UPDATE: This article was originally posted on April 12, 2019. It has been updated with new information and tips below. 

Sitting down to compose your MBA admissions essays, you may be wondering what you should write about in the first place. While there are many different strategies that can lead to an effective essay, there is one thing that you definitely need to include: a will and capability for leadership.

Leadership, more than almost any other single quality, is one of the top things schools look for in their candidates. Some schools have even decided to dedicate an entire essay to their value of strong leadership. Take Kellogg’s essay A prompt, for example, which reads:

“Kellogg’s Purpose is to educate, equip & inspire brave leaders who create lasting value. Tell us about a time you have demonstrated leadership and created lasting value. What challenges did you face, and what did you learn?” (450 words)

Other schools, on the other hand, specifically ask about leadership as an element of essays or understand leadership to be an implicit part of the answer they are looking for, like Chicago Booth’s essay 2 prompt: 

“Chicago Booth immerses you in a choice-rich environment. How have your interests, leadership experiences, and other passions influenced the choices in your life?” (250 word minimum) 

This means that it is absolutely imperative that you clearly demonstrate your leadership capabilities in your essays. 

Your essay may be a masterful piece of writing, but only with the element of leadership is it likely to be successful and land you a spot in your top MBA program. 

Why is demonstrating leadership so important for elite MBA programs?

All business schools value leadership in their candidates. However, leadership has many different facets and forms, a fact that becomes clear when looking at schools – and what they value – in depth. 

Berkeley Haas, for example, connects leadership with their value of innovation. Specifically, Berkeley’s full-time MBA program features four Defining Leadership Principles. These include Confidence without Attitude, Question the Status Quo, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. Berkeley sees each of these as an integral part of good leadership.

London Business School, on the other hand, sees leadership as an inherent and essential value for a global outlook,  one of their most important values. They write: 

“We nurture our students to challenge the status quo, to question the norm and to develop the skills to become the world’s best business leaders. Over the years we have adopted a truly global outlook tackling challenges faced by international businesses and their leaders.” ​ 

For LBS, the qualities of leadership and having a global mindset go hand-in-hand.

This list goes on and on. IESE sees leadership as an essential prerequisite for impact, one of their greatest focuses; Wharton specifically offers training for global leadership capabilities through their Leadership Ventures; Booth – a school heavily focused on community – views leadership as a fundamental element of that value. 

Given the different forms of leadership that each school values, how you showcase your own will change depending on which application you’re completing. So be sure to choose stories and lessons learned that align with the school you’re applying to. 

Of course, not only do these schools look for leadership in their candidates, they also offer explicit opportunities for developing and polishing leadership skills in their students. 

It is clear that leadership is extremely important in MBA programs, the work you do post-MBA, and of course, to the MBA admission committee. 

Leadership comes in many different forms

As you can see from above, there is no one definition of leadership that schools adhere to. In fact, because leadership can be tied into so many different values, there are many different ways to demonstrate it effectively in your MBA admissions essay. 

Here are some ideas about how to show leadership:

 

1. Innovative ideas

Leadership can be shown through an ability and desire to innovate. This can be coming up with a new product at a company, developing a new idea for a business, or helping an existing company capture a market opportunity that may not have been obvious before. By coming up with a creative new idea, you can show that you took the lead to help a company become more successful. 

Take a look at this example. Here, in his essay for Harvard Business School, our client Bruno demonstrated his capacity for leadership by applying data: 

“While working on a marketing and sales project for a large telecommunications company in Brazil, I was responsible for translating all the knowledge we had created with machine learning into segmented offerings, client retention actions, and up-selling initiatives. Combining industry expertise with the insights generated, I identified a 10% margin increase in the company’s mobile business, a market that is highly competitive and usually seen as margin-deteriorating. This experience made me realize that corporations need people who can guide them to make intelligent use of data.”

As you can see, identifying an opportunity to grow a business can be used to help show off your potential as a leader, especially as an entrepreneur. 

 

2. Helping others

This can be applied to both personal or professional situations. Maybe there was a time when your family was struggling financially, so you stepped in to offer your support? Maybe you had a colleague who couldn’t get their work done on time, so you helped them organize their priorities better and grow as a professional? Both of these instances show how you guided others through challenging experiences by relying on your leadership skills. 

This value can also be strongly related to impact and community, ideas that are becoming increasingly important within MBA programs. In many instances, leadership skills can be connected to a professional endeavor that helped a company create value for others. This is a great way to show how helping others revealed or helped you train your own leadership skills. 

