Leadership is a common topic for scholarship essays application. Scholarship applications often include essay prompts related to leadership to assess individual skills as well as capturing future potential. Leadership encompasses a wide range of skills, including communication, problem-solving, teamwork, and decision-making. Scholarship committees may ask about leadership to assess an applicant's ability to demonstrate these skills effectively. They want to identify candidates who not only excel academically but also possess the leadership skills necessary to their future careers.
For me, I understand that leadership is about the ability to serve people around us. Also, a leader is an individual who can influence, motivate, and bring people to achieve goals. When writing a leadership essay for a scholarship application, it's essential to provide specific examples of your leadership experiences, explain how these experiences have shaped you, and demonstrate how they align with the scholarship's mission and values. Here, I would like to share how I answered the leadership essay questions. I hope that what I share here will give you an insight with your applications.
The structure of answering a leadership essay is like that of any other essay, comprising an introduction, body, and conclusion. Here, I would like to try to explain a bit, one by one, based on my experience.
Introduction - What does leadership mean to you?
In the introduction, I define the type of leadership that represents me and explain why this leadership style is meaningful to me. Here is the example.
For me, a leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. This means a leader sheds light on other people to walk confidently in the darkroom because people tend to follow on something that has been proven to them. So instead of telling people what to do, I prefer to lead them by the actions that I have developed with certain characteristics such as being open-minded and having problem-solving skills during my professional life.
Body paragraph - Giving example from the any experience when I got a chance to show leadership skills.
 When answering this question, I thought of two of my best achievements during my professional career. In total,  I have had working experience in four private companies before I started working for the government. I decided to choose one of the most memorable experiences where I used and showed my leadership skills. I then used the STAR techniques to write about each story. The STAR approach is an effective way to structure my writing. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
Situation - In this part, I described the general situation what it was, where it happened, how is the situation and what role I took. Task - Then, I described what I tried to achieve based on my job description. Then the Action - in this section, I started to describe how I used my leadership skills to achieve the goal or solve the problem. I tried to be specific by providing clear examples based on my previous real problem. The Result - is the last part when I mentioned the outcome or the improvement that happened in relation to the action. Here is the answer:
My leadership development was shaped when I worked in an edible oil company. I was the youngest, who leads the older as a Quality Control Supervisor. There was a case when I handle a complaint from one big customer that rejected 25 tons of our products. I was assigned to set a strategy to handle this complaint, I started to investigate the problem by organized several meetings where I allowed everyone to share the idea and encouraged them to assign specific duties. It was incredibly challenging, the more experienced people that I supposed to be managing giving advice. I listen to all those inputs, then I try to provide a solution based on the summarization of those inputs. I decided to ......................................... (I have not mentioned it in this writing because it is considered confidential). Both of my company and customer accept this win-win solution. This experience showed me that being open-minded, I learned a lot about the supportive team helps me to improve my problem-solving skills. My Leadership skills is evolving from time to time, since I worked at several position in private companies that develop my problem-solving skills.
In the second paragraph, I attempted to connect this experience with another previous achievement, where I was able to demonstrate something that had been proven.
