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 young technology leader makes one of the toughest decisions in his professional career – to let go of two senior team members.
Theme: Leadership
Theme (Explained): Leadership is not just about empowering and encouraging the team. It could also mean making tough decisions. One such common theme is a layoff or letting personnels go for underperformance.
Profile: Technology Consultant
Industry: Technology
MBA Essay Strategy: Capturing layoff in an essay narrative where you are not the person facing the edge of the sword requires balancing the motivation for the layoff while also showing empathy for those affected by your decision.
Care should be taken to offer elaborate context – at least 40-50% of the words on the dynamic in the team, the expectations from you as a leader, and the triggering point when you had to make the decision.
For the essay, the merger is the context that sets in motion a merger of two cultures – a startup that is obsessed with innovation and a technology behemoth where individual brilliance is valued over everything else.
Realizing that the culture that emerged from the mergers cannot be transformed without making a tough decision, the applicant narrates the dilemma and the circumstances under which the decisions were made. He hints at the positive impact of his decision on helping the two find a new path in their career journey.
Opener: The opening line sets the context of the merger.
Kellogg MBA Leadership Value, Difficult Decision and IMPACT on leadership Style Essay (Transforming a Culture) (442 Words)
I was surprised when the Founder shared the news that he had accepted a $20 mn acquisition deal with <x>. As part of the deal, the management gave promotions to the top 10% of the employees. The triple promotion that I earned in a year led to an interesting first-day meeting where I was leading technologists 10 to 20 years senior me.
Our project customized AI and cloud services for Fortune 500 companies. The transition involved a steep learning curve as, traditionally, the company sold enterprise technologies with proprietary products that have been tested and deployed in thousands of servers and devices.
Although the company had the distinction of earning the most patents, the honor also perpetuated a culture of individual brilliance over teamwork. Cross-functional idea ..
