UPDATE: This article was originally posted on July 18, 2022. It has been updated with new information and tips below.
For your MBA admissions essay, you want to ensure you shine to stand out amongst thousands of other applicants. Does that mean you should avoid talking about negative experiences, failures, and weaknesses?
Not at all. In fact, you should use past failures to your advantage to show how you have grown!
Utilizing failure in the appropriate places can even help you stand out from the crowd and land you a spot at your top b-school. To do so effectively, we have compiled our top tips for handling stories of failure and weaknesses below!
Tip #1: Take Advantage of Failure
The admissions committee for your top MBA program is looking for future leaders who seek to make a difference in their field. They want candidates who have experience making difficult, real-life decisions.
Experienced professionals have most often made their share of mistakes. This doesn’t mean that admissions committees are looking for people who have never failed. Instead, they seek candidates who have grown from their past errors.
This perspective is particularly useful for writing MBA admissions essays. It allows you to frame a negative event positively by showing the admissions committee what you’ve learned from it.
By illustrating your ability to learn from mistakes, your awareness of areas for improvement, and your understanding that there’s always more to learn, you can position yourself as a growth-minded leader who belongs at their school.
Tip #2: Use STAR to Demonstrate Your Strengths!
The best way to talk about failures and weaknesses – and, more importantly, the lessons you learned from these experiences – in your MBA admissions essay is by utilizing stories. When using storytelling to discuss failures and weaknesses in your MBA essay, there are a few essentials to include.
To effectively discuss a failure, the following elements must be clear:
1) The problem: Why did the failure happen in the first place? Why did you act as you did in that situation from your perspective?
2) How you recognized the problem: How did you notice it was a problem? What further consequences did this problem have?
3) How you overcame the problem: What did you do to solve this problem? What do you wish you would have done differently?
4) The lesson you learned from the experience: What was your takeaway from this story? How would you apply this lesson in the future?
It is important to include all of these elements to tell an effective story about failure or weakness. For example, take a look at how our client Paul concisely discussed a weakness in his Ross essay:
“I was humbled when I failed to implement a product’s preparation process at a retail store during a consulting project, leading to sales loss risks – besides client dissatisfaction. Later, the store’s manager eliminated parts of the process, completely redesigning it. His idea initially seemed like unfounded nonsense, as necessary data wasn’t being collected. However, the manager insisted on its success, so I tested his idea in two other stores: it was indeed agiler while maintaining effectiveness. I learned that listening to others is essential, even when our opinions diverge. The manager’s idea was subsequently shared with 300+ stores.”
As you can see, all of these elements must be present to tell an effective and compelling story about failure. If one or more of these are unclear or missing altogether, you may not be able to make an effective case.
Tip #3: Strengths and Weaknesses Complement Each Other
Sharing stories about your weaknesses or past failures can also highlight your strengths to the admissions committee. Here, weaknesses and strengths work together harmoniously.
In other words, discussing a negative habit, trait, or experience does not have to result in a negative perception. Instead, you can use these weaknesses, along with the lessons you’ve gleaned from them, to clearly demonstrate your strengths.
In this regard, you could present your tendency for being stubborn – which could be a problem in some situations – as a strength when it comes to knowing what you want. The decision not to go into the family business – which may have been seen as a failure from the family’s perspective – may have helped you find a job that revealed your true passion and opportunities for impact.
In this example, our client Lucas used his multicultural background characterized by culture clash to show how this led to both his greatest strengths and the need to overcome a weakness in his essay for INSEAD:
“The child of South Korean immigrants, I was born in France and raised in Argentina. Growing up between clashing cultures yielded important personal adaptability skills. These skills have shown me how I can serve a higher purpose, helping people and businesses through responsive empathy and a pragmatic approach. Nevertheless, my parent’s Korean heritage also reinforced a strong respect for hierarchy. I have, therefore, always avoided openly discussing their decisions or suggesting new ideas, focusing instead on delivering requests. However, effective consultants don’t just follow orders, they take the initiative to think like a leader. I thus began challenging myself to think critically to assess objectives.”
This excerpt from Lucas’ essay clearly shows how traits he gained from his cultural background contributed both positively and negatively to his character. This way, he can use this theme to discuss both of these elements.
