Harvard MBA Leadership Essay Tips

• Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)

To answer the Harvard MBA Leadership-Focused Essay, I explore:

•    Experiences that Shaped who you are
•    Invest In Others
•    What leader do you want to become

Experiences Shaped who you are

1) Family 

I am certain the Harvard MBA admissions team don’t have the bandwidth to read between the lines, but as a consultant I notice the applicant’s adaptability to life stressors by evaluating the narratives and the relationship they describe with the authoritative figure in the family.

No one has perfect dynamics with their parents. 

You don’t have to be self-conscious while writing about your upbringing, the stressors in early life, and their impact on how you see the world, but remember that most people fall between the two extremes:

a)    Sensitive Care
b)    Conditional Attachment

a) Sensitive Care: Eastern cultures make fun of American parents negotiating with children, but psychologically, it has been proven to develop adults who see the world with optimism and respect other’s autonomy.

b)Conditional Attachment: takes two forms.

The first - the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mindset where the individual is detached from the ‘support’ of the society and is fighting against the world.

The ‘individualized’ narrative is easy to spot. There won’t be any credit or acknowledgement of the support network in the essay. It is all about ‘me against the world’. Although these profiles are accomplished in Finance or Technology where often such individualized personalities are rewarded, when writing essays, such narratives come across as lacking emotional intelligence.

The second are applicants, who need constant attention and acknowledgement from peers to compensate the lack of attention they received from the family’s authority figure. And interestingly, such attention seeking leads to initiatives and milestones that are important for Harvard MBA application.

Life stressors and lack of sufficient attention from the authority figure can lead to individuals who are eager to do more for their communities and peers, in turn, making them a highly sought after group for Harvard and M7 MBA programs.

I had received this question several times while guiding applicants to write better narratives, ‘I am accomplished, but I don’t have any setbacks to write for Harvard MBA essays.’

I discourage applicants from creating inauthentic family narratives, but it doesn’t mean you have nothing to write.

Family is just one dynamic in the essay. You should explore the social environment, education, and cultural background.

2) Social Environment 

Perhaps a bigger influence on the causes you care, the goals that you set and the careers you entered are the social environment. 

A social environment includes the neighborhood, social groups you identify most with (arts, sports, majors, hobbies), and the organizations you volunteered. 

The advantage of making the ‘social’ environment the influence is that you don’t have to manufacture any trauma narrative. 

Neighborhood: A white male applicant related to the struggle of black children because he grew up in a black neighborhood. Such association works in MBA application if your contributions are meaningful and the narrative comes from your heart. 

Empathy: An underrepresented minority can relate to another underrepresented minority. I have read the narrative of an LGBTQ+ applicant from Asia volunteering for causes of women beneficiaries. 

Authoritative Figure: If an applicant had a healthy dynamics with their parents, the causes of the caregiver becomes dear to them as well. I have read how parent’s teaching career influenced applicant’s interest in Teach for America. 

A parent’s interest in conservationism, encouraged an applicant to document all varieties of butterfly into one of the most historically important websites on butterflies. 

There are multiple ways in which social environment can be included in the leadership story without any trauma narrative. 

3)  Education

Education is another sub-set of experiences that shapes who you are. The positive affectation associated with top universities is from the assumed holistic education each school offers.

If the brand of the school was the only criteria, Harvard Business School would be filled with candidates from top universities. Interestingly, the diversity in schools and universities is much higher at Harvard than any other category on which an applicant is evaluated.

The pedigree of the university alone is not a satisfactory condition to improve admission chances at HBS.

The extra-curricular engagement and volunteering become two critical evaluations of your evolution as a leader.

When you cite experiences, understand under which identity you will be classified based on first impression, then work backward to supplement your positive attributes and break negative stereotypes with complementary stories.

One applicant narrated her passion for popularizing special Olympics by connecting her relationship with a younger sibling who was wheelchair bound after a traumatic accident. If the admissions team had just evaluated her for her high-performing career as an Energy candidate there would have been other equally qualified women applicant in the competition. 

She could have easily used initiatives on promoting women leaders in the industry but she chose a cause that was dear to her while her growth and curiosity narrative were all on increasing representation of women engineers and leaders in industry. 

