Essay 1: Kellogg’s purpose is to educate, equip & inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Provide a recent example where you have demonstrated leadership and created value. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn? (450 words)
Leadership might have become a clichéd essay topic, but not for Kellogg. Even their core curriculum has a mandatory course in Leadership (Leadership in Organizations). Since leadership has several contexts: personal responsibility, overcoming a personal setback, domain expertise, overcoming a team setback, motivating the team, and leading the team towards a goal, pick an experience where you worked with more than one person.
Don’t worry if you don’t have such experience in your work. The admission team also accepts examples of leadership outside of work.
The only time guideline that you must keep in mind while mentioning Leadership Experience is Professional > College> Pre-College
The admission team highlights the preference by changing the prompt to include ‘a recent example’ this year.
Titles are Not Everything
Even if you were the President of a charitable organization or led a team in your company, the admission team wants to see how you articulate leadership.
Business Schools have a tough time figuring out the leadership potential in an applicant just by looking at GMAT, GPA, or even titles mentioned in the resume.
Here are Eight Examples of Leadership that you can use in the Kellogg MBA Leadership Essay
1) Handling Constraints
Leadership roles come with constraints - small budget, limited talent, lack of motivation, lack of trust in your leadership (your first project as a leader), or a culture that believes in the status quo.
How you navigate the constraints with a clear strategy will highlight your leadership skills.
Focusing on goals despite constraints has been written to death, but a different way to write about goals is to differentiate between survival and growth goals. In any project, there are Minimum viable performance indicators – the minimum number of sales, minimum acceptable feature list, the minimum number of marketing channels to propagate your brand message, or the fewest number of prospects you approach before a sale. Whatever job function you might have led, communicating survival goals is critical to motivating the team.
We, as individuals, are easily distracted. When we are stressed, the tendency to seek distraction is at its highest. This is the time when we need a leader to guide us towards one unifying goal.
Explain how you guided your team towards that ‘one’ goal. If you are writing about budget constraints, demonstrate how you asked the team to focus on that ‘one feature’ that allowed a sign-off for the first phase of the project.
2) Handling Dynamic Goals
If you have worked in the service industry, meeting the demands of an overbearing client might have been wrongly equated as “the Customer is always right.” Many Businesses accommodate outrageous demands, which means that as a team leader, you don’t have much of a choice. Accepting new requirements involve changing your plan dynamically and, in some cases, during the very last week of the project.
Motivating a team that does not believe in randomly changing the scope of the project has to be one of the toughest jobs for a leader. How do you motivate a team in such scenarios?
If you were open about the reasons for the change in goals, explain how the conversation worked. Either the client was unaware of the project complexities, or there were no clear change management processes.
In any case, openness about the problem and the corrective measures you have taken (setting up rules for accepting changes/accommodating time for unplanned goals) will push the team to pursue the unexpected goals.
3) Accountability beyond Responsibility
Accountability is often associated with fear – the fear of getting fired, fear of losing your position when revenue targets are not met, and the fear of innovation. Teams are not empowered when innovation that leads to missed goals is met with punishments? For leaders, accountability is about owning the output of the team. This means that, as a leader, you are responsible for defining roles, assigning tasks, motivating each team member to own the task, and a general sense that you are responsible for the team – both their strengths and weaknesses. The team will follow through when you give them complete autonomy and empower them to find the solution within the target deadline.
Accountability is about continuous improvement. It comes from a culture where feedback is accepted without prejudice or judgment. Teams accept weaknesses when they are honest. That can happen if the leader is not judgmental but encourages the philosophy that everybody needs time to master their skills.
An emotional reaction that clouds the team’s problem-solving skills will not solve the complexities of the project, but an environment that encourages open debate, collaboration, and peer-to-peer learning will certainly do.
Leaders create such an environment.
4) Motivating the team After Failure
The morale of a team affects productivity and collaboration. Keeping the motivation of the team high is not a task reserved for setbacks. Even after the team meets a seemingly impossible milestone, leaders have a way of keeping the hunger alive.
From a leadership personality point of view, motivating the team after failure requires higher emotional intelligence and understanding that dominant individuals influence the psyche of the team.
Influencing the pack leaders within the team require strategies that are tailor-made for that type of personality.
Facing failure has been discussed with two approaches – be stoic or be empathetic.
A stoic leader will not be surprised by successes or failures. Successes are stepping stones to a greater legacy, and failures are stepping stones to greater challenges. The problem with stoic leaders is that the high that teams experience when they meet a milestone will be missing, but at the same time, the lows that they expect to feel when the goals are not reached would also not impact the team. A sense of duty/professionalism is driving the team towards action.
An empathetic leader shifts the focus to recent success and looks for life lessons from the failure.
An ideal leader is a mix of two – empathetic enough not to be critical/negative about the team and stoic enough to openly discuss the problems they overlooked. By maintaining the balance, failure becomes another event and not feedback on the team’s character.
5) Challenging Status Quo
Only a certain type of personality has the courage, communication, and persuasion skills to challenge the status quo. It would be in how the organization approached a problem – the processes, build teams – degree/experience/school preferences, communicate with stakeholders – frequency/depth, or integrate technology – automation/management.
The biggest hurdle in challenging a status quo is that they have been ingrained into the culture of the organization. We hate changes unless it is forced upon us through changing personal, organizational, or market dynamics. This is especially true for those entities that have achieved relative success. Why would you tinker with something that is working?
Kodak waited too long to move from films to digital. The state-of-the-art film development processes were too sacred for them to be disbanded. Even the acquisition of Ofoto in 2001 was to print beautiful films and not to move the entire business to digital. Kodak was a pioneer in Digital Cameras, with the first prototype developed in 1975. The new business model of digital sharing was too far out in the future for the management to take it seriously. The advent of social media and smartphones made films obsolete in one sweep. Sometimes the status quo is what makes the company a brand. How will you challenge such an ingrained and revenue-generating ideology?
Kellogg is not asking for such a giant push in change. They want to see whether you have the vision and courage to challenge an ingrained behavior in the organization (professional, volunteering, or extracurricular).
6) Consensus Building
Consensus building is defined by the hierarchy in the organization. For a top-down hierarchy, the narrative of associates spearheading consensus-building beyond the scope of their responsibilities won’t be believable. It must be from the most recent title – assuming you had reached a Senior or Managerial role (Assistant or Associate) to have the authority for consensus building.
Consensus building is more relevant in Investment Banking and Consulting roles where you would have the opportunity to interact with multiple stakeholders. It would be relevant for Technologists working on the project with functional and subject matter experts. Sometimes the design or strategic choices require persuading multiple experts. Such examples are ideal for the Consensus
Building narrative for the Kellogg MBA leadership Essay.
7) Strategic Thinking and Planning
A strategic thinking narrative at its core is about thinking two steps ahead instead of the immediate. It would be related to saving person-hours or reducing double work, or creating a permanent system/solution that would give a unique advantage to the organization.
The thinking, planning, and implementation could be part of the product, service offering, or designs that increase customer loyalty. The contexts are many.
For a Management Consultant, it would be an awareness of the project pipeline. A performance metric or insight might determine closing the deal. With an awareness of the long-term IMPACT and the current goal, the applicant can articulate the stakes of the project. By going to the specifics of the finding, they can also reveal how the client was sold on the second project.
For an IB professional, strategic thinking cannot be articulated from a client perspective. They must be related to organizational change. The most commonly cited examples are related to building pricing and evaluation models that became a template for the firm. The leadership example quoted in the Kellogg essay should be validated by the supervisor.
