A Key to Leadership: Empathy

Like most MBA candidates, you’re likely trying to reflect on and brainstorm key moments in your past that reveal leadership. As you do so, keep in mind that there are plenty of ways to think about leadership:

1)    You’re in charge, so you’re the leader.  This is the authoritarian model. As you might guess, this style of leadership is not very inspiring and will not be enough as top MBA programs evaluate your candidacy.

2)    Lead by example.  This is a style of leadership that many MBA candidacy lean on and, unfortunately, it too is not enough.  Every top MBA candidate SHOULD be a hard worker that allows their actions to speak for themselves. 

3)    Use ideas to lead. Another way to think about your impact as a leader can stem from your creativity and ideas.  By questioning the status quo and showing confidence to pursue a new path or direction, you can inspire others.

4)    Lead by making the right decision.  This is more of an informational-based leadership.  You can earn followers and motivate others by consistently being right.  To make the right decisions, you need to know how to use information to make an impact.  

5)    Use empathy to connect with and lead others.  From an MBA admissions perspective, this style of leadership is the pinnacle.  By using your ability to understand someone else’s perspective, needs, concerns, motivations, etc. – even someone with completely different life experiences and backgrounds from your own – you can establish a level of trust and respect that allows you to influence and guide individuals and teams.

With everything going on in the world right now – from discussions on systematic racism and police brutality to the health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic – I believe empathy will play an even larger role in the examination and evaluation of leadership in the applications of top MBA candidates.

Now, as we discuss empathy, it’s important to remember that it is not synonymous with sympathy.  Take a look at this video from Dr. Brene Brown, presented by The RSA, a global non-profit which encourages the release of human potential to address the challenges that society faces:

So as you continue to reflect on your past and experience, remember to think about the Four Qualities of Empathy as defined by Theresa Weisman (a nursing scholar):

1)    Perspective Taking – to see the world as another sees it

2)    Non-Judgmental – to listen, hear, and consider that other perspective

3)    Recognizing another’s feelings – to understand how they feel

4)    Communicate that Understanding – to form a connection

For a deeper examination into Empathy, click on this link to Theresa Weisman’s Concept Analysis of Empathy published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing.

To discuss your MBA candidacy and your impact as an empathetic leader, please click here to set up an initial consultation with one of Amerasia’s talented MBA consultants and coaches.

Four Ways to Overcome the Increased MBA Admissions Competition of 2020-2021

In late April, after a month of shock due to the coronavirus lockdown, the number of initial inquiries and sign-ups for MBA admissions consulting services at Amerasia Consulting began to spike.  Over the last month and a half that increased interest has been consistent, reflecting a largely held belief in MBA admissions circles that this season, both in Rd. 1 and Rd. 2, could be the most competitive MBA admissions cycle in history.

With the prospect of an economic downturn, top MBA programs are expecting a dramatic increase in applications over the last few years.  Furthermore, with high deferral rates at top MBA programs due to COVID-19, the number of available admissions spots in this year’s MBA admissions classes will be reduced.  So, more applicants and fewer spots available. 

With an increase in the caliber of MBA candidates, how do you – as an MBA applicant – begin to set yourself apart?

1)    Understand the Schools and MBA Programs You’re Targeting

Due to varying cultures, curriculums, perspectives on leadership, etc., every school and MBA program you plan on targeting values different skills and qualities in their MBA candidates. So, if you make the effort to understand and embrace the unique qualities of each program and allow those qualities to help shape your essays and application, you can begin to elevate your candidacy from being “qualified” to being “ideal.”  Contact one of our Admissions Consultants for more detail on how to approach the individual programs you’re interested in. Click Here.

2)    Reveal Your Emotional Intelligence by Picking the Right Goals

Admissions officers often want to know about who you are and what you value, not just what you’ve accomplished.  Often the best way to do this is through the passion behind your career goals. When you think about a passion, it often stems from a person’s background and values.  And a person’s background and values… that’s a pretty good window into understanding who they are as a person.

So, you want to pick career goals that reveal who you are, what makes you tick, and shows your values. Here are a few quick tips on picking your MBA career goals:

Avoid something too boring (I want to get promoted over the years and become an executive – this is a waste of precious essay real estate as it says nothing about you and rather describes a generic path to prosperity).