The theme of the question need not be matched neatly based on the most expected experience. 

Choose examples based on your strengths, weaknesses, and unique life experiences.

For Essay examples: Download F1GMAT's Harvard MBA Essay Guide or Winning MBA Essay Guide (Harvard plus other M7 schools)

4) Cultural background 

For applicants with strong social and cultural identities, including examples that are closest to their identity would be the best way to authentically capture their leadership experiences. 

Among the many contributing factors to your cultural background, three stands out:

a)  Country/City

This is perhaps the biggest indicator of whether you would make it to Harvard if you are an international applicant. 

If the leadership narrative is closely tied to the culture of the region and an MBA from Harvard is unlikely to add to the network, learning framework, or skills to solve the problem, no matter how persuasively you have captured the experience, it won’t resonate with the admissions team. 

Your experience should have similarity to what the US has overcome within the past decade. Or the problem should have keen interest among the political or investor communities in the US. 

Climate Change is one universal problem. 

Security of digital infrastructure is another.

Managing inflation without affecting growth is another. 

If your leadership is in one niche – addressing climate change, make it the core narrative, even if all your experiences are tied to a non-US country.

Then, there are problems that cut across cultures. 

One applicant wrote about the lack of regulation in the real-estate industry and how it adds to the carbon footprint in a harmful way. 

As a reader, I was rewarded when the applicant made a correlation between an incentive and government policy.

It cuts across cultures. 

What the city was facing from over-tourism was a problem that was phrased with three contexts – unsustainable rent for locals, destruction of flora, and overreliance on the tourist income that led to substance abuse during the off-season.

b) Functional

Sometimes, leadership in a function has a strong association with an identity. 

For an extraverted applicant, the template for the weekly meeting felt impersonal. No one was truly sharing the challenges they were facing or receiving ideas from peers. It was just an update on the tasks that a workflow or an email could have solved. 

When the applicant introduced a communication framework for the weekly meeting, it first solved the problem by forcing the participants to share the -Why, What and How, then it became a platform for sharing larger cultural issues many international peers were facing in the city.  And finally, the meeting became a critical platform for building camaraderie. 

Your personality trait might have been transmitted into a team or a culture. Share them when you mention leadership examples. 

c)  Identity

The best examples are around identity. 

If you are let us say from an underrepresented minority in the US, starting a club in your organization or a forum for addressing the concerns of the group or introducing cuisines or cultural artifacts from your identity into the company culture will be looked at as your efforts into making the company culturally inclusive. 

The identity need not be all related to ethnicity or sexual orientation.

It could also be around gender, nationality, personality traits or even talent. 

If you are part of a largely represented identity at Harvard, avoid using your identity in the leadership narrative. 

Focus on functional or volunteering or extra-curricular leadership.

Invest In Others

The evolution of your leadership traits means little unless you used those traits for your team, peers, or the communities you identify the most with.

Among the many leadership traits on investing in others, four traits always get associated with this quality:

1) Motivating

Motivating a person in the team or mentoring a junior person doesn’t work in how we see in movies about underdogs winning some football or baseball tournament. 

Often, we are inspired by mentors who themselves have traversed the path to achieve a milestone.

Educating underprivileged children works if you yourself have overcome similar obstacles or your family has a legacy of teaching. 

The motivation should be unambiguous. 

Ronald Heifetz, Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University have used this technique way back in the late 1990s when he encouraged students to bring their leadership experiences as case studies. 

The experience of learning about the journey of someone that you could relate to made the learning experience more impressionable for peers at Harvard law.

2)  Common Goal

In a team setting, investing in others is about aligning the person’s learning and career goals with the company’s goals. 

For a start-up, the applicant hired a person who became nervous when the pitch was in front of the client, but the job required that he pitch the product or a new feature to the client every quarter and, in some cases, every 7 weeks. 

The easiest solution was to replace the person, but the applicant introduced strategies to manage nerves and build the teammate's confidence through mock sessions and presentations in front of a larger audience. 

Both the company and the person's learning goal were met with the corrective action.

3)  Risk Taking

Investing in others would also mean taking a risk on a person for a role or task when you don’t have the buy-in to include the person in the team. 