Take a look at this example from a client’s application to Wharton last year:

“To escape Rio de Janeiro’s perilous, impoverished favelas, education and employment are the only way out. During university, I came to understand this while mentoring a group of underprivileged students. Despite wanting to attend school, my students often missed class due to active shootouts between gangs and police, on top of the many other challenges of living in favelas. Through this experience, I became aware of my role in society and how I could directly impact other’s lives.”

Here, our client Conrado used his experiences of mentoring others to understand his ability for impactful leadership. Not only does this help you underline the impact of your achievements, but also reveals a deeper aspect of your personality.

 

3. Taking initiative

Showing your desire and ability to be proactive can easily overlap with either of the two suggestions above. Often, recognizing a problem – either in your personal life or professional environment – and deciding to do something about it is a great way to demonstrate leadership. 

This is especially true if the problem was something nobody else had identified – or even blatantly denied existed. Here, your will to take the steps to fix it might be the perfect way to show your potential as a leader and self-starter while highlighting your drive and motivation.

 

4. Community and teamwork

A sense of community and working in teams is an essential value for many top MBA programs. Highlighting your leadership role does not mean you were working individually or only at the head of a team. Leadership can be also demonstrated through your ability to promote teamwork and collaboration. 

An important part of teamwork is being a team member who is not afraid to speak up, proactively solve problems, include others, or put new ideas on the table. 

By taking on a leadership role, even a minor one, within your community or team, you help further collective success and often multiply your impact. This is an awesome quality to demonstrate in your MBA essay. 

This can be a great opportunity to utilize extra-professional examples in your MBA essays. Take a look at another strategy Bruno used in one of his Columbia Business School essays:

“We’ve just stopped to catch some air, a scarce resource above 6000 meters. All members of the expedition are feeling mental exhaustion, but we fight it with team spirit. I nod heads with each member, making sure signals are clear. Each and every one of us is responsible for encouraging the others not to give up and for knowing when to tell a teammate to stop because going forward might risk their life. Lucky for all of us, now is not that time.”

Here, Bruno does an excellent job utilizing storytelling to help show how he is a leader within the group. As you can see, leadership can be evident even in stories of personal and group achievement.

5. Taking a leap of faith

Good leadership is not just about making data-backed decisions. Much more, it entails taking risks and using your intuition to navigate the complicated worlds of interpersonal communication, timing, and networking. 

This can not only highlight your courage but also your ability to push the envelope and create new solutions and possibilities.

For example, you could demonstrate leadership by telling the story of how your confidence in a subordinate helped them grow to become a more mature professional and enrich your team as a whole. It may also manifest itself through the idea to start a new business, despite not knowing if you will reach success. 

 

6. Getting out of your comfort zone

Leadership can also be recognized in the desire to get outside one’s comfort zone. Adcoms are looking for individuals who are ready to take full advantage of their MBA programs, which requires a willingness to learn and grow. This is an especially good tactic if you want to show attributes of global or international leadership, a characteristic that is especially valuable for European schools like LBS, INSEAD, or IESE. 

For example, spending a year in a foreign country can help you understand intercultural connotations of business in ways you could never have experienced before or how to communicate in completely new ways. 

Demonstrating leadership by getting out of your comfort zone can be expanded to experiences about polishing foreign language skills, helping international colleagues understand your home region, or expanding a business internationally. All of these can reveal and train global leadership skills and intercultural competencies – something all schools are looking for in their candidates. 

 

7. Straightforward leadership positions

Of course, we cannot forget the most obvious way to demonstrate leadership. If you have taken on an explicit leadership position within your company or organization, this is a great way to express this value to the admissions committee. 

Professional leadership positions can include leading teams, guiding clients through transformation processes, presenting results to senior leadership, or taking on a senior leadership position itself. If you have had experiences like this, be sure to include them – and the challenges you faced – in your MBA admissions essay. 

These ideas not only help you demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay, they might also give you bonus points for connecting leadership to other values a school might share, like community, innovation, teamwork, creativity, and a drive to make an impact. 

 

Tips for demonstrating effective leadership

Naturally, just explaining one of the above situations in your essay will not cut it. There are a few other things that you should keep in mind and try to apply when focusing on leadership in your MBA essay. 

 

Use the STAR method

Telling a story that thoroughly highlights your leadership role does not automatically mean it will be compelling. Often, candidates fail to show how leadership was necessary – in other words, what the problem was that required them to take on a leadership position in the first place.

That is where storytelling – and specifically the STAR method – comes in. The STAR method will help you highlight not just the problem that you faced, but also your specific role in solving it that led to success. 