Avoid something “ripped from the headlines” or otherwise pie-in-the-sky (another way to think about this to borrow from a legal concept that you can only argue “facts found in evidence” – don’t talk about a LT goal in social media or clean tech or something else “buzz worthy” unless you have existing passions and experiences that support those claims).

Instead, land on something interesting that comes from your own life. Nothing is better for an admissions officer than to truly learn about you from your long-term goals. Make sure that whatever you pick connects to who you are as a person.

Make sure that your ST goal will give you skills and/or perspectives necessary to reach this LT goal (otherwise, the bridge starts to break down).

Overall, your LT goals should connect to both your ST goals and your existing life in big, swooping arcs – it doesn’t have to be a tight line from one to the other, but it should make a big circle that reveals who you are through your passion when all is said and done. 

3)    Show How You Stepped Up as a Leader During this Crisis

Due to the pandemic, many of us have been stuck at home for weeks.  While cities and states are beginning to ease up on some of the lockdowns, many businesses are continuing to operate remotely.  As telecommuting becomes the new normal, teams are interacting less and many businesses and groups are losing the social dynamic that can unite and inspire people around a goal.

As time goes on, these new realities have the potential to impact your business.  So, set up and look for opportunities to lead and bring people together, even if only online.  Be the person that hosts an online “social event” where you and your team can make cocktails and socialize using an app like Houseparty.  Or host an online board game night.  There are countless ways for you to step up to be a community and team leader despite your current isolation.

Furthermore, look for the opportunity to serve your community.  Many people, mainly those with service jobs, have lost their jobs and are struggling financially.  Reach out to a local financial services non-profit to see if you can counsel people dealing with debt or looking for a new job.

As you can see, the key right now is to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING to step up to serve and lead others.  Because when these top programs ask you “what you did during this crisis?” You want an answer that’s better than, “I watched a lifetime’s worth of Netflix.”

4)    Connect and Begin Working with an Amerasia Admissions Consultant.  Click Here to Get Started!

OWNING YOUR MBA CAREER GOALS IN FIVE STEPS

Let's talk about Career Goals for a minute. I want to present a crystal clear five-step process for how to handle the Career Goals aspect of your MBA pursuit.

STEP 1 - HAVE CLEAR MBA GOALS. Remember, this is not a degree designed for 22-year old applicants, nor does it punt away the responsibility of asking the question (yes, Law School, we are talking to you). The MBA is a career-focused degree and in almost every instance, the schools ask you what your goals are. To embark on such a life-altering process (to say nothing of expensive and time-consuming) without possessing goals would be bizarre. Now, maybe your goals need some refining - particularly in presentation - but if you can't at least decide for yourself what you want to do with your life and why you want to spend $150,000 and two years to get there, you should not be applying to top 10 MBA programs.

STEP 2 - REFINE YOUR SHORT-TERM MBA GOAL TO MAKE SURE IT CAN BE ACHIEVED. We know that just as important as setting goals is the idea of setting realistic goals. If you want to get in shape and you set a goal of running a marathon, great, you are on your way. However, if you set the goal of winning Olympic gold in the marathon, you are probably setting yourself up for failure. Therefore, it's not a good goal. This is especially true when someone else shares in the responsibility for whether you achieve it. Schools share the responsibility for helping you achieve your short-term goal. Nobody bears any responsibility for the achievement of a long-term goal. Nobody is tracking, measuring, or even checking. Too much life is going to happen between now and 10-20 years from now. So when you hear about making goals realistic or having them “make sense,” it’s almost always about the short-term goal, because that is what shows up on an employment report, what impacts career services, and generally has enough immediacy that everyone feels responsible for outcomes. Some ways to check your short-term goal:

• Look at the employment reports of the school to see if they place people into the role and firm of your choice

• Consider whether your previous experiences (and resulting transferable skills) put you in position - with an added MBA - to impress recruiters for this job

• Contact someone in career services (usually at your alma mater) to quickly check your path

• Ask me to give you a reality check on your goals (important point: don’t try to “brainstorm” your goals and certainly never ask anyone to “give you” goals - you should have goals in place that I can look at and either approve or poke holes in)

  The main thing is you want to be sure that the following equation checks out:

  YOU (and what you have done so far) + MBA (at this school) = ST GOAL.

