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 consultant in a non-profit balances short-term value creation with long-term impact by cultivating empathy for the beneficiaries.
Theme: Leadership, Empathy
Theme (Explained): In non-profits, leadership, and empathy might not always go hand in hand. Sometimes, the founders and team members are so obsessed with fundraising that they forget about implementing the right solution for the beneficiary. Other times, they empathize too deeply with the beneficiary that they forget the value they are supposed to create in the short-term.
Profile: Consultant
Industry: Non-Profit
MBA Essay Strategy: I didn’t want to present the applicant as the leader who transformed the culture.
It was an intervention that offered the high-achieving team a perspective to balance short-term value creation with long-term impact.
The fundamental problem was the team composition - engineers with strong quant skills who are obsessed with sales and fundraising, less so about delivering solutions for the beneficiary.
The toughest decision for the applicant was to intervene and affect the team’s morale when the team had the best quarter in fundraising.
The intervention showed the deep dissatisfaction the beneficiaries had in embracing the solution.
Some were around not understanding the day-to-day challenges the beneficiaries faced, while many were cultural.
By encouraging the team to spend more time with beneficiaries through weekly educational sessions and assistance, the team built up strong connections that defined their engagement.
Opener: The opening line establishes the motivation of the applicant to join the non-profit.
Kellogg MBA Leadership Value, Difficult Decision and IMPACT on leadership Style Essay (Data Driven to Empathy Driven Non-Profit) (449 Words)
Starting my career in a 900+ strength Fortune 500 company made me wonder whether I had any impact on society. When the founder of the non-profit, <x> invited me to join their consulting team, I embraced the opportunity.
In a year, I was entrusted to lead a team of 12 on a renewable energy project in rural India. The organization has a tradition of recruiting engineers as most of the problems require interpreting complex datasets and correlating the impact of policy, laws, and budget allocation on government projects in the villages.
The quant-heavy nature of the analysis that attracts engineers also led to the development of a monolithic culture.
Two years back...
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