When you write about weakness in an MBA Application essay, focus on real weakness, the consequence, realization and how you were able to fix it. The weaknesses can be related to skill or limited exposure to team dynamics. Whatever be your weakness, do not cite the ones that show lack of maturity, leadership, or communication. Some elements of weaknesses in these three areas can be mentioned in your essay, but the very reason that you are writing about your weakness in an objective manner shows your maturity. Only leaders invite criticism and work hard on their weaknesses. By writing openly about your shortcomings, you are highlighting your traits as a leader.
For a complete list of leadership traits that you should highlight in your MBA Application Essay, Download F1GMAT’s Winning MBA Essay Guide
The weakness essay follows a simple trajectory
Weakness (Real Weakness) -> Consequences (Loss of Account/Revenue/Missed Deadlines) -> Realization (Feedback from Managers/Observation about the loss) -> Work on Weakness (Corrective Action) -> Results (Win Back a Client/Exceeding Expectations/Life Lesson)
If you want help creating a structured essay like the simple trajectory shown above, complete the form here.
Dos and Don’ts for MBA Weakness Essay
Dos
1. Identify your real weakness
Understanding weakness from an MBA Applications point of view is critical in identifying your real weakness. Stating trivial personal weakness will not help you. Dig deep and find instances in your career where you have not bonded well with the team due to mistrust, lack of coordination, favoritism, or poorly defined roles. It’s easy to blame colleagues or team leaders for your shortcoming. Avoid the temptation and own up to your mistakes.Read about eight Leadership traits that you should promote in your essays (Starting from Page 67)
2. Consequence of your weakness
It is hard to write about the impact of your sub-standard work, but only an objective leader can look at their shortcomings in dollar value. Leaders want to know how their weaknesses translate to the bottom line of the company. If you mistrusted your team members and took up the major chunk of the work that resulted in project delay – calculate the dollar value of the delay. Let’s say three-day delay cost the company $15,000. How did it impact the trust between the client and the company? Find out how to write about "Trust" - a leadership quality that should be highlighted in your essay.
3. Realization
Only in worst cases would you be asked to leave after one failure. It would not be ideal to include weaknesses that led to your firing. But in almost all major botch ups, the supervisor will give one on one feedback on what happened and how the problem would have been averted. Even though at that time, it might have seemed too personal for any reflective analysis, later in your career, you would have taken extra steps not to repeat the same mistake. What feedback did you receive? How did you feel after the conversation? Most engaging essays follows a W Pattern. Learn how to use W pattern for your weakness essay (Page 34 - F1GMAT's Winning MBA Essay Guide)
4. Work on Weakness
Weakness essay is not just a sincerity test; it also checks whether you are pro-active or reactive to failures. A reactive applicant’s tone would be too defensive while a pro-active applicant accepts the weakness and works on it head-on without any excuses. Admission team wants to know how you would improve your skills once a weakness is brought to your notice. Do you take help from colleagues or supervisor? Are you more of a self-learner or do you ignore the feedback? Applicants who are not bound by false pride, and openly ask for help find favor in the MBA Admission process. After all, learning in an MBA class happens mostly through each other. There is no point in stating weakness for which you have hardly taken any concrete steps. Understand the importance of context before writing essays (Page 19 - F1GMAT's Winning MBA Essay Guide)
5. Results
Another metric that interests the Admission team is the results. Once you declare your weaknesses and articulate how you reacted and felt after your shortcomings were made known, reveal the results achieved with the corrective action. The results need not be completely in a tangible format like revenue, future cash flow, and bonuses, but the impact on team spirit and quality of output should be articulated.
Don’t s
1. Do not mention the weakness like ‘I am a perfectionist’
You might have adopted a strategy to use strengths as a weakness. This might have worked in early 2000, but the admission committee has seen many essays with a similar strategy. It shows that you are not sincere about addressing your weakness. The last thing you want to do is to show that you have not done due diligence in addressing your real weakness.
2. Do not mention the weakness like ‘I am a workaholic”
This is another strength disguised as a weakness. Although you have to show how committed you are towards achieving your goals, direct mentions like “workaholic” will be taken in a negative context. MBA is not just about completing your tasks in the prescribed time; it is about teamwork and networking.
In the following example, the weakness is "Trust.”
