Q) What are some good failure examples that you have coached for MBA admissions interviews?
Atul Jose (Admissions Consultant, F1GMAT): There are so many trivial examples that I have heard in F1GMAT’s Mock Interview Service where the client was initially unwilling to accept some of their mistakes. But after some persuasion, they were able to come up with some interesting examples. I can broadly categorize them into three kinds of examples:
1) Career Change
Right now, we are in one of the most exciting employment markets where I have yet to see a client or reader who has not at least switcher their career once – either from their undergraduate major to a different industry or function or tried a function for 1-year and then received an opportunity to switch. Now, an MBA is again considered a tool for a career change or rapidly enhancing one's career. Many authentic answers around failure talk about wrong approaches while pursuing a career change. The common ones are the unnecessary persistence with an industry or function where they were a poor fit. If you can reflect and share a regret - not in a negative tone, but as a reflection on your fear that the transition would have been more challenging than what it really was, the answer will be authentic.
2) Leadership Mistakes
There are so many contexts around which we make leadership mistakes. It could be on hiring or team building. There are many examples of a lack of a backup plan where a critical team member couldn’t join, and it had a negative impact on the deliverable. There are mistakes around setting clear guidelines or delegation or assumptions that led to missteps. In all the good examples, the client owned up to the mistake and developed a framework or value not to repeat the same mistake.
3) Conflict Management
Use this example only if you are in Finance or in a high-stress, conflict-driven environment. These are not your typical work schedule. There are aggressive deadlines, borderline unethical practices, and treatment of peers that lead to conflicts. Here, the mistakes are often around how the client should have built a consensus to highlight the cultural issue because they didn’t have the power to escalate the issue. These are examples from the first year on the job. Use it only if you don’t have any leadership mistakes or career-change-related failures.