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) Leadership has multiple contexts. Each context is defined by the industry, the job function, the country where you work and the culture in which you operate.
Regardless of the hands-on, supportive, top-down, or bottom-up style of leadership, you must demonstrate 5 leadership qualities that have universal appeal regardless of the country of origin or the culture or the hierarchy in your organization.
In this decoding of leadership qualities for M7 and T15 MBA Essays, I cover:
1) Impact-Orientation
2) Valuing Diverse Experiences
3) Intellectual Curiosity
4) Leveraging Power for Good
5) Adaptability
1. Impact-Orientation
The admissions team is expecting you to reiterate the importance of a visible leadership style that is essential for impact orientation. The style requires the leader to be present on the front line, reiterating the values that guide the team and the organization.
When faced with conflict, the leader has the perspective to prioritize and frame the conflict for each stakeholder. By doing so, they ensure that the conflicts don’t escalate and lead to disruption for the team and the company.
The people orientation is not restricted to the team but also involves investors, customers, and stakeholders who support the organization. By marshaling the team, the customers, the management, and the investors, the IMPACT-oriented leader ensures that everybody is aligned with the company’s vision.
Another critical aspect of IMPACT orientation is the leader’s habit of assigning a purpose statement.
A study interpreting the hundreds of hours of training students, managers, and executives found that only 20% had a specific purpose statement.
What seems like a peripheral exercise in adding meaning to the daily grind of a project has a long-term impact on the professional’s probability of reaching a challenging personal and professional goal.
Leaders with the insight to assist the team in finding their personal and professional goals beyond the roles and responsibilities of the organization have been rated as the most effective leaders.
I ask all my clients, regardless of the service - resume editing, essay editing and even consulting, to fill out an IMPACT table. We often forget our impact in a team, organization or society.
Quantify your achievements. Capture your contributions. I have shown how in all F1GMAT’s Essay Guides (read the chapter on How to create an IMPACT table)
2. Valuing Diverse Experiences
The DEI initiative is not just about finding representation in universities that reflects the society, but it also builds leadership intelligence to succeed in a dynamic environment.
An effective leader has the skills to recognize diverse experiences and learn from them. Interestingly, the experiences are not just influenced by the diversity of the demographic in the team but also influenced by the pre-MBA function.
For example, a Marketing and Technology person, despite their niche skills, would get the opportunity to work with diverse clients, geographies, and scopes that a Finance or Accounting person might not experience. Banks with 300 years of a traditional and top-down hierarchy have systems in place and geographic specializations assigned that limit acquiring diverse experiences.
The decision to choose a management professional as a CEO depends on the depth of the skills in addition to cultural intelligence. The entry of professionals with diverse undergraduate degrees into the Venture Capital function is disrupting the exposure that finance candidates experience from their peers.
Leaders you admire have an incredible knack for qualifying the diversity of the team’s experience.
A team member might have unique experiences in volunteering or changing the culture of a family business that might have direct value in building processes or managing a client. Such experiences are converted to insights only if the leader has the skills to manage the conversations.
Good leaders make a conscious effort to reflect and interpret past experiences into meaningful lessons for current challenges. Leaders are also open to challenges that are likely to offer new leadership insights and help the team find their strengths and weaknesses.
Admission Consultant’s Note – 4 in one Test
Every inclusion narrative is not a DEI example. The most work I do while editing DEI MBA essays is in defining the dynamic in a team, a culture, an organization, a country or rarely – all the four. Without capturing all the constraints, there won’t be anything at stake.
3. Intellectual Curiosity
Intellectual curiosity in leaders is a secret weapon that helps them scavenge information, find optimum processes, and build a passion in teams for learning.
Beyond the challenges of acquiring function-specific knowledge, intellectual curiosity in leaders influence the culture of the organization. The difference between a ‘just enough’ mindset to ‘thinking deeply about a problem’ would be the difference between a good and a great product.
When a culture triggers and encourages deep thinking, the team develops a mindset to evaluate decisions and processes. A feedback mechanism inevitably emerges, encouraging the team to be less sensitive about missteps and failures. They look at the failures objectively, building the foundation for entrepreneurial culture.
Risk-taking is rewarded not just for the audacity of the idea but for the payoff for each risky decision.
Leaders play a crucial role in orchestrating an intellectually curious culture.
Admission Consultant’s Note – The Family Test
Examples of intellectual curiosity in M7 and T15 MBA essays often involve breaking down a technical problem. It can easily turn into a complex thread of systems, processes, laws, and technology. An easy shortcut to limit context is to remove all the ‘additional’ jargon around the problem and see if your mother, father, and grandparents – all understand the paragraph.
Leaving Gaps in Defining a Problem
The intellectually curious leader also develops a practice of asking the right questions, leaving out enough context to trigger curiosity. When the steps are ambiguous, the team explores and stumbles onto ideas that the leader might not have anticipated.
Defining Limitations on Free Exploration of Ideas
The leader is also aware that free riding through multiple ideas without restrictions is inefficient. To set the team on the right path, intellectually curious leaders are proficient in creating outcome-driven exploration. When ideas are valued more than anything else in a team, the hierarchy of the organization is driven by merit - a culture that attracts and retains top talents.
