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| The Top MBA Applicants and Leadership | Today all top-flights business schools are looking for leaders. It’s very important as now is offered two-year, full-tuition MBA fellowships for up to twenty-five of the US's most outstanding young leaders.
How do admissions directors identify leaders? Think about the following:
• A consistent pattern of taking initiative and engendering change. Reliability is a key. The best leaders are constantly surveying their environment to see how they can make it better, wherever they are.
• Balance. As well as a solid record of academic and professional achievements, leaders also have a variety of activities they are involved in outside of school or work.
• Comfort taking calculated risks. Leaders don’t scare to take an occasional, well-thought-out chance.
• A genuine desire to leave a legacy that lasts beyond their involvement in an organization. The most successful leaders manage to involve other people in their activities such that their legacy lives on.
Positioning Yourself As a Leader in an Admissions Interview
Interviews can give you an outstanding opportunity to demonstrate your leadership skills. Being interviewed, try to do the following:
• Actively manage the interview process. Don't answer the questions without interest fired at you. Make a game plan: write down three or four key points you want to make. Leaders are aware of when they need to redirect a conversation to showcase their strengths and ensure that their agenda gets met.
• Have several cogent stories prepared about how you took initiative or participated in a leadership role. Try to tell them quickly and succinctly, what you did, how you did it, who else you involved and why you did it. Be cautious about managing the time well. The information you can provide in a one hour interview won't fit into a 30-minute slot.
• Make sure you have something to talk about. Lots of people participate in concrete optional activities while they are in a structured school setting, but let their activities trail off as they move to the more complex environment of the working world. Have you maintained an appropriate level of leadership and community service?
• Strengthen your stories with your physical aura of confidence (eye contact, an enthusiastic voice, a relaxed but attentive posture). Recognize how to listen as well as to talk.
• Establish rapport with the interviewer early in the interview process. Master skills of pre-interview chitchat so that it comes comfortably and naturally.
• Look carefully at what you've accomplished, as there are many ways to demonstrate leadership. Take into account some examples of leadership that you may be missing, mainly where your leadership wasn't necessarily public or visible. You should ask yourself where you have made an impact. Admit the role of a team, - very few operations are solo enterprises, but do highlight your leadership role. Narrate how you energized and managed the team of people who helped.
• Never overstate an experience where you weren't really in a leadership position. By making a mountain out of a molehill, you will destroy your credibility at once. Distinguish between cases in which you actually took initiative and those in which you actively supported someone else.
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