I will teach you how to bring your life stories to essays faster with F1GMAT's essay guides. Download below or subscribe to F1GMAT's Service and work with me - Atul Jose, Author/Editor/Founding Consultant, F1GMAT(16 Years of helping applicants gain admissions to M7 and Top 30 schools) Perhaps your image of a leader has ideals of the perfect being.
You don’t have to manufacture irrelevant leadership traits.
I have captured 9 qualities that M7 schools expect when you capture leadership qualities in MBA Essays:
1. Passion
2. Sacrifice
3. Team before Self
4. Socially Conscious
5. Emotional Intelligence (Calmness under Pressure)
6. Vision (Long-term thinking)
7. Customer-centric excellence
8. Risk Taking
9. Ambition
1. Passion
Passion is synonymously used for leaders and for a good reason.
Passionate leaders dedicate their time to achieving and exceeding the expectations of the team and the organization.
The commitment and complete ownership of the tasks, the outcome of the team, and the client experience are only reflected in the way in which the ‘leader’ occupies the room.
If you are uncertain of the ‘leader,’ most often, it is the person quietly cutting off one high-priority task after another, momentarily smiling, then going back into the ‘zone.’
The burden of ownership is visible if you pay close attention.
The leader is not complaining.
The ego is visible only to pick up the team from setbacks. The rest of the time, they are driven and locked in on the problem.
Narrative Example: Unifying teams from conflicts or problems not relevant to the goals is a classic leadership trait. Offer context on how you kept the focus back on the larger problem.
A client in F1GMAT’s Essay Editing service shared about a disruptive colleague who was going through a divorce. The conflicts that escalated from mundane disagreements disrupted the morale of the team. The applicant realizing the person’s emotional state, guided him with empathy, allowing him to be relieved of some of the high-stress responsibilities for the month, until the divorce proceedings were finalized. A month later, he thanked the client for the kindness.
Can you include such a personal narrative?
Yes. That is how you humanize your achievements.
2. Sacrifice
Mandela sacrificed his freedom, Gandhi sacrificed his family life, and Madam Curie sacrificed her life to take humanity into a new path of reality.
Leadership is a sacrifice.
A 1997 image of Jeff Bezos stuck in an office with wires knotting to infinity near the power outlet has become legendary for would-be entrepreneurs and dreamers. The bulked-up image of Bezos is an ‘after’ photo of the millions of problems he solved to reach the ‘leader’ status.
Narrative Example: The sacrifice of family time, socializing, and the comforts that people seek in favor of solving tough organizational, team, and societal problems is a hallmark of a leader.
One client shared how, in his first year of entrepreneurship, he was sleeping in his office. When the three employees arrived in the office one early morning, he was showering in his office bathroom. That is the kind of ‘unique’ moment you must capture to demonstrate ‘the life of an entrepreneur.’
Always Show, Don’t Tell in MBA Essays
3. Team before Self
A leader prioritizes the team over the self or any individual. The learned habit is visible in every decision they make. It could mean short-term protests or expressions of discomfort from the team, but the steely resolve with which the leader continues with ‘unpopular’ decisions would make sense for the team when the goals are achieved.
Leaders are rarely the most likable group of people. They can’t be pushed around on individual whims and preferences.
The untiring pursuit of team and client goals is another trait that separates a leader from a follower.
Narrative Example: I have read extreme versions of the ‘commitment’ narrative where the applicant skipped funerals of loved ones or endured physical pain to achieve a company goal. Such narratives won’t work universally. Some schools have such strong work ethics as an ethos. Others might misconstrue such examples as your lack of EQ. Understand the school before including an example.
If you need help shortlisting the right examples for each school, Subscribe to F1GMAT’s Essay Editing Service.
4. Socially Conscious
With profit-motive driving capitalism, socially conscious business decisions have slowly but steadily merged into routine corporate decisions in the form of ESG.
Embracing automation and AI at the expense of lower-skilled workers has led to predictions of a potential class war.
Companies can no longer ignore the consumers who are losing jobs and ecosystems or need massive retraining to remain competitive.
With pro-active educational programs sponsored by businesses, leaders have embraced social consciousness as a pillar for long-term growth and a uniting factor for the teams to solve inter-generational problems.
Social consciousness need not be only focused on issues that have caught the attention of the media. It could be an issue that is relevant to your community, family, or neighborhood.
Setting up the background of the ‘socially conscious’ decision is crucial to show your role as a leader.
