If you investigate the details of each defining principles, some unique qualities underlie the Haas defining principles. When you write your essays, make sure that at least 5-6 qualities explained below are highlighted:
1) Bold Ideas
Bold ideas, by its nature, should be a little unconventional. The narrative should spike the curiosity of the admission team. For example, a client used an unconventional approach to leadership by asking her team to list the first impression they have about her in an anonymous feedback session. First, it seemed like a counter-productive measure, but by collecting the most common perception about her style and leadership, she could address them straight away instead of her guesswork obstructing team dynamics and productivity.
2) Intelligent Risk Taking
Risk-taking requires numbing the logical way of thinking. However, with the advent of sophisticated analytics tools, ‘intelligence’ in decision making became a norm than an exception. Even with the most advanced tools, risk-taking involves several assumptions or unknowns. By sharing the motivation for a decision, the admission team would understand the ‘intelligent’ risk-taking behind a solution or a career move.
3) Accepting Sensible failures
For the entrepreneurially bent applicants, the propensity to take intelligent risks is complemented by the ‘humility’ to accept failures. Sensible failures seem like a misnomer, but the tales of persistence should never be about aimlessly wandering on in a direction without any feedback. There are times when accepting the failure of a product, solution, or a strategy, frees up your leadership talent and your team’s creative energy for worthwhile goals.
4) Decisions based on hard evidence and extensive analysis.
The days of intuitive leaders are far gone. The old legend of leaders sensing the direction of a strategy rarely works in a complex world like ours. Analytics tools are your leadership tools. A skill to analyze evidence without any biases misdirecting your effort requires analytical skills that refine with experience. An inviting attitude towards evidence is a winning skill for a career in consulting and general management.
5) Trust and Collaboration
Leadership and teambuilding cannot happen without ‘trust.’ Even the motivation for collaboration arises when you trust your colleagues. At Haas, most of the learning happens through peers. Without the spirit of ‘collaboration,’ the effectiveness of the International Business Development – a flagship experiential learning program at Haas MBA, would be ineffective. You can’t suddenly start collaborating. A history of cross-functional (leadership) and cross-cultural (extra-curricular) involvement would convey this ‘essential’ trait.
6) Confident but not arrogant
If you must summarize one winning quality of an accepted Haas MBA applicant, it is an attitude of ‘confidence’ without arrogance. One acquires this quality with a perspective that ‘leadership’ doesn’t exist in a vacuum. An engaged, talented, and driven team could make even an average leader great. Those who know this truth sheds any tendency for arrogance. Many leaders receive a hit to their confidence with failures and learn to temper down their invincibility. Some are predisposed to this balanced perspective. Whatever has been your path to this leadership quality, use it strategically in the essays.
7) Curiosity
Learning at any level requires curiosity. For a top MBA like Haas, the quality transcends into experiential learning, case studies, classroom discussions, and even job search. Many pursue opportunities that are outside the realms of the post-MBA goals one has framed for the essays. This habit of exploring and chance encounters could only happen if you are curious about the job function, the industry, and the unique problems MBAs are solving. Consulting - the most lucrative post-MBA function for Haas MBA candidates requires curiosity for effectiveness.
So is Marketing, where one must decode the motivation of diverse demographic and frame the message to match the brand with the customer motivation.
8) Self-improvement
Self-help books have transformed from the old model of ‘positive’ thinking to observing ‘negative’ thoughts. That is not what the school values in self-improvement. The biggest proof that you have taken a path of self-improvement is chronologically captured in the resume. The increase in team size that you managed is the first hint. The increasing scale of your responsibility – budget, market size, and reach, are a few other parameters on which the school evaluates your candidacy. On the extra-curricular front, the intensity of each involvement instead of the number of extra-curricular initiatives is another way to measure whether you are committed to a path of self-improvement. Without taking on more responsibility, self-improvement rarely happens.
9) Ethical
Most Businesses charge exorbitant fees when they have a monopoly over the market. The price of technology products in the past five years is evidence of this trend. It is a tough trait to highlight in essays if you are already working in organizations that believe in price maximization in markets with a high barrier for entry. However, when you are leading a team, small ethical decisions at a team-level could coalesce and even if in a minor way, transform the culture. Cite one such example if you had the power or persuasion to bring change.
10) Responsible
Responsible leadership work in two contexts. One in terms of ownership of a project, task, or a team’s outcome. Another on balancing profit with sustainability. For this trait to be highlighted in an essay, you should have worked in a start-up culture where autonomy is valued, and where a communication channel exists between you and the management to introduce changes in approach.
The best example we have read is from an Oil Reservoir Engineer, who was involved in formulating the maps of oil reserves. The case for capping the exploration to limit the impact on the ecology was presented by the candidate from the perspective of long-term profitability, brand perception, and the dependence on locals for future projects.
Not all responsible leadership are framed from the idealistic view of limiting greenhouse gas or narratives on the future generation. Most require talking in a language that businesses and management understand – profitability, long-term growth, and market size.
11) Ability to see the bigger picture
Perhaps the first ‘real’ leadership quality that you have acquired in a 3 to 7-year career is the ability to see the bigger picture. Most companies don’t encourage you to think beyond the immediate as such thinking could distract you from implementing the functions for which you were recruited. If you are an accounting person, rarely would you could dictate the strategy. But on some occasions, you might have observed a leak in cash flow that could feed into the strategy or a misallocation that had a cascading impact on the company’s market position.
For technologists, it could be a bug that affected the privacy of customers.
For Finance professionals, it could be an invalid data source or an assumption that was replicated across the due diligence process.
Any act of intervention reads well in essays. Make sure that you share the bigger picture of the problem.
