CPE 618: PAIRING ASSIGNMENT 2

Prepared by:

MHD BADHRUL BIN BAHAR (2016589039)

MUHAMMAD SAIFUL AMRI (2016552211)

Date of Submission:

13th December 2019

Name of Lecturer:

Ir. Normadyzah Binti Ahmad

Faculty of Chemical Engineering,

UiTM Campus Shah Alam.

An Essay About Strengths-Based Leadership

Strengths-Based Leadership Theory is a tool or method introduced by Tom Rath and Barry
Conchie for maximising productivity, efficiency, and success by continuously fortifying
strengths of the organisation. The main focus of this method is to tackle the core underlying
belief that people are more potentially driven by grow their strengths rather than mending
weaknesses. Not to say this will ignore the shortcomings, but rather focus on building talents
and put the weaknesses into smallest scope as possible. A strength is defined as the ability to
exhibit near-perfect performance consistently in a given activity.

There are four domains of team strengths coined by the Gallup Organisation. The first
one is EXECUTING. People with dominant Executing theme know how to make things
happen. This kind of theme is driven by a person who are an achiever to have laser focus
mean on getting the task done, an arranger who charting and plotting the overall tasks, a
believer who believe this will happen eventually, a consistence person in planning,
deliberative, discipline, focus, responsible, and restorative towards the end of the major task.
In the previous Ethics and Leadership for Engineers community project that has been carried
out, I was the Director of The Pink October Fund-Raising with MAKNA (Majlis Kanser
Nasional) program. Problems have already occurred since the very beginning of this program
is when this program was handed by The Sacred Cow and the integration between two
faculties, which are Chemical Engineering Faculty and Civil Engineering Faculty. The
problem arose when this program given in accordance with the Civil Engineering Faculty’s
Engineering Week event without a single aid ever given to my team. Not only that, the major
problem regarding to this program is time limitation given to accomplish. Without a doubt, I
took the challenge and improvised the flow and scenario of this program in a well written and
graphical depiction on how this program will be done and tabled this down in the group
meeting succinctly. The key for this theme is to keep my feet on the ground, and head
straight, and always have a phlegmatic temperament towards everything even though there are
things that boiled up into a certain degree. With that, this program dubbed as THE MOST
SUCCESSFUL EVENT from MAKNA as we strived THE LARGEST FUND RAISING ever
done in THE VARSITY LEVEL, with that being said, our collection is RM5,323.00. More
than 70% of our initial target, RM3,000.00.

The second domain is INFLUENCING. People with dominant Influencing theme

know how to take charge, speak up, and make sure the team is heard. The person who are
prone to influencing are an activator or the threshold of the team to move, commandment
person who move the game, a good communicator for public relation with any people or any
who, a competitor for always wanting to strive for the best, a maximiser that always want
more and more for the result, a self-assurance person who confidence in one's own abilities or
character, and a significant person who knows his place and channel in order to performing
the tasks. Regarding to the community project given, my classmates behooved me as the
project director as for my preceding experiences in programmes handling under the Chemical
Engineering Faculty’s of Student Affairs. The true measure of leadership is Influence –
Nothing More, Nothing Less. True leadership can not be awarded, appointed, or assigned. It
must come only from influence, and that actually can not be simply mandated. It must be
earned. In this project, there are six factors to circumscribe influence. The first one is
Character - Who they are. The person that is in charge or helm any organisation needs be
influential. Without this, the organisation is deemed weak and dormant not only extrinsically,
but intrinsically as well. The second one is Relationships – Who They Know. With deep
relationships with the right people you can become the real leader in an organisation, so was I
with the red tape of Chemical Engineering Faculty’s management. The third one is
Knowledge – What They Know. As information is vital, you need a grasp of the facts to
develop an accurate vision for the future by charting the best plan of the overall event. What I
did was doing a Gantt chart for the whole team can see the projection of the program.The
fourth one is Intuition – What They Feel. Leaders seek to recognise and influence
intangibles such as energy, morale, timing and momentum. For every problem occurred
within the program, I went for the simplest solution but have a higher impact about definite
answer for an event to complete successfully is not depends on the longest, turbid way for a
solution, but rather the easiest form to be comprehended or done and having the biggest
impact. The fifth factor is Experience – Where They’ve Been. The greater your past
challenges, the more likely followers will be willing to let you lead. This being said, I’ve been
through rigmarole of personal endeavour and group tasks processes to grasp on leadership and
way to build bridges with people. By using my past experiences, I put pieces into completion
like a puzzle so things will run a smooth sailing until the end. And the final factor, the sixth
one is Ability – What They Can Do. The bottom line is followers want to know whether you
can lead them to victory. As soon as they no longer believe you can deliver, they will stop
following. There is nothing more kaput in organisation than putting a square peg in a round
hole. If you put someone at the top without one’s knowing what they can or have to do, is like
watching Rome to be burned faster than they have ever built. To be an influencer, I had to
hone my public relation and soft skills to be at par or resonate with the same frequency with
the people that I am dealing with. It is never easy, but doable.

The third domain is RELATIONSHIP BUILDING. People with dominant

Relationship Building theme have the ability to build strong relationship that can hold a team
together and make the team greater than the sum of its part. Team building person is the
people who are adaptive to any situation, connected with people, developer of new solution,
empathy to the circumstances and people, always in harmony ambient, include people in
every situation to make every one understand the current situation, individualisation, positive,
and a relator. I still remember the first problem surfaced when this community project was
given where all of my team agitated and stressed about the execution and implementation of
what to do, how to do, when to do, which to do, where to do, who to do, and why to do
because of time and money constrain given to us. Each and every one of them complaining to
me about it and then I took a stand scribbling and doodling the blueprint of this program. The
thing about human behaviour is, they will believe in something they can see or fathom. By
tabling the plan and linking everything towards the correct people and providing solutions
with the time range, people will likely to believe and begin to cooperate with each other after
that. The plan will seem to be convoluted, obfuscating, and clouded if you are not decluttering
problems into pieces and starting to linking it. After that, every bureau starting to execute
their own focus and eventually integrated every single bureau into one successful event.

