Today’s question is from a consultant who has experience in over three countries with a diverse range of projects. His question is
Q) How should I shortlist leadership experiences for my MBA Application
Atul Jose (Admissions Consultant, F1GMAT): When you are competing against some of the best Investment Bankers, Management Consultants, Product Managers, Marketers, and Technology Consultants, you must prioritize 3 leadership experiences:
1) Permanent IMPACT
The word IMPACT has been used loosely in many MBA application essays.
A universal example of an IMPACT-oriented leadership experience is any initiative or process or methodology or framework or policy, or approach that you introduced and that is now repeated across the organization or your team, or in your client’s processes/product/services.
The primary quality of the deliverable is that ideation might have been yours, but the development of the deliverable required collaboration with multiple stakeholders. So an IMPACT-oriented leadership deliverable will have a unique idea, a team, and collaboration with multi-functional stakeholders across the company or the client’s organizational hierarchy.
2) Creativity
If you were lucky to be part of a creative project either in marketing or solving a resource constraint, or reaching a solution that required overcoming several regulatory challenges, then your leadership experience will be categorized under creative problem-solving. The most common example is around deadlines, which has now become a cliché. So you have to really define a nuanced problem that required a unique creative solution. In your narrative, explain how the creative solution was developed, how it helped you solve a larger problem, and its IMPACT on the stakeholders and beneficiaries.
3) Team Performance
This might sound obvious, but very few applicants really spend enough words on how they streamlined their team’s processes, collaborated, and created a culture that prioritized performance.
The narrative should include how mentorship worked in the team, the processes that you introduced to solve the learning gaps, and the overall strategies that you adopted to motivate the team after a failure. The narrative should also include how you keep them focused on the larger goals and mission of the company.