Narrative Example: helping communities that benefit from your company’s products and services, helping communities with identities similar to yours, or helping communities disrupted by your products and services are classic examples of a socially conscious leader.
Read: 5 Archetypes of Socially Conscious Leaders in MBA Essays
5. Emotional Intelligence (Calmness under Pressure)
Wearing your emotion on the sleeves works in sports for the superstar player, but stoic disregard for setbacks and the calmness to see through the chaos when everybody is losing their composure rank among the top desirable qualities for a leader.
First, emotional outbursts rarely address the core problem and become an outlet for the person - leading to a display of frustration or anger. Once the team recognizes the frustration, then what?
Leaders who learned to manage their emotions would convey the discomfort in the most subtle or direct manner without too much emotionality attributed to the situation.
Second, an emotionally charged leader is rarely the person you go to for counsel when things go wrong or when the next step seems daunting.
Through the expression of excess emotion, leaders create a circle of defense that discourages interaction with them, which eventually leads the team to lose trust in their capability to solve problems.
Narrative Example: Any example where you resolved conflicts or understood the team’s emotional cadence from setbacks or the long hours required to meet the demands of the customer are narratives that show a leader’s role in managing the emotional health of the team.
6. Vision (Long-term thinking)
Leaders are chosen to achieve goals that have value for the team/organization in the short-term, but as they learn the interplay of products/services, markets, client requirements, and the value the company is offering, ideas to leverage the short-term value to long-term impact becomes an extension of their thought process.
If you have seen what your current Employer could iterate with the current project for a larger impact in the market, you are already thinking like a leader. Not many professionals outside consulting and Business development do that. They are lost in the minutiae of implementing a solution.
Imagining an outcome and taking baby steps to translate an idea is a reality for most managers working in the corporate environment.
What separates leaders that we admire from managers is that the vision has not been attempted before or has a track record of repeated failure.
Creating a mass market for battery-driven cars capable of competing with oil-guzzling cars is the fruition of a leader who is thinking long-term.
Narrative Example: Capturing long-term thinking in your industry requires a context setting. The MBA Admissions team might not be fully aware of your industry’s demands and needs, especially if you are working on cutting-edge Financial or Technology products. Set the context before narrating your vision.
7. Customer-centric excellence
If you are quoting leaders in Business or a Community, their obsession with serving the customer/citizens and seeking feedback from them to improve the policy, service, or product should be an explicit part of the narrative.
The reason why the admission team asks for constructive feedback and your response to it in the recommendation letter is to measure your ability to seek feedback.
Without collecting and developing a sense of what customers/citizens/community want, you would be creating products/services just to fulfill your ego and not to serve and bring ‘real change’ to the market.
Narrative Example: Narratives where the innovative solutions are narrated with ‘the customer’ as the prime focus do extremely well to showcase your role as a leader. And it is tough when you are anxious about admissions. The balance required to highlight your role and the beneficiary who you are helping needs an experienced reviewer. Reach out to me if you need help with balancing the narrative.
8. Risk Taking
One common thread in all the ‘leaders’ we admire is their ability to take risks that could have negatively impacted their finances, mental health, physical well-being, or status.
Without risking at least two of the four pillars of their existence, it would be extremely tough to capture the ‘essence of a leader.’
Leaders are defined by risks. Not the excess risks at the cost of taxpayer’s money that drowned economies but ownership of risks that could obliterate the Leader out of existence.
Narrative Example: Separating intelligent risk taking from risks that are detrimental to future employers (post MBA) require the right tone. I remember a conversation with a Technologist who in a casual manner and with a naughty smile shared how his project – a poorly tested App cost millions for customers. I couldn’t but wonder at the ethics of the person to consider such examples as a joke.
The tone is everything in MBA essays.
Read: When Tone Goes Wrong in MBA Essays
9. Ambition
We look up to leaders because they are not dreaming of achieving 20% year-on-year growth or completing the project before 5th September. They are obsessively solving problems that would change how we communicate, travel, transact, trade, consume, or even age.
With the market constantly blowing up negative news, ambition becomes the only fuel to persist in the path of repeated failure.
Narrative Example: Long-term MBA goals is a great opportunity to highlight ambition. The best essays capture personal motivation and beneficiary in equal measure. Here understanding your identity is crucial to bringing authenticity to the MBA essay.
What leadership traits have you highlighted in your MBA Essays?
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