I will teach you how to bring your life stories to essays faster with F1GMAT's essay guides. Download below or subscribe to F1GMAT's Service and work with me - Atul Jose, Author/Editor/Founding Consultant, F1GMAT(16 Years of helping applicants gain admissions to M7 and Top 30 schools) Question 2 (450 words): Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style.
Leadership might have become a clichéd essay topic, but not for Kellogg.
Even the core curriculum has a mandatory course in Leadership (Leadership in Organizations). Since leadership has several contexts: personal responsibility, overcoming a personal setback, domain expertise, overcoming a team setback, motivating the team, and leading the team towards a goal, it is tougher to shortlist the most relevant experience.
Luckily, Kellogg has clearly highlighted the context of the leadership – “where you had to make a difficult decision.”
The example must be from your professional career.
I have shortlisted 6 themes for the Kellogg MBA Leadership Decisions and Styles Essay
1) Handling Constraints
2) Changing Company Culture
3) Active Listening
4) Facing Failure
5) Fairness in Team
6) Challenging Status Quo with Incremental Change
1) Handling Constraints
Leadership roles come with constraints - small budget, limited talent, lack of motivation, lack of trust in your leadership (your first project as a leader), or a culture that believes in the status quo.
Focusing on goals despite constraints has been written to death, but a different way to write about handling constraints is to mix serendipitous insights with results that you achieved with deliberate planning.
A narrative that reads like a case study on leadership without any vulnerability will not impress the admissions team.
A narrative with just vulnerability without the reasons why the leadership decision was difficult would also not impress the admissions team.
Clearly Establish what was at Stake
Context setting with key performance metrics, trends in the industry, and the pressure you faced from the management, the team, the client, or all the stakeholders are essential to demonstrate what was at stake.
In any project, there are key performance metrics – the number of sales, acceptable feature list, the number of marketing channels to propagate your brand message or the fewest number of prospects you approach before a sale.
All these performance metrics mean little if there are no crises.
Include a Crisis Narrative
Adding a crisis narrative while describing the constraints will force the reviewer to pay attention to your story.
To reiterate the change in value as a leader, you must describe the constraints in such a way that novelty in the idea, process, or strategy you incorporated to handle the problem should look like a logical step.
Avoid Technical Narratives
Avoid using a technical solution in the narrative, as it is the least effective way to write for the Kellogg MBA leadership essay.
If you are from the Technology/Engineering or FinTech function, share the thought behind the solution, with emphasis on the customer or the beneficiary.
Example of Handling Constraints
Background Information: A campaign manager risks losing an account when a star copywriter takes emergency leave.
Read: Kellogg MBA: Leadership Style and Difficult Decision Essay (Losing Star Performer)
2) Changing Company Culture
Any ‘changing’ company culture narrative regardless of whether you are just a team member, a team lead, a manager, a startup founder or an executive in your family business require prioritizing certain key ‘believability’ factors.
Action over slogans
The first believability factor in the real-world is leading through action. I have read examples of pasting slogans on factory floor, starting the meeting with a mission statement and many internalizing techniques. But rarely such intervention work without action. The best examples will include actions that a leader took to endorse the new leadership value before narrating any communication strategies.
Systems for Change
A client narrated how communication across hierarchy was facilitated with a reporting system that allowed factory workers, managers, technicians, and even vendors to report issues they notice at any part of the workflow. Earlier only staff with technical proficiency could report issues, but with the integration of WhatsApp, voice recording was translated to an issue ticket. Such technology integration is an ideal example of systems facilitating a change in culture.
Communicating Action and Systems
Only after the actions of the leader and the systems to enforce the new culture are introduced, should you highlight ‘communication’ strategies that reinforced the new values.
Build Influencers and Collaborators
The communication framework should go beyond top of the mind reinforcement techniques. It should fundamentally alter how the values are communication and prioritized in decisions. One way to demonstrate collaborative and empowering skills as a leader is to find influencers in the organization who can accelerate the adoption of the new culture. It need not be aligned to seniority or a job function.
Example of Changing Company Culture
Background Information: A young technology leader makes one of the toughest decisions in his professional career – to let go of two senior team members.
Read: Kellogg MBA: Difficult Decision and Leadership Style Essay (Transforming Culture)
3) Active Listening
If you have worked in the service industry, meeting the demands of an overbearing client might have been wrongly equated as “the Customer is always right.” Many businesses accommodate outrageous demands.
Active listening is much more than following orders; it also means dissecting the intent behind the demand.
A VP of a technology product asked one of my clients – a product manager to change the algorithm in such a way that high-cost products were featured on the top of the search results over best-selling products.
A follow-up communication through tactful phrasing revealed a new development – a competitor had started a price war. The best-selling products were the target. Instead of reducing the price, the VP wanted to feature high-cost products. Through higher conversion, he wanted to grow the revenue.
The ‘strategy’ was out of fear.
Once my client understood the emotion behind the strategy, he suggested three ideas, one of which was eventually accepted.
The accepted idea had nothing to do with tweaking the search results.
Sometimes, listening is not just about following orders. It is about understanding the person’s fears and goals.
Listening is also not just about tackling a worried speaker; it is about allowing the speaker to listen to themselves. Sometimes talking out loud help a speaker validate the idea through the listener’s verbal and non-verbal responses.
Active listening is also the foundation for a listener - to grow, to recognize the vulnerability a person is expressing, and to see the world through their values and fears.
