Essay: Kellogg leaders are primed to tackle challenges everywhere, from the boardroom to their neighborhoods. Describe a specific professional experience where you had to make a difficult decision. Reflecting on this experience, identify the values that guided your decision-making process and how it impacted your leadership style.
Background Information: A campaign manager risks losing an account when a star copywriter takes emergency leave.
Theme: Leadership, Authentic Communication
Theme (Explained): Leadership is all about laser focus on goals and inspiring the team to rise above mediocrity. When a crisis emerges, the leader has enough bench strength to fill in the shoes of the ‘star performer.’ Such insights on team building and changing culture are rare among Kellogg MBA applicants.
Profile: Marketer
Industry: Consumer Products
MBA Essay Strategy: Difficult decisions cannot be narrated without a crisis.
For the applicant, the difficult decision was to let the star copywriter continue his leave of absence when his father faced a near-death accident.
Continuing with the remnants of the team, the applicant had to empower the copywriters to rise to the occasion.
While the leadership style was right, he accidentally fell into an idea that emerged from authentic communication with a person in the team who was not performing to her full potential.
The evolution of the applicant’s leadership style from optimizing performance to finding wisdom even from underperforming team members through authentic communication is the wisdom he shares with the admissions team.
Opener: The opening line indirectly shows the impressive 2-year timeline when the applicant earned a leadership role.
Kellogg MBA Leadership Value, Difficult Decision and IMPACT on leadership Style Essay (Marketing) (441 Words)
With just 2 years into developing campaigns, I was assigned to lead the campaign for <X> – a newbie from the US with limited market penetration. However, the flagship brand – <c> chip, had a cult following in India and Japan – two markets with opposite palettes for spices.
The campaign was the first time I was leading a team of creatives. Unfortunately, for a niche market, my employer had limited resources, and I was assigned professionals with relatively low experience.
<X> was not impressed with the initial campaign idea. Our slogans integrated Cricket into the Campaign in India and Anime for Japan. The head of marketing laid it out in brutal honesty. “We are going to lose the account if your team doesn’t come up with a fresh campaign.
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