The Tuck Sense of Inclusion professional examples are broad. Depending on your industry and the performance metrics, you are likely to attract peers with different social, communication, and ethical perspectives.
Tuck or any Top 20 school wants to fill the class with some uniformity in how they see the world or how they see ethical decisions in a tough business environment. Citing gray examples where your colleague’s judgment was at fault, and you helped the team offer a second chance needs to be captured with precision.
Use these 3 steps carefully:
1) Build Credibility for the Person at Fault
The second chance narrative only works if you build enough credibility about the person and finally when you reveal the misstep, the reader instinctually understands that it was an error in judgment. If you look at some of the classic movies and protagonist with shades of gray – Al Pacino in Godfather two, the screenwriters carefully build the character to show that he cared about his family. So when he finally does the unthinkable (spoilers) to avenge the betrayal by taking out his own brother, the audience is certainly bewildered but in some strange way empathize with the decision.
2) Immoral vs Unethical vs Gray Decisions
Everybody steals is a classic rebuttal of the stakeholders in a corrupt system. When your business operates in such an environment, you are likely to have faced three kids of decisions – gray, unethical and immoral. If you choose an unethical decision, and say that you gave the person a second chance, the admissions decision will go against you. But if you are quoting a gray decision that was the most optimum path incentivized by a system, the admissions team with empathize with the misstep.
3) Blame the Incentives
Whenever corruption happens, the first step the management or a decision maker evaluates is the incentive structure of the organization. In the example - Dartmouth Tuck MBA - Sense of Inclusion Essay (Second Chance), I edited the essay for a client who is working in the insurance industry. Insurance by definition is mostly around destruction, death or illness. Under the morose circumstances, it is easy to normalize negative outcomes and traits. Even in such environment, we captured a gray decision of a team lead, who decided to circumvent a due diligence process for a customer, who was a repeat customer for the past decade. The assumption that the customer will continue to renew the policy was the gray decision. The management didn’t see such shortcuts kindly and he was let go.