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Results. If you want to make your story about leadership convincing, you must include all of these elements. This translates to:

Situation – clearly presenting the context for your story.

Task – demonstrating that there was a problem to be solved or a challenge to be faced.

Action – showing exactly what you did to solve that problem or overcome that challenge.

Results – the outcome of your actions. This can range from personal growth to helping other individuals to producing company-wide results. 

In this example, our client Karen effectively used the STAR method in her Kellogg essay to show leadership initiative at her mother’s store:

“I learned the value of hard work early, as a child helping in my mother’s gift shop, serving customers and wrapping gifts. (Situation) Once the boom of social media started, I saw the opportunity to leverage this technology to improve our business – this could attract more customers, increase revenues, and keep our financials organized. Simultaneously, I realized I wouldn’t be able to help in the store once I left for university (Task), so I taught my mom to use the computer to manage our Facebook page and financials (Action). The fulfillment of providing my mother with the tools and skills necessary to run and improve her business – increasing sales by 10% – is indescribable (Results).”

Using STAR is a great way to make your leadership role very clear throughout your essay and utilize storytelling strategies successfully. 

At Ellin Lolis Consulting, we believe that one of the keys to a compelling essay is effective storytelling. This technique transforms your example of leadership from a stale image that adcoms have heard a thousand times to a colorful journey that highlights you as unique and valuable to their community.

 

Highlighting your role

Your MBA essay is the place to discuss your personal achievements. Don’t sell yourself short in your essay! Telling a story about leadership that does not thoroughly explain your part will not be a good demonstration of leadership. 

This means that it is important to show the admissions committee what you specifically did in your story. Just saying that you were part of a team that produced fantastic results will not achieve this. Instead, you must show them how your work – what you did and how you did it – was essential for collective or individual success. 

Even if a success was only possible due to the work of your entire team, it’s still important to show how your actions complemented those of your colleagues. Not only does this allow the readers to see your contributions, but also demonstrates your capacity for collaboration!

Combining personal and professional examples

We have already established that leadership can manifest itself in many different forms, and that admissions committees see it that way, too. 

This means that the adcom is not only looking for your professional leadership experiences – or that they will condemn you for demonstrating leadership in your personal life. In fact, a good mix helps the adcom understand that you have a well-rounded, flexible understanding of what leadership means. 

For example, last year, our client Thais wanted to show leadership via the theme “grow by growing others”. To do so, she included the following stories in her Berkeley Haas essays:

• Teaching fellow children how to read as a child
• Mentoring younger students during university
• Professionally mapping NGO efforts to coordinate the distribution of their impact more evenly throughout Brazil

Don’t be afraid to include personal examples of leadership – this may help to reinforce your multi-faceted capabilities as a leader even more in your MBA essay. This is also a great way to show a clear pattern of leadership.

Show a pattern of leadership

When writing your MBA essay, it is good to not just show a single instance of leadership, but instead to demonstrate how your tendency for leadership is part of your brand using multiple stories. 

Of course, this only applies to prompts that do not ask for only a single experience (unlike Kellogg’s essay B!)

For example, you could show how you led a school club as a teenager, started a project at an NGO during college, and went on to lead recruiting initiates at your current consulting firm. This way, the adcom has a number of examples to go on to understand that you will make for a good leader in the future. 

Often, the greatest way to demonstrate a pattern of leadership is by establishing it via your central theme.

Leadership and theme

A theme is a great way to connect your message to your reader. A theme is a central topic that is reinforced throughout your essay via one or more stories. If you are curious about how to effectively apply a theme in your MBA essay, check out this article.

Many candidates decide to use leadership as their central theme in one or more of their essays. This is a great strategy and is definitely a winning possibility. However, you can also choose a theme with a bit more subtlety and still create an effective argument for leadership. 

To demonstrate, let’s take another look at Kellogg’s essay B. Their question specifically asks candidates to talk about a (single!) past leadership experience.

Last fall, our client Carolina began her essay with: 

“While the choreographed movements of a ballet dancer are polished and graceful, the journey to reach this result is full of setbacks. Although I no longer practice ballet, I have benefited from the discipline and determination I developed as a ballet dancer, applying these strengths to my professional and personal life.”

Here, Carolina uses ballet to help the reader visualize discipline and determination. She goes on to explain that she later used these traits to successfully demonstrate her leadership capabilities to overcome hurdles while implementing a membership program at her company. 