“As far as my professional drawbacks is concerned; I have a tendency to “Do the entire task on my own.” I feel that starting my career as a software developer has habitually made me take charge of the entire solution. However, I had to pay a bigger price in one of the projects, where in trying to develop the functionality on my own, the project was delayed by two weeks. It costs the company $15000 in lost revenue. Although as an individual contributor I had generated over 1.2 million dollars in revenue, $15k was still a big number. Understandably, my project manager was not thrilled with my performance. On retrospect, I feel that creative aspirations, mistrust and the need to control had made me take up the ownership of the entire functionality. I realized the importance of delegation and trust during the course of my career. When you see how your team members are able to perform the tasks allocated to them, you will begin to trust them. That is exactly what happened to me. I began to trust my team members and it changed my outlook towards my team and my responsibilities. Their output improved considerably, and it had a positive impact on my career. I was able to come up with unique solutions not because I came up with all the ideas on my own but because I was lucky to receive a bigger pool of ideas from my teammates. Some of the solutions that we created were the result of hours of brainstorming and prototyping. My team played a crucial role in retaining at least two major accounts for our company.”
Weakness: Lack of trust (mistrust).
Action due to weakness: Do the entire task on my own
Consequence: Delayed project, lost revenue & criticism from the project manager
Realization: Importance of delegation and trust
Positive Action: Task Delegation
Positive Results: Improved efficiency, creative solutions and high team spirit
Recommended Resources
F1GMAT's Winning MBA Essay Guide
F1GMAT's Essay Editing Service
F1GMAT's MBA Admissions Consulting
About the Author
I am Atul Jose - the Founding Consultant at F1GMAT.
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Winning MBA Essay Guide - A Complete Guide for M7 and Top 15 MBA Application Essays
F1GMAT's Winning MBA Essay guide will teach you how to transform your essay into a life journey with trials and tribulations that will move the admission team.
+ Over 245 Sample Essays (Read Previews of F1GMAT's Winning MBA Essay Guide Sample Essays here)
+ Top 15 MBA Programs (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Booth, MIT, Kellogg, Yale, Haas, Darden, INSEAD, LBS, NYU Stern, Tuck, Duke Fuqua, Ross)
+ The Art of Storytelling
+ Leadership Narratives
+ Review Tips
+ Persuasion Strategies
+ The Secret to "unleashing" your unique voice
+ How to prepare and present for the Video Essay
+ How to write about your Strengths
+ How to write about your Weaknesses
+ Leadership Narratives
+ Review Tips
+ Persuasion Strategies
+ The Secret to "unleashing" your unique voice
+ How to prepare and present for the Video Essay
+ How to write about your Strengths
+ How to write about your Weaknesses
Want to try the individual school Essay Guides before upgrading to the Winning MBA Essay Guide? Try below.
F1GMAT's Essay Guides
Harvard MBA Essay Guide (20 Sample Essays)
Growth-Oriented Essay: Curiosity can be seen in many ways. Please share an example of how you have demonstrated curiosity and how that has influenced your growth. (up to 250 words)Example #1: Persistence Narrative
Background Information: The applicant – a design and music talent, shares her journey through several setbacks. She attributes curiosity to her growth.
Curiosity: Philosophy
Curiosity (Explained): Curiosity as a philosophy is tough to translate into a narrative unless you are from the creative industry or your contributions had an influence on a solution or an initiative.
MBA Essay Strategy: I wanted to capture the humanity of the applicant and her influence in music instead of just highlighting how she overcame multiple roadblocks to gain attention as a designer.
Theme: Persistence
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – Life Starts at NO (Growth-Oriented HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #2: International Community Building
Background Information: The applicant, a Machine Learning (ML) entrepreneur specializing in healthcare diagnostics, shares how his curiosity to learn other ML algorithms’ evolution in diagnosing Alzheimer’s, cancer, and heart disease transformed his platform into a global community.
MBA Essay Strategy: I wanted to show the applicant’s contributions in diagnostic from 2020 to 2024 by citing two events. Such examples build credibility instead of engagements that were recent. The evolution of the platform from an AI development community to a community for discussing the application of AI in diagnostics is captured through a ‘curiosity’ angle.
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – Growth through Collaboration (AI in Healthcare) (Growth-Oriented HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #3: Culture
Background Information: The applicant, an Entrepreneur from India narrates his first entrepreneurial experience – facilitating exchange of stamps in the late 1990s.
Theme: Culture
MBA Essay Strategy: Instead of addressing the biases in the investor community that could turn preachy, I wanted to focus on the applicant and his entrepreneurial journey by citing two entrepreneurial experiences – a platform(club) for stamp collection and his Grocery delivery App.
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – The American Dream (Growth-Oriented HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #4: Addiction
Background Information: The applicant – a beneficiary of the foster home system, captures the sacrifice his adopted grandparents made to save him from a path of addiction. Paying it back through early intervention among teenagers and community engagement is the curiosity narrative.
