Personal responsibility does not come that often when you think about leadership qualities. It is always about “My Team didn’t perform well”, “We lacked coordination”, “Our communication was poor.” You can make all the excuses you want but if you are leading a team, the failure is because of one person – “You.” The team has given you the authority to lead. So how do you go about explaining failure as a leader in your essay?
1) Own It
As you might have read in our previous article about Trust as a leadership quality – as much as team members love to have autonomy in making decisions, real leaders own up their mistakes. Lack of communication and coordination arises when leaders don’t set up processes to do so.
2) Lessons Learned
Once you own the mistake, it becomes easier as a leader to look back and analyze what went wrong. Every failure has a lesson hidden in it. Find out the root cause of the failure, and if you have learned the lesson, explain how that failure has been useful to you as a leader.
3) Respect
When you take personal responsibility for the team, and credit them for the success, you earn respect as a leader. No money, power talks, or extra vacation can make your team members work hard for you more than this. When they know that you are taking responsibility for the team beyond what anyone is willing to do, they will not let you down.
Did you take personal responsibility for the team? If so then your leadership essay will have authenticity.
About the Author
I am Atul Jose, Founding Consultant of F1GMAT, an MBA admissions consultancy that has worked with applicants since 2009.
For the past 15 years I have edited the application files of admits to the M7 programs: Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School, MIT Sloan, Chicago Booth, Kellogg School of Management, and Columbia Business School, together with admits to Berkeley Haas, Yale School of Management, NYU Stern, Michigan Ross, Duke Fuqua, Darden, Tuck, IMD, London Business School, INSEAD, SDA Bocconi, IESE Business School, HEC Paris, McCombs, and Tepper, plus other programs inside the global top 30.
My work covers the full MBA application deliverable: career planning and profile evaluation, application essay editing, recommendation letter editing, mock interviews and interview preparation, scholarship and fellowship essay editing, and cover letter editing for funding applications. Full bio with credentials and admit history is here.
I am the author of the Winning MBA Essay Guide, the best-selling essay guide covering M7 MBA programs. I have written and updated the guide annually since 2013, which makes the 2026 edition the thirteenth.
The reason I still write and edit essays every cycle: a good MBA essay carries a real applicant's voice. Writing essays for F1GMAT's Books and Editing essays weekly is how I stay calibrated to what current admissions committees respond to.
Contact me for school selection, career planning, essay strategy, narrative development, essay editing, interview preparation, scholarship essay editing, or guidance documents for recommendation letters.