including the interns too in these processes introduced them to our way of working and made them aware of the plans and dates. As we went through daily stand up meetings to track status and address issues, slowly, I had an energized team committed to contribute. By being adaptive to my circumstances, I laid the