Active Listening is a sign of respect.
Active listening is the foundation for crossing cultural barriers.
Active Listening is the starting point for a growth experience.
Example of Active Listening
Background Information: A consultant in a non-profit balances short-term value creation with long-term impact by cultivating empathy for the beneficiaries.
Read: Kellogg MBA: Leadership Style and Difficult Decision Essay(Building Empathy)
4) Facing Failure
Facing failure or an ‘L’ (even the word is a taboo) has been discussed with three popular narratives – be stoic, be empathetic, or look at the statistics on failure vs success (sports and venture capital communities).
Be Stoic: Stoic and Buddhist ideals have a unique intersection – to be detached from the setbacks and accept the eventual demise of one’s physical form. Such thinking cannot be easily turned into a narrative for MBA application essays on leadership.
A stoic leader will not be surprised by successes or failures.
Successes are stepping stones to a greater legacy, and failures are stepping stones to greater challenges. The problem with stoic leaders is that the high that teams experience when they meet a milestone will be missing, but at the same time, the lows that they expect to feel when the goals are not reached would also not impact the team. A sense of duty/professionalism is driving the team towards action.
Be Empathetic: A better narrative theme is to be empathetic – to oneself, if you are a leader and responsible for the outcome, or be empathetic to the team, who did their best or made a mistake that led to the failure. Such nurturing oneself to make a comeback or building a culture of risk-taking and pivoting through failure turns into many inspiring leadership narratives.
An empathetic leader shifts the focus of the team to recent success and looks for life lessons from the failure.
An ideal leader is a mix of two – empathetic enough not to be critical/negative about the team and stoic enough to openly discuss the problems they overlooked.
By maintaining the balance, failure becomes another event and not feedback on the team’s or the leader’s character.
Example of Facing Failure
Background Information: A technologist responsible for managing a proprietary pricing algorithm stares at zero sales in the airline and hospitality industry – a once-in-a-lifetime event that motivates him to find a creative solution.
Read: Facing Failure - Kellogg MBA Leadership Style and Difficult Decision Essay
5) Fairness in Team
Consensus building is defined by the hierarchy in the organization. For a top-down hierarchy, the narrative of associates spearheading consensus-building beyond the scope of their responsibilities won’t be believable. It must be from the most recent title – assuming you had reached a Senior or Managerial role (Assistant or Associate) to have the authority for consensus building.
Include Consensus Building - For Finance and Consulting Roles
Consensus building is more relevant in Investment Banking and Consulting roles where you would have the opportunity to interact with multiple stakeholders. It would be relevant for Technologists working on the project with functional and subject matter experts. Sometimes the design or strategic choices require persuading multiple experts. Such examples are ideal for the Consensus Building narrative for the Kellogg MBA leadership Essay.
A strategic thinking narrative at its core is about thinking two steps ahead instead of the immediate. It would be related to saving person-hours or reducing double work or creating a permanent system/solution that would give a unique advantage to the organization.
The thinking, planning, and implementation could be part of the product, service offering, or designs that increase customer loyalty. The contexts are many.
For a Management Consultant, it would be an awareness of the project pipeline. A performance metric or insight might determine closing the deal. With an awareness of the long-term IMPACT and the current goal, the applicant can articulate the stakes of the project. By going to the specifics of the finding, they can also reveal how the client was sold on the second project.
For an IB professional, strategic thinking cannot be articulated from a client perspective. They must be related to organizational change. The most commonly cited examples are related to building pricing and evaluation models that became a template for the firm. The leadership example quoted in the Kellogg essay should be validated by the supervisor.
Example of Fairness in Team
Background Information: An LGBTQ minority entrepreneur, after failing to raise funds for his apparel business, addresses implicit biases in the VC community.
Read: IMPLICIT Biases - Kellogg MBA: Leadership Style and Difficult Decision Essay
6) Challenging Status Quo with Incremental Change
Only a certain type of personality has the courage, communication skills, and persuasion techniques to challenge the status quo.
Unlike the myth of the popular leader disrupting existing systems, leaders who could bring lasting change had a strategic understanding of the incentives of all stakeholders before introducing new processes, systems, technology, and incentives.
The biggest hurdle in challenging a status quo is that they have been ingrained into the culture of the organization. We hate changes unless it is forced upon us through changing personal, organizational, or market dynamics. This is especially true for those entities who are achieving the milestones expected of them.
Why would you tinker with something that is working?
Kodak waited too long to move from films to digital. The state-of-the-art film development processes were too sacred for them to be disbanded. Even the acquisition of Ofoto in 2001 was to print beautiful films and not to move the entire business to digital.
Kodak was a pioneer in Digital Cameras, with the first prototype developed in 1975.
The new business model of digital sharing was too far out in the future for the management to take it seriously.
The advent of social media and smartphones made films obsolete in one giant sweep.
Sometimes, the status quo is what makes the business a brand.
How will you challenge such an ingrained and revenue-generating ideology?
Kellogg is not asking for such a giant push for change. They want to see whether you have the vision and courage to challenge an ingrained behavior in the organization (professional, volunteering, or extracurricular).
Example of Challenging the Status Quo
Background Information: A consultant puzzled by the hesitation of stakeholders to embrace digitization reevaluates incentives to streamline the implementation of digital tools, processes, and frameworks for the hospital network.
Read: Digitization - Kellogg MBA: Leadership Difficult Decision Essay