The fourth and final domain is STRATEGIC THINKING. People with dominant
Strategic Thinking theme help teams consider what could be. They absorbed and analyse
informations that can inform better decisions. People with this strength is analytical and
deducible, full with context when performing task, futuristic with contingency plans and
ideation, intellection and strategic in reasoning, and a learner. Anyone Can Steer the Ship, but
It Takes a Leader to Chart the Course.Before good leaders take their people on a journey, they
go through a process in order to give the trip the best chance of being a success. Every past
success and failure a leader experienced can be a valuable source of information and wisdom.
Success teaches them what they are capable of doing and gives them confidence. However,
their failures can often teach greater lessons. If you fail to learn from your mistakes, you’re
going to fail again and again. No good leader plans a course of action without paying attention
to current conditions. Good leader counts the cost before making commitments for themselves
and others. Great leaders get ideas from many sources. They listen to members of their
leadership team. They spend time with leaders of other organisations who can mentor them.
They always think in terms of relying on a team, not just themselves. A leader has to possess
a positive attitude. If you can’t confidently make the trip in your mind, you’re not going to be
able to take it in real life. On the other hand, you also have to be able to see the facts
realistically. If you don’t go in with your eyes wide open, you’re going to get blindsided.
Balancing optimism and realism, faith and fact can be very difficult. These were the lifeline
that I have been followed since the beginning of the project until the end. By having a
strategic plan, I will not wasted time over a frivolous and petty unwelcome situation. There
was one problem getting the paperwork approval by my team, thinking that putting maximum
budget will be cut into half of whatever it was but it wasn’t true. Because of that we lost two
weeks of approval-time, so I had to sit down and brief them about what supposedly to be
included, depending on the necessities and requirements.
Tom Rath and Barry Conchie identified three keys to being a more effective leader
which is knowing your strengths and investing in others strengths, getting people with the
right strength on your team and understanding and meeting the four basic needs of those who
look to you for leadership. All this three key aspects used for the guideline on completing
community project that our class have been assigned. The first key is knowing our strengths
and investing in others strength. Every individuals is different and we all function differently
based on our personalities. However, all those different strenghts can be unite and used
together as a team in completing the task for example in our project, each person in our class
have been assigned based on their own strength to help strengthen other member strengths. As
for me, I have assigned as the Bureau of Multimedia and Saiful as the Director of the
programm. As the Bureau of Multimedia, the main job is to get the people to know about our
programm by creating, designing and preparing all the banner, E-flyers and Mock-Up Cheque
and many more. The second key to be an effective leaders is getting people with the right
strenghts on the team. Saiful Amri has appropriately chosen us for our respective bureaus
knowing our strengths in handling the expected issues. As for me, the person who handled all
the media content of the event, i have an experienced in the multimedia department from my
previous project, i also have been assigned as the multemedia person whose created the
banner for our event. Based on those experienced that i have gathered, My partner in Bureau
of Multimedia, Mr Zulfitri Firdaus and I worked togethers to handled all the media content of
this project. The last key discussed on the Strength Based Leadership is meeting the four basic
needs of those who look to you for leadership. As the Bureau of Multimedia and as the person
with have more experienced regarding all the media content compared to other members in
our project, they have been assigned and looked me as the leaders for the multimedia content.
By Following all three keys to be an effective leader by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, we
have been successfully completing the target for our project.

As the Bureau of Multimedia, there are many challenges that we have encountered
from the beginning of the project until the final part of the project, One of the challenges that
we have faced is at the beginning of the project where we have the difficulties to find the
suitable equipment for the recording purpose (taking pictures and videos) for the whole event.
This the most important part the person who handled the media. After several discussion with
all the project members, we have all agreed to use our own mobile phone as our equipment
for the recording purpose. We have created a group platform at Telegram application and
invited all the project members, the purpose is to collect all the pictures and videos in one
place and make our job easier to find any pictures and videos for our documentation. The
second challenges is that , it was the lack of knowledge regarding the techniques and know-
how on the programmes that are critical for the role in as person in multimedia duties. These
programmes such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects are
significantly complex programmes that are key in every media content creation, such as the
posters and flyers to bring about attention to the fund raiser. Mr Zulfitri and I as the Bureau of
Multimedia spend a lot of time in order to be familiar with all those software despite knowing
that it takes forever to master the software. It was all for the sake of this programm to be
sucsessfully completed. Moreover, one of the major problems that I have faced is when Mr
Saiful Amri as the director of the programm assigned us for the Mock-Up Cheque creation.
The hard part is to be collaborating with the Department of Printing Uitm Shah Alam. Since
the budget from HEP Uitm is still lagging and we have less knowledged on the total money
that have been collected, we need to postpone the Mock-Up Cheque printing until the very
final week of the programm. In addition, because of the late collaboration with the person in
charged in the Department of Printing, we did not have enough time to design the Mock-Up
Cheque and need to spend extra money for the design of the cheque. However, we managed
to not over spending on the budget for the cheque creation which is RM 100.00 after several
dicsussion with the person in charged for the printing and design of our Mock-Up cheque.

As a conclusion, The fund raising programm in Collaboration MAKNA was a

successfull project and we as a team have been working hard in order to complete this project.
Trough ups and down faced challenged and execute the ways as a team to overcome the
challenge.

(2516 Words)