Theme: Addiction
MBA Essay Strategy: My strategy is to capture a gratitude narrative in the first one-third of the essay to demonstrate motivation for starting the venture and dedicate the latter part of the essay to the unique solution
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – Drug Addiction and Gaming (Growth-Oriented HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #5: Scarcity
Background Information: The applicant, an education major, recognizes that 70% of all students in Kenya don’t have a computer. The curiosity that drives him to pivot from one solution to another is the growth narrative.
Theme: Innovation
MBA Essay Strategy: Often, innovation is captured with a ‘hero’ narrative where the applicant is the sole originator of an idea. I wanted to break that cliché and include a person from whom the applicant learned to use a concept called ‘scaffolding.’
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – Scarcity (Growth-Oriented HBS Essay Example)Example #6: FinTech
Background Information: The applicant captures a vulnerable moment of a beneficiary to compare his journey of side hustle before a technology giant noticed his talent. Although cryptocurrency is not a flavor for the year, capture niches where innovation is still happening.
Theme: Education, Child Welfare
MBA Essay Strategy: Empathizing with a techno solution is tough without a strong backstory around the beneficiary. For the essay, I wanted to clearly establish the beneficiary – Rami, before the applicant narrates the similarities to his journey and finally shares the solution that emerged from his curiosity.
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – FinTech as a Tool for Good (Growth-Oriented HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #7: Learning from the best
Background Information: The applicant – a Remote Engineer in the Oil and Gas industry, reflects on a value that has helped her learn from the best regardless of her geographical limitations.
Theme: Learning
MBA Essay Strategy: The effectiveness of the case-study method depends on the assumption that peers in a Harvard MBA class will help elevate your learning experience. For the essay, I have highlighted the applicant’s recognition of this value proposition with three examples.
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – Learning from the Best (Growth-Oriented HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #8: Military & Search for IMPACT
Background Information: The most common narrative for US military applicants is to quote 9/11 and the reaction your immediate family had while watching the events unfold. The horrifying moment is captured as a motivation to join the Military. On digging deeper, most applicants would share that their motivations were diverse.
Theme: Career Choice
MBA Essay Strategy: I wanted to quickly highlight that the applicant had the choice of entering any industry. One achievement to demonstrate his curiosity that I shared in the first half is the invention of a game. Since the game is mentioned in the resume and verifiable through search, I didn’t quote the name. By clearly highlighting the person’s curiosity and career options, the family legacy is used as a factor in joining the military.
Read: Harvard MBA Curiosity Essay – Career Choice after a Military Career (Growth-Oriented HBS MBA Essay Example)
Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped who you are, how you invest in others, and what kind of leader you want to become? (up to 250 words)Example #9: Small Business Values
Background Information: The applicant - a second-generation Asian American, is familiar with the values of fiscal conservatism, building relationships, and understanding the daily struggles of the community through his family’s department store.
Theme: Customer-Centric
MBA Essay Strategy: The applicant’s role in developing an App for the store is highlighted in the essay at a crucial part of the narrative so that the essay is not all about his father. I have also humanized the journey – by sharing how upset the father was when the revenues fell by 40%. The essay is about the transformation in the applicant’s value from a person chasing productivity and optimization technique to someone who is truly thinking about the customers.
Read: Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – Small Business Values (Leadership-Focused HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #10: Breaking Away from Family Business
Background Information: A unique challenge that applicants whose parents are public figures or CXOs of businesses or entrepreneurs are the pressure to live up to the parent’s standards or milestones. For the leadership narrative, the burden of legacy is established before the narrative addresses his leadership principles.
Theme: Authenticity
MBA Essay Strategy: For the essay, I want to capture an entrepreneur’s journey to rise above his entrepreneur father’s image. But I didn’t want to make the entire essay about this complex dynamics. The narrative is around the applicant’s focus on customers and surrounding with teams who keeps him grounded.
Read: Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – Breaking Away from Family Business(Leadership-Focused HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #11: Creativity and Communication
Background Information: When the overall percentage of users with internet access is 62% in South Africa and the inequality accentuated by the rural and urban divide, the applicant endured the lack of digital infrastructure, and spending close to 22% of the family income on gaining relevant information on schools, global exams, and financial assistance.
Theme: Creativity, Communication
MBA Essay Strategy: The strategy is to share why the applicant values no distraction in a child’s home for optimum education experience. Then I highlight the many roadblocks the applicant’s non-profit faced in receiving fee waiver for their cooperative run ISP.
Read: Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – Non-Profit (Telecom) (Leadership-Focused HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #12: Mental Health
Background Information: The applicant like most didn’t pay much attention to the mental health epidemic until tragedy hit home.