Hiring and assigning a person to a challenging project/milestone are all great examples of risk-taking.

Risk taking could also be an ethos that might have helped you but seem uncomfortable for someone who doesn’t have the family support or network that you might have. 

Often, applicants mention the mindset when they narrate mentoring children from underprivileged backgrounds. Their world is limited from the lack of support. When the information to a better future is shared with potential plans to achieve them, self-limiting hurdles are imposed from a decade or two of limited thinking. 

The mentorship narrative are around techniques to get oneself out of the self-limiting thoughts. The best ones always have specific techniques to overcome the mental barrier.

4) Growth

A growth mindset is easy to understand but tough to follow. 

Failure is a feedback on the missed opportunity, a lack of prioritization, a lack of understanding the problem, or a gap in understanding the dynamics in the competitive space. 

But failure is never feedback on the person. 

A person with growth mindset instinctually understand to separate failure as an event that has valuable information from failure as feedback on the person’s character.

The mindset is valuable as a leader when the team faces setbacks. 

The focus on evaluating the missed opportunity is always on processes, framework and workflow and never the person. 

The person is just part of a flawed system.

Interestingly, team dynamics in such an environment is on optimizing one’s productivity and the systems that keep the team nimble.

Share one such example where you thinking as a leaders helped the team learn from a failure.

What leader do you want to become

Any aspirational leadership traits should be prefaced with some evidence of the same traits. 

No candidate regardless of their earnestness is likely to acquire a new leadership trait from the ground up without some evidence of the traits in their pre-Harvard professional, extra-curricular and volunteering experiences. 

Often, three leadership traits stand out in the aspirations of most Harvard MBA applicants:

1) Adaptability

The most obvious way to demonstrate adaptability is by pivoting a business model, strategy or tactics when faced with a customer or organizational problem. Use them if you want to focus on a professional leadership experience. 

If you want to explore aspects of your leadership behavior, expand on your adaptability to the team’s skill level, maturity, experience, culture, and power dynamics.

You can elevate the stakes by sharing how you maintained the vision of the company while strategically adapting to change in team dynamics (after mergers or acquisition), competition (a new policy or product or a competitor) or change in leadership. 

For applicants from the Technology or industry facing rapid innovation, use the adaptability as a core narrative to demonstrate a readiness to manage change.

Most importantly, through the experience highlight your self-discipline to lead through the chaos that typically follows when there is change in organizational structure, technology or team.

2) Being Role Models

Leading by adhering to values of integrity, fairness, and growth and encouraging teams to pursue challenging milestones are often cited in Harvard MBA essays, but the best essays on leadership are from entrepreneurial applicants. They are pursuing a vision that is ridiculous now in the current paradigm of how we think, transact, and communicate but useful for a generation that is yet to be born.

Persuading a group of people a.k.a followers to pursue this vision is the fundamental tenant of being a role model. 

Defining your vision for the world, sharing the progress you made, and painting a future where your vision will be actualized, beneficiary’s world transformed, and new industries/functions emerge from it, often can be a show-stopping part of the narrative. 

The only catch - the first few milestones should already have been accomplished if you are an entrepreneurial applicant. 

3) Challenging Status Quo

Challenging the status quo can take many forms. 

The typical leadership narratives are around challenging the culture of the organization. It works for start-up and mid-tier companies but for large organizations, the pressure from shareholders, influential investors and the industry’s power dynamics can all lead to narrative that are not believable. 

Another more believable form of challenging status quo is challenging a process or a framework by which a team operates, communicates, strategize or delegates. Breaking down your role and the impact of your contribution had in changing the ‘inefficient’ process often reads well when the jargon is broken down for a general reader. 

Your recommendation letter should also validate the contributions when you are talking about any innovation.

Related Download

• F1GMAT's Harvard MBA Essay Guide

References

• An attachment perspective on psychopathology - MARIO MIKULINCER1 and PHILIP R. SHAVER2
• Personality Change from Life Experiences: Moderation Effect of Attachment Security:Tetsuya Kawamoto  
• LEADING FROM WITHIN: Building Organizational Leadership Capacity, David R. Kolzow, PhD