Tip #4: Check Out Past Examples!
Some schools are explicitly looking for candidates to show how they have grown from failures or are improving on their weaknesses. This is because top MBA programs are looking for students with what is called a growth mindset. Take INSEAD, for example, whose motivational essay questions request you do both:
“Give a candid description of yourself (who you are as a person), stressing the personal characteristics you feel to be your strengths and weaknesses and the main factors that have influenced your personal development, giving examples when necessary.” (approximately 500 words)
“Describe the achievement of which you are most proud and explain why. In addition, describe a situation where you failed. How did these experiences impact your relationships with others? Comment on what you learned. (approximately 400 words)”
INSEAD knows that you must reflect on failure to continue growing, and outright demands this skill from their candidates.
Ross is another good example. They ask candidates to answer one of three prompts from two sets. One of the prompts reads:
“I was humbled when…” (100 words or fewer)”
Like INSEAD, Ross wants to know how you reacted at a time when things did not go exactly as you planned. Learning from a past failure would be a good choice for this prompt.
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Tip #5: Nobody is Perfect!
If you try to make a case to the admissions committee that claims you have a flawless record, this is unlikely to be successful. In other words, to allege perfection is likely to get your application set aside.
This is because the adcom is looking for a pattern of success based on abilities of self-reflection, open-mindedness, and capacity for improvement.
After all, universities – including top programs like Harvard, MIT, or Yale – are institutions of learning. All schools implicitly value growth, improving on one’s weaknesses, and intellectual appetite. High-profile MBA programs are specifically looking for these qualities in their candidates.
If you claim that you are perfect, you indicate that there is nothing left to learn. This is definitely not the impression you want to give the adcom. By including failures and weaknesses, you can show the adcom that, even in success, there is still a way to get even better – and become even more successful.
Remember, you are not trying to tell the adcom that you are perfect. Instead, you are trying to tell them how you use imperfection to your advantage to lead you to success.
Tip #6: Utilize personal failures, too
Not every failure or weakness you discuss has to come from your professional background. Personal stories about failure can be very effective, too. Similarly, not every failure has to be a huge one – some can be tiny mistakes that you wish you had done differently.
Personal weaknesses may range from disappointing a good friend to a tendency for tardiness. They could include not making time for someone in need, deciding not to take over the family business, or the fact that you have trouble negotiating compromise.
Last year, our client Audrey wrote about a personal failure while leading her sailing team in a regional competition. In her answer, Audrey explains that her team consisted of her and her five teammates, all expert sailors. However, an inability to work together, despite careful planning, led to them losing their first race of the regatta:
“I learned that to have a successful team, it is not sufficient to focus only on high-performing individuals. Instead, it is necessary to create a unified mentality, aimed together at the same goal. If given a second chance, I would begin our planning by emphasizing how we were all skilled sailors but that we needed to form a united team. Some of us might disagree with aspects of the strategy, but we must derive a single plan and stick to it, knowing that focusing our efforts is the best overall option.”
Here, Audrey learned an important lesson about leadership, an important quality in MBA candidates. As you can see, strong professional lessons can also be derived from personal stories.
Failures and weaknesses can also include much larger personal challenges. You may even find that themes like coming to terms with your identity or overcoming loss are powerful – and authentic – solutions. This may be another way to creatively elaborate a change in industry or direction in your professional past.
Tip #7: Talk About Failure – Even When You Don’t Have To!
Although schools like INSEAD and Ross explicitly ask their candidates to discuss past failures or their weaknesses, choosing to do so for another school is never a bad idea. Depending on the prompt, you can decide to discuss your failures and weaknesses for other schools as well.
This will help demonstrate to other schools that you have a growth mentality, can reflect on your past failures, and see the need to improve on your weaknesses. Keep in mind that the admin board is looking for these traits – even if they are not explicitly asking you to talk about them!
For his LBS essay, for example, our client Dennis decided to tell the admissions board how working with the case-study format during a university exchange led to lower grades but ultimately helped him refine his communication skills.
Whatever you choose, make sure the content you are sharing is relevant and adds value to your application.
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