Theme: Communication, Innovation
MBA Essay Strategy: A question we frequently get from applicants is whether they should cite tragedy in the family as a motivation for a venture or a non-profit initiative. As long as you don’t linger too much on the tragedy and offer a balanced narrative, there are no restrictions on leveraging unique stories from your life.
Read: Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – Mental Health (Leadership-Focused HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #13: Trauma, Healing & Finding Authentic Self
Background Information: The applicant narrates the absurdity of war in the narrative about the duties in Kabul, and the trauma. Instead of wallowing in on the horror, the applicant takes what makes military applicants strong and guides unprivileged children build life and leadership skills.
Theme: Resilience
MBA Essay Strategy: Capturing PTSD in an essay, the healing process, and the cues that helped the applicant are too sacred to be shared in a Harvard MBA application essay. However, with the right motivation and narrative arcs, you can capture the essence of your journey without sharing the darkest secrets. That is what I did by merging two stories – the horrors of the war with a non-profit engagement.
Read: Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – Military & PTSD (Leadership-Focused HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #14: Addiction, Setback and Leadership Mantra
Background Information: In this narrative, the applicant captures Peru’s Silver mining boom of 2006. The growth experienced in her father’s business shifted the family’s economic status to a new stratosphere. Through the changing economic and family dynamics, the applicant finds her voice in a unique way, initially to record her unheard voice but later as one of the youngest subject matter experts in mining and commodities.
Theme: Failure
MBA Essay Strategy: For the essay, the strategy is to show how life’s unpredictability is a blessing. By narrating two setback events, the essay demonstrates the applicant’s resilience and her acknowledgment of people who made a comeback possible.
Read: Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – Addiction, Setback and Leadership Mantra (Leadership-Focused HBS MBA Essay Example)Example #15: War, Immigration and Starting Over Again
Background Information: Despite a raging war in Syria, the family of the applicant was unblemished by the chaos. The strategic government assets near the applicant’s house would have made the region an easy target, but it was not. The calmness of her journey is shattered in one event. From the privileges of a cocooned life, the applicant is forced to think about survival, her sister’s future, and her future in the US. The second half of the narrative captures the change that was forced on her.
Theme: Gratitude, Resilience
MBA Essay Strategy: I consciously chose not to start the essay with a dialogue or trauma. Two lines are allocated to set up the narrative before the trauma event.
Read: Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – War, Immigration and Starting Over Again (Leadership-Focused HBS MBA Essay Example)Harvard MBA Business-Minded Essay: Please reflect on how your experiences have influenced your career choices and aspirations and the impact you will have on the businesses, organizations, and communities you plan to serve. (up to 300 words)
Example #16: Creative or Finance
Background Information: The applicant starts the narrative with the origin of her talents. The unbridled enthusiasm receives a reality check when in high school, the applicant’s father has a conversation with her about academics. While the applicant picked up her quant skills, she was reaching over 50,000 loyal fans, and her videos captured 1 million views.
Theme: Passion, Talent
MBA Essay Strategy: Capturing vulnerability is the toughest part for Harvard MBA applicants. For this essay example, I have captured the applicant’s uncertainty about career choice throughout the essay. Here the goal is to show vulnerability in the career choice essay while for leadership and growth essay, I could capture one example each from creative and PE industry respectively to balance the narrative. So don’t follow this example without a strategy.
Read: Harvard MBA Business-Minded Essay – Creative or Finance (Business-Minded HBS MBA Essay Example)- Stanford MBA Essay Guide (24 Sample Essays)
- Columbia MBA Essay Guide (21 Sample Essays)
- Wharton MBA Essay Guide (15 Sample Essays)
- INSEAD MBA Essay Guide (19 Sample Essays)
- Darden MBA Essay Guide (21 Sample Essays)
- Yale SOM MBA Essay Guide (15 Sample Essays)
- Tuck MBA Essay Guide (15 Sample Essays)
- Haas MBA Essay Guide (18 Sample Essays)
- NYU Stern MBA Essay Guide (15 Sample Essays + 6 Examples - Visual Essay)
- LBS MBA Essay Guide (6 Sample Essays)
- MIT Sloan MBA Essay Guide (6 Sample Cover Letters + 3 Sample Video Statement Scripts + 3 Sample Optional Essays)
- Kellogg MBA Essay Guide (11 Sample Essays)
- Chicago Booth MBA Essay Guide (12 Sample Essays)
- Ross MBA Essay Guide (31 Sample Essays)
- Duke Fuqua MBA Essay Guide (10 Sample Essays + Two 25 Random Things Samples)
- Cambridge MBA Essay Guide (12 Sample Essays)
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