For the Tuck MBA meaningfully contributed to the sense of inclusion essay, applicants often ignore the ‘meaning’ part while drafting the essay. The meaning is not just from a company’s IMPACT perspective, narrowly focused on the performance metrics – money saved, clients earned, increase in revenue, and contribution towards the productivity of the team.
Sometimes, the contribution is meaningful when the team lead or team manager thinks about the holistic growth of the teammate.
While narrating such examples for the Tuck Meaningfully Contributed to the sense of inclusion, capture these 3 Story Points:
1) What You Did
As I have shared in F1GMAT’s Essay Guides about the importance of W-Pattern narratives, even smaller essays where an elaborate story is not required would also benefit from such a storytelling strategy. With this approach, you are starting with all the actions and decisions you took to support the applicant. In the Sample Tuck MBA Essay - Sense of Inclusion (Underperformer), the client shares two task-based strategies that he followed to help the teammate find optimum performance. When all the strategies failed, the client began to dig deeper.
2) Personal Reasons
How many times has your manager asked you about the personal reasons for an underperformance? In a modern metric-oriented world where every employee is just a $ to make more $, such outreach is rare or with certain conditions.
I remember in my 2nd job when the manager asked me to list my hobbies – all to find out whether the hobby could be planned in such a way that I could come on Sundays and work. For the novice manager, enquiring about personal hobbies was to find more time for pending tasks.
Rarely is it more time that leads to better outcomes.
Specific Guidance and aligning personal and professional motivations are two ways to free up a teammate’s attention.
Attention is the secret to all productivity. Not more time.
3) Intrusion vs Genuine Assistance
Managers or Team Leads with intrusive tendencies will ask about all personal engagements to get leverage on the teammate. Such examples don’t work for the Tuck MBA Sense of Inclusion.
The intervention should be genuine and meaningfully remove a big roadblock from the beneficiary’s life.
For the example about turning around the productivity of a Teammate, the applicant shares two roadblocks – time for optimum contribution and genuine financial roadblocks that prevent the teammate from managing the personal setback.
Coming from a blue-collar family, the applicant didn’t have enough financial cushion to pay out of pocket. The insurance coverage was not sufficient to meet the nursing needs of both parents. In such dire scenarios where a person is financially, timewise, and attention-wise depleted, expecting any productivity, let alone above-average performance, is too high an ask. The applicant had the fortitude to understand the personal challenge and intervened.
The assistance on two fronts – finding better insurance coverage and strategies to balance the care demands of the family with professional tasks is the core of this Sample Tuck MBA Essay.