4. Leveraging Power for Good
Another leadership quality worth highlighting is a leader’s capability to leverage their power to do good in society, team, and organization.
Leaders address the barriers to equity with courage and drive change to create long-term IMPACT.
For founders and CXOs, the push for DEI involves creating a culture where transparency is embraced as a key differentiator. The statistics about diversity and the impact of corporate social responsibility initiatives are often included in the annual report. The initiatives to change the culture in the organization or society, no matter how small, are mentioned, measured, and shared across the organization.
The challenge of increasing representation is not limited to a particular function or role.
Changing Hiring Practices
This often means changing the hiring practices and recruitment culture to accommodate the unique backgrounds of underrepresented communities. Many a time, the hiring process is broken down to understand the biases in the algorithm, the shortlisting process, and the assumptions key decision-makers make while reviewing a resume.
Leaders also prioritize educating the workforce on implicit biases and share the many traumas underrepresented communities faced over the past 200 years. Several assumptions are from the lack of knowledge on the struggle the communities faced to reach an equal footing with the rest of society.
Admission Consultant’s Note
Applicants working in team leadership – team lead, project lead or project managerial role often narrate examples of making unconventional team choices and their choice eventually turning out to be the greater good of the team.
Change Management and Resistance - An Interesting Conflict Narrative
Many a time, implementing a change is met with resistance. Leaders understand that to bring real change, all stakeholders and key decision-makers with power should be on-boarded. Communication with these decision-makers is frequent, with reasoning an integral part of the discourse. The perspective of the company and why ‘good’ as a value is worth pursuing in the organization is reiterated to reinforce the value.
New Processes and Systems - Highly Valued in M7 and T15 MBA For Finance and Consulting Applicants
The top-down buy-in is followed by a meticulous revamping process that creates new processes and systems that ensure that the barrier to equity is removed. Change management is essential, but finding the right pace – not too fast nor too slow ensures that the key personnel in the organizations are not overwhelmed.
Changing Culture - Most Points in M7 and T15 MBA Essays
The toughest changes involve changing the DNA or the culture of the organization. If the organization’s history is rooted in a strong national or regional identity with majority stakeholders from one demographic, leaders are mindful of the challenges that lie ahead to drive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
5. Adaptability
The pandemic revealed the adaptability of leaders to new technology stacks, work-from-home dynamics, and rapid shifts in customer behavior. They had to anticipate changes in productivity and risks to cash flow and develop strategies to reduce costs and improve competitiveness. Although such drastic changes are unlikely to be forced on companies in the near term, the risks from climate change could also create similar threats where leaders with an ‘adaptable’ mindset will thrive.
There are three contexts that you should explore while narrating adaptability as a quality:
Organizational Changes: Even in a 5 to 10-year period, a professional experiences changes in organizational structure through mergers and acquisitions. The new team dynamics or conflict arising from merging two cultures requires adaptation in communication, behavior, and processes. Leaders manage the change from the top down by developing systems for the new group dynamics and the challenges it poses.
Technology Changes: Professionals manage changes in technology when an old technology phases out or a new technology offers competitive advantages. Leaders operate at a level above where they must choose between technology stacks, plan the rollout of the new technology, develop a training schedule, monitor the short-term impact of the disruption, and ensure that the competitive advantages of the firm are not disrupted by the change. If the changes are disruptive, the leader must be open-minded to switch back or find a middle.
Customer Changes: The biggest threat to leaders is the changing demographic of customers or a change in behavior that fundamentally redefines the demand for the product or service the company is offering. The threat could be in the form of a competitor who understands the customer better and offers a better product to fit the needs. The leader must adapt to the preferences of the new demographic or the changing interest of the current customer base and fine-tune their offering.
Change is inevitable.
Leaders who are accepting and thrive under the new reality have three strengths:
a) Intellectual Adaptability
b) Emotional Adaptability
c) System Adaptability
a) Intellectual Adaptability: Competent professionals leveraging an MBA, especially Technology and Finance candidates, have the skill to acquire knowledge about new technology, framework, tool, process, or methodology. Leaders build on this foundational skill set to learn about frameworks before introducing them to the team. They also find similarities between the newly introduced frameworks with existing technology frameworks. The insights are used to develop training materials that empower the team to smoothly make the transition.
b) Emotional Adaptability: Not surprisingly, intellectual adaptability is not the biggest hurdle to change and adapting to change. Teams often find the chaos of learning new technology and change management overwhelming. Leaders are adept at easing the stress of the team by planning the transition, communicating the value of the change, and being present for the team as a sounding board during the transition. They build allies within the team and often divide the leadership roles among team members who can support the mission.
c) System Adaptability: Although leaders follow a delegative process and believe in getting buy-in from the team, they also create systems to ensure that checks and balances are created to monitor the progress. By building a systemized approach to change management, leaders excel at creating a repeatable process to enforce and adapt to changes in the organization.
