When business school admissions officers evaluate a candidate, they primarily look for four dimensions that round out a strong applicant: leadership, teamwork, innovation, and maturity. (These applicant dimensions are detailed extensively in Your MBA Game Plan, the industry’s most effective book on MBA admissions strategies.)
Why, then, have essay questions that directly hit on teamwork mostly disappeared from business schools’ applications over the past decade? Could this mean that teamwork suddenly doesn’t matter like it used to?
Most definitely not. While most schools no longer directly ask about teamwork in their essay prompts, you can be sure that they still care about this attribute a lot. They have just moved from asking about teamwork directly to looking for signs of a team-friendly attitude in your other essays and interview answers, as well as in your letters of recommendation. While they could ask you in an essay prompt, many have found that they get more useful answers via the interview process and your letters of recommendation.
Some essay prompts still do at least indirectly hit on the concept of teamwork. Take one of MIT Sloan’s essays from this past year, for example:
Please give us an example of a difficult interaction you had with someone. Please describe the situation, what was difficult about it, and how you resolved it.
While many applicants hear “teamwork” and think of trust falls, it’s a much more involved concept than that. It requires a willingness to share successes and take accountability for failures. It also calls for a great deal of empathy and emotional intelligence (also known as “EQ”), which admissions officers talk about almost endlessly these days. MIT Sloan’s essay attempts to get at that — an ability to “feel out” a situation and figure out how to work with someone, even when they may not want to help or your goals may not be aligned.
Don’t then doubt that teamwork is going away as a core attribute that admissions officers want to see; they’re just measuring it differently than they have in the past. Whether you communicate this ability via essays or letters of recommendation or any other medium, you absolutely must bring teamwork to the table in order to be successful in the MBA admissions process.
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.