Leadership Experience And Your MBA Application

March 30, 2024 :: Admissionado Team

Leadership is key in all applications at all levels of education and employment, not just for B-School.

Why? Well, because everybody wants leaders. Leaders are sexy. Leadership means drive, focus, confidence, power, and progress. It shows development, promotion, and success. That’s why it applies to every career. As you get promoted, you will become a leader—whether you’re a teacher, accountant, business guy or gal.

In business, though, it’s even MORE important. Obvious, right? I mean, you’re trying to earn a Master of Business Administration, which basically means “business leadership.” Of course leadership experience is important, because the entire structure of business organizations is hyper-businessy. Chances to “lead” happen more quickly, and there are just plain more of them when you’re in the business world. A principal of a school might lead 200 people, a CEO of Coca-Cola…20,000. But the basic premise is the same. As you get promoted, you will lead.

Emphasize Leadership In All Aspects Of Your MBA Profile

Leadership in business also maps to money, and therefore to the prestige of the school. Managers make lots of money, but CEOs make LOADS more. If you’re good at leadership, you’ll ascend the ranks more quickly, and therefore make more cash. If a school can say one of its graduates is making $3 million a year as a CEO, that reflects PROFOUNDLY on the school’s reputation, which increases admissions, which helps the school expand, and so on and so forth.

Top B-Schools Want Proven Leaders

If you’ve never managed or run anything before (even on a small scale) how does the admissions committee (we call them adcoms) know that you will be a successful leader after you graduate? The adcom wants to see a clear leadership arc in your application: upward mobility, increased responsibility, larger teams under you, etc.

What if you’ve never been a proper “manager” in your career before business school? Well, chances are that you’ve run SOMETHING even in your non-managerial role.

• Did your boss give you a project to run on your own?
• Did you ever supervise other staff members?
• Have you initiated interdepartmental jobs?

These are the things that say “leadership” if you’ve got a lack of promotions or management positions in your career history. Just remember, leadership experience equals leadership potential equals the adcom loving you.

Showing Leadership Impact In Your Essays

When arguing your leadership, you’ll need to focus on particular moments that demonstrate this potential. By focusing on specific experiences from your professional past, you can avoid sounding like you’re using “leadership” as a buzzword. There are a couple ways to do this. The first, and least effective (though, admittedly, still effective) is to show that you were placed in charge or a group of people. This, by definition, is leadership. If you’re an Associate at a bank and you mentor a team of four Analysts, great. That’s leadership. But it’s worth noting that this kind of leadership can easily be listed as a bullet point on your resume. It doesn’t do much to show how you have demonstrated leadership ability, and it doesn’t promise that you’ll be able to lead a team of 100 later on in your career. So, though you should absolutely list this kind of leadership on your resume, your essays require a more robust approach.

To demonstrate leadership in your essays, try the following equation:

Demonstrated leadership = innovation + impact.

For every act of leadership that you want to include, start with innovation. To do so, you’ll need to step back and start with the need for innovation. There’s a problem. There’s an obstacle in the way. There’s an inefficiency of process that’s causing a bottleneck. Take a moment and explain the issue to the adcom. Your team needed to accomplish XX goal, but YY obstacle stood in your way. Step 1 to demonstrating leadership is showing how you, the innovative thinker, found a way to overcome that obstacle. From there, you rallied your team around the plan, and you ultimately succeeded.

Once you’ve showcased your innovation, it’s time to show your impact. Compared to the results your team usually achieves, how did your newly innovative approach stack up? Give comparative results to show that your innovation improved your team’s success. Revenue on a specific project grew by 20%? That’s impact.

But there’s more! True leadership creates lasting impact, so you’ll get some major leadership bonus points if you can show that your innovation – your legacy – was carried on by your company after you moved on to other projects. Let’s say you designed an automated reporting tool for your company’s consulting platform, and let’s say your tool saved 15% in labor costs in the first quarter. Great. But what’s greater is if that tool was preserved in your institutional process and saved 15% in labor cost every quarter for the past 3 years. That’s lasting impact resulting from your innovation, and that’s the highest mark of demonstrated leadership.

Leadership in Remote Work

In an increasingly globalized and technologically connected world, more and more people are getting the option of working from home… or coffee shops, bed & breakfasts, tropical locations, airplanes on the way to those tropical locations… you get the point.

For those of you not tied to the good old ball-and-chain of an office cubical, but who wish to leave the comfort of the couch for the pious halls of an academic campus (unless you’re applying for an online MBA, in which case, stay comfy!) showcasing your teamwork and leadership in your MBA applications might feel a bit tricky.

Though the answer depends on what kind of work you actually do from home, the good news is that it really shouldn’t be an issue. MBA adcoms are looking for impact, and you can have just as much impact from your couch as you can from your cubical. Impact involves:

1. Identifying a problem
2. Coming up with an innovative solution to that problem, and
3. Collaborating with your team to implement that solution.

The first two aspects of this really aren’t any different for remote employees versus on-site employees. Just explain the problem you noticed, how you noticed it, and what you DID to solve it (focusing, of course, on the “how” and “why” of the solution.)

But that last aspect – what you did to solve the problem – gets a little tougher to explain when you’re a remote worker. Can one truly collaborate with a team when they’re not with that team? Well… absolutely! For remote applicants, you’ll need to focus more energy on explaining the implementation process for your solution in order to get credit for your collaborative qualities and team leadership. If the normal process was Skype calls, what did you do differently to organize the group and keep them on task?The important thing you’ll need to explain is how you overcame the obstacle of working with a team that’s spread all across the globe. What aspects of your leadership and teamworking skills allowed you to bridge that physical divide.  Your remote accomplishments might even pack more of an “impact” punch than your cubicle-bound peers’, because not only did you overcome the problem you set out to solve, the first step toward execution was a problem in itself! It’s double leadership points for your initiative, if you spin it right.