In this F1GMAT's Columbia MBA Essay review series, I show how an applicant in asset management answered the collaboration prompt by changing what his team counted as work performance.
Columbia MBA Essay 2: Please share a specific example of how you made a team more collaborative, more inclusive, or fostered a greater sense of community within an organization. (250 words)
Learning Objective: Essay Concept – Invisible Glue
Applicant Background: Asset Management, Iberian institutional client team at a global manager (29-year-old Spanish applicant, 6 years of experience in Madrid)
Stretch Schools: Columbia, HBS
Match Schools: LBS, IESE, INSEAD
Post-MBA Goal: Institutional client strategy, European pensions
Sample Columbia MBA Essay 2 – Asset Management to Client Strategy
Note: This is a first draft written to illustrate the essay concept, and it has not been edited down to the 250-word limit. Do not use it in your Columbia MBA application. It is shared for educational purposes only.
MBA Resume Entry: C Built and rewrote the client profitability model for a 41-relationship Iberian institutional book (€4.2bn AUM); reallocated 1,600 servicing hours a year, and retained the book's largest pension mandate
I built the model that ranked our Iberian book, the forty-one institutional clients we served in Spain and Portugal, by revenue per hour of coverage. My managing director took that, and we converted four small pension plans because of the deliverable
The rating followed. I had my best year.
Nacho was not lucky. He was fifty-six and fell in the bottom quartile.
It didn’t look well-deserved.
Nacho was the first person to bring us the client list of a regional saving bank – one of the Spanish banks absorbed after the 2012 bank rescue. We respected his seniority, but the performance lingered at the bottom for six months.
Each time, I wrote the same remark; he did not log his activity. He did not write the quarterly note explaining what the portfolio did and why, and worse he was slow on the analytics.
I kept him anyway in the team, and the reason I gave upstairs was always about the cost of replacing him.
Thirty-one years of seniority works out at roughly two years of pay under the Spanish severance formula.
In March, our largest pension fund came up for contract renewal, and he was nine days late on the annex, the appendix of holdings, fees, and performance figures that defines the main proposal.
When Nacho couldn’t meet the first few internal deadlines, I took the role and started working on the annex.
Day three: I needed to know how the committee would vote.
A Spanish company pension plan is supervised by a comisión de control, a committee that hires and can fire the firm managing the money.
Half of the voting rights belong to the employer.
The other half belongs to the workers and pensioners whose savings are in the plan.
In March, that committee would decide whether we kept the account.
I knew the employer side.
I had never met the worker side.
I called the two representatives who mattered and arranged for the meeting. Nothing, no response.
Nacho asked whether he should try.
He rang, and by the next morning I knew how both of them would vote and which of our fees they thought were too high.
I asked him his secret.
He said he goes to the annual member assembly, the meeting where the fund reports to its own savers.
Every year for eleven years, on a Saturday, in a room outside Valladolid, Nacho answered questions from retired members about their savings.
His response was to the same two questions.
Why is my savings smaller than last year, and can I withdraw all my pension, all at once?
The worker representatives are elected out of that room.
He has never billed a minute of his work, facing the music of our pension fund’s underperformance in those lean years.
Day nine, I read the plan's own rulebook.
I had assumed the two sides held equal voting rights, which would mean the employer side could protect us if the workers turned against renewing our contract. That is the standard arrangement.
Under the older Spanish rules, the workers held an absolute majority, and our pension plan was written before the change and never rewritten.
The workers could end our largest mandate on their own, without the employer side voting at all.
Nacho had the voting count on a sheet of paper.
He shared it with my office.
I had spent two years covering the half of that committee that could not fire us.
My model recorded every hour I spent with the employer side, but missed the regulation and the side that closed the deal.
I did two things.
In December, I put Nacho in the top quartile.
I explained to a reviewer in London why a man who logged no client activity had been holding our largest account together on Saturdays.
He accepted it.
Then I changed the evaluation model.
Assemblies and committee meetings now count as client coverage hours.
I had spent four years telling the room what things were worth.
I had never valued Nacho. I had only considered him a cost.
Our team became more collaborative, not because of a single thing I said, although I keep a leaderboard for each week’s top performer and top collaborator.
Our team became more collaborative because I brought in a new measuring stick for performance - a stick that acknowledges the Invisible Glue like Nacho.
What is the essay concept in the above Columbia MBA Essay 2?
The essay concept covered in the Sample Columbia MBA Essay is the Invisible Glue.
Unlike narratives where the protagonist starts off as kind and understanding, the protagonist here is acting out of self-interest – to protect his job.
What is the trigger event?
Nacho missing the deadline on the annex and the applicant taking over the task.
The applicant is not rescuing Nacho. He wants to meet the deadline and protect his reputation.
Distance is the reason Nacho’s work was invisible in the first place. The applicant sits in Madrid, but the work happens 200 kilometers away.
Who is the secondary character used in the Columbia MBA Essay 2?
Nacho.
He is deliberately unglamorous.
The essay never says he was secretly excellent at his job nor describes him in detail, except to show his age.
He was slow, did not log his activity, and the applicant would write the same rating again.
Making him admirable would turn a valuation essay into a rescue story.
What is the number that binds the entire Columbia MBA Essay together?
Client Coverage
Where the Stanford oil and gas essay used a pumpjack, the essay uses one metric from the applicant's own spreadsheet.
Attending meetings on Saturday was not considered part of the client coverage.
How is the Columbia MBA Essay on Collaboration Different?
Most answers to this prompt describe a mentorship.
The problem with a mentoring narrative is the low chance of including surprises and twists.
The mentee didn’t know X. The mentor teaches the mentee X.
The mentee becomes better.
The template is predictable.
In the example, the person is not helped.
The applicant takes over to save his reputation, but by starting with the worst assumption about the person, the revelation is interesting.
By the end of the narrative, the applicant’s perspective changes about the person.
The change happens for the applicant not the mentee or the team member.
MBA Essays are all about the applicant – their change in perspective, change in behavior, or change in goals.
Change is the interesting part of any narrative.
For the Columbia MBA essay, share what changed with the collaborative experience.
