MBA Essay Tips for writing about leadership and teamwork

This MBA essay asks you to demonstrate your leadership skills. Leadership can be expressed in many forms in your life such as managing your team in professional life, volunteering at an NGO or pioneering a task. As an effective leader or team member you should have motivated and led your team to achieve a common result and meet a common goal. In this essay you need to bring out your leadership qualities along with your motivational skills and illustrate instances where you have shown or exhibited leadership properties.

In this essay you need to think in particular, about the instances where you had employed necessary actions as a leader. As a leader you must have led the path of your subordinates to gear them towards a common goal. In your essay, demonstrate an example where you have correlated one of your past experiences with your leadership skill to solve a certain problem. Pick one incident from your professional or personal life which was most relevant and impactful in your life. Recollect and write about an experience wherein through example, ideas, leadership, enthusiasm and/or relationship building you were able to inspire and motivate a team towards success.Select the example based on the extent of your contribution to the team`s success and what the story tells about your ability to inspire.

Structure for your leadership essay:

SAR (Situation, Action and Result) is a good way to breakdown your essay.

Situation: First, start with discussing the issue and its criticality to your organization or community (if you are discussing an example from your personal life).

Action: As a leader you must have lead by your own example and experiences. Narrate your past professional experiences and correlate them of how you have implied them with the present situation. Your essay should reveal your actions as a leader. What have you done to motivate your team members and was it useful to the organization. Discuss the situations where you have demonstrated effective leadership, to guide your team members. It must be evident from your application that, as a leader your actions spoke louder than your words. Please bear in mind instead of writing what your team members did to solve a particular problem, inscribe what you did as a leader, what kind of leadership skills did you exhibit in that pressure situation.

Result: Now conclude with the result of your leadership. Do not forget to mention the learning experience from the whole process and your enhanced ability to better handle teams in future. Also include how your leadership skills have benefitted your team members and your organization. Considering these strategies will assure the admission committee that your eligibility stands fit.

The admission panel cannot judge your leadership skills until you explicitly discuss your leadership experiences. In this essay the admission panel looks for your ability to work within a team and your ability to lead a team effectively and efficiently. Your leadership skills and your ability to lead a team are the two most highlighted areas where the admission committee preferably focuses, because not only during your MBA you have to work in teams in different project and assignment, but also post-MBA as a manager you are required to work in teams and lead projects. So you need to project your leadership and team working attributes in your essay in a much captivating manner to fortify your candidature. 

Many of the applicants are uncertain about the correct definition of leadership. They still present a vague representation of their leadership capabilities. Leadership does not only mean exercising authority and monitoring routine tasks, but the responsibility of a leader is much beyond these aspects. You should always look back and remember how you had been working when as a team. In your essay, correlate your past experiences as a team member with that of how it helped you to understand your team better. Discuss how good team work is always the result of the combined efforts of you as a leader and your well driven team.

Here are some suggestions for you to include in your essay that will help you to show your best team leading capability. After choosing the anecdote for your MBA admission essay, focus on these points to effectively describe your motivating role. Tell, how apart from just monitoring the routine tasks as a leader, you also took initiatives for new tasks and guided the team members to achieve interesting results. In your essays try to portray the initiatives you have taken in the past as a leader. A leader should pay attention to motivate the team workers and take care of their minute needs to achieve the team objectives. Give examples of when and how you have motivated your team. Every one of us has worked as a team. Recall your past experiences and bring it to action with your team. It does not need to be from your professional experience. You can always discuss your skills exhibited during your undergraduate program or extra-curricular activities such as club membership or member of an NGO. 

If you have ever shared your past experiences with your team members, and have helped them derive ideas from your experiences for sorting out a particular problem, then mention those situations. Also write that as a good leader you have never tried to underestimate or exercise dominance over your team members as you knew that would eventually result in a rebellious attitude in them. Your essays should clearly depict of how cooperative you are as a leader. Your essay should reveal all your leadership skills and it should correlate them well with the efficient working of your team members. Your essay should nowhere show your dominancy or aggressiveness as a leader. Display your assertiveness not aggressiveness. Bring forward all your good characteristics in your essay, like integrity, dedication of purpose, selflessness, knowledge, skill, implacability, as well as determination not to accept failure.

Bottom line for you: In the essays show that you have led and inspired people. Do not discuss that you have managed or manipulated people. Inventories can be managed but people can be lead.