She ends her essay like this: 

“Although the membership program was successful, it required overcoming many setbacks through a rigorous execution process. Like ballet dancing, the completed project shows little of the work that went into it or the learnings I acquired along the way. Ultimately, it gave me the opportunity to lead a very diverse team, learn about a new industry, and strategically collaborate to achieve impressive results.”

As you can see, she uses the theme ballet to focus the reader on specific leadership qualities (discipline and determination) that helped her succeed in her career.

This strategy will work for other schools and essay prompts just as well. If your answer to Stanford’s What Matters Most to You and Why is quality leadership, you may be able to express that best with a metaphor. 

Our client Isabella, for example, began her essay like this: 

“What matters most to me is watering plants. Not any plant, but the ones that insist on growing, even when lacking nutrients and sunshine.” 

She continues her essay by explaining how, by overcoming bias and obstacles in her own life, she was able to grow into a leader who helped others overcome their own obstacles as well, thus “watering plants that insist on growing.”

As you can see, it is possible to demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay indirectly and implicitly – and even in unique, creative ways. Choosing your theme like this may even help reveal a new side of your personality that the admissions committee might not have otherwise been exposed to.

 

Don’t be afraid of conflict

In life, we work hard to avoid conflict as much as possible, yet when it comes to stories, conflict and tensions are not only important, but essential to captivating attention. 

Would Breaking Bad have been as interesting if Walter White was already an established drug lord when the show started? Probably not. Watching him take the news of his cancer diagnosis and find an unusual way to drum up the money for treatment is just what makes the show so addictive. 

Conflict and how our “hero” (in this case, you!) solves the challenge is at the core of any good story, so make sure you use the STAR method to clearly set up the conflict you needed to navigate and then show how you took steps to turn this roadblock into one of your standout moments. 

Let’s take this essay for example. In an early version, the story was conflict-free. 

Upon joining MBB after graduation, another experience inspired personal growth. While abroad, I participated in recruiting processes for top consulting firms, and saw firsthand that MBB lagged behind in recruiting students pursuing dual degrees abroad. After joining, I created a dedicated process to recruit these top performers. Four months later, we had the first online connection event, which attracted more than 40 interested students. The program has since become an essential recruiting tool. I am proud to lead this internal team in contributing to MBB’s long-term success as we attract the talent we need to deliver high-impact results to clients.

Though this shows initiative on the applicant’s part, it is far less compelling than this version of events:

After graduating, I joined MBB, as it allowed me to channel my intellectual curiosity, explore various sectors and be an agent of change. While abroad, I participated in recruiting processes for other top consulting firms, and saw firsthand that MBB lagged behind in recruiting dual-degree students. After joining, I spoke with several partners about creating a program to solve this issue. The partners were hesitant, however, concerned they could not adequately evaluate candidates remotely. After demonstrating the implications of overlooking these high-potential candidates, I received permission to create a dedicated dual-degree recruiting process. Four months later, I had mobilized 10 colleagues, leading them in organizing BCG’s first online connection event. The program has since become an essential recruiting tool, bringing in more than 10% of our hires since inception.

Here, not only does she show initiative, she also shows she has an ability to clearly communicate and add value to her firm, even when the odds are stacked against her. This tactic shows development and engages the reader, making your story more memorable.

So, when writing your leadership essays, make sure to give your stories some much-needed drama to really demonstrate how much impact your actions generated!

 

Still struggling with leadership in your MBA essays?

There are many factors to consider when deciding how you will demonstrate leadership in your MBA essay. 

On the one hand, it is good to consider the multi-faceted nature of leadership. You will want to demonstrate multiple environments and ways in which you have been able to create impact. And just because you have never managed a team or become the leader of a school club does not mean you cannot show your leadership capabilities to the admissions committee. 

In fact, you may be able to prove to them that you are a leader through a number of other situations, like taking the initiative or innovation, and even simultaneously connect those situations to other things the school values. 

On the other hand, just selecting a story that demonstrates leadership is not enough – you must also present it in a way that is convincing. Using strategies like STAR, a mix of professional and personal examples, and reinforcing the message through your theme, you can make sure that the admissions committee remembers your unique value as a leader. 

Of course, understanding these concepts and applying them is not the same thing. 

Even more importantly, we can help you effectively highlight your desire to grow as a leader in your top MBA program and the global world of business beyond. After all, as Kellogg’s admissions point out, growth is a challenge confronted by every organization – and every leader. 

If you still find yourself struggling with these issues, we are happy to help! Our MBA essay editors at Ellin Lolis Consulting have the expertise you need to identify the right stories and approaches to discussing leadership for each school you’re applying to. We can help you polish your essay to really make your leadership experiences shine.