If it does not, you will get dinged basically every time.

STEP 3 - SELL YOUR ABILITY TO ACHIEVE THE SHORT-TERM MBA GOAL. Normally I would talk next about long-term goals, but we are going to stick with short- term goals for a minute. Just because you figure out a short-term goal that can work does not mean your job is done. Here is a quick case study of a client who received an interview at a top-10 school despite aiming for a difficult transition. He was a task- oriented professional with little outside experience and little by way of management responsibilities (this describes a lot of people, so I am not worried about “outing” this person). This presents a limited platform from which to work, but that doesn’t mean his only short-term goal had to be something connected to his trade. Indeed, if he were to pick a short-term goal in that area, he might fail the “why do you even need an MBA?” part of this whole test. Remember, it’s not just whether the MBA is enough to get you to your goal, it’s also whether the goal is enough to warrant investing in an MBA (rather than just walking down the street for an interview). For this individual, his long-term goals were entrepreneurial, so in the short term, he needed more exposure to business practices and frameworks. He needed to take his upcoming MBA experience and expand on it, in order to continue broadening out and to see what works and what does not in new situations. To gain those 360-degree skills that would enable him to be a successful large-scale entrepreneur down the road, two paths made the most sense: management consulting and brand management. The former would expose him to lots and lots of scenarios in different industries, different geographies, and on different scales. The latter would give him experience with all aspects of bringing something to market. Either would allow him to broaden out the MBA experience of expanding frameworks, widening knowledge basis, and building up his network and pedigree. All good things, to quote the old Martha Stewart Saturday Night Live sketches. So, his work was done, right? Of course not! Just because he thought this was a good idea (or that we, collectively, thought it was a good idea), does not mean a recruiter or - by proxy - an admissions officer will see it the same way. He had to:

• First, explain the connection. He had to say everything I just wrote above, about continuing to acquire experiences and skills so that he will be in the best position to achieve his eventual goals.

• Second, highlight the transferable skills that make him a desirable candidate. I wrote an entire blog post about this once and you have read all about it in the Goals Memo, but one of the most common mistakes I see among applicants is that they don’t fill in the missing link and explain the skill set that will allow them to 1) get the job, and 2) thrive once they get it. You can't assume the reader will know what someone in your exact job does and see the connection between projects within your trade and being a consultant or a brand manager or whatever the case may be. You have to identify the skills critical to the ST job and then show that you have them. It’s very simple, yet we would wager to guess that 75% of applicants don't do this. They never say “here is what I will need to be a good brand manager and here is how and when I developed those skills in my current job, through examples A, B, and C.” You MUST do this, whether you are young

or old, American or International, a banker or a beekeeper. You can’t assume that the reader will do this extracting and matching for you.

STEP 4 - PUT "YOU" INTO YOUR LONG-TERM MBA GOALS. Unlike with short-term goals, the challenge with long-term goals is not to map out a perfect plan that everyone can achieve collectively. Here, you want to dream big and put as much of you - your passions, your inspirations, and what you care about - into the answer as possible. Think about goals the way Stanford GSB asks you to think about them: “What do you REALLY want to do?” If you say that your ST goal is consulting, you are creating the foundation for just about any long-term goal. You might think it wise to say, “I want to then climb the ranks to become a managing partner” and feel like that is a smart, safe play. Well, it's boring. Worse, it is impersonal. Literally anyone on earth could write that. What do you want to do? Really? If the real answer is to rise through the ranks and become a managing partner, well, why is that? There must be some greater good you want to serve or some burning desire that drives that aim, right? If it is just financial security, is there something in your past that makes that paramount, above all else? There is always a way to make your LT goals about you and that is what you have to do. You do not have to make your long-term goals 100% achievable. You do not have to make your long-term goals about connecting back to previous areas of expertise. You just have to pick goals that are personal and that require this MBA path you are on, at least on some level. There is an incredible amount of freedom in shaping your long-term goals, so be yourself, be interesting, and pick a path that you can truly own.

STEP 5 - OWN THE MBA GOALS. This is the part where perhaps we have come to assume too much over the years and where our case study client seemed to run into trouble. Once he had a path that made sense, ensured that he had achievable short-term goals (complete with highlighted transferable skill sets), had a long-term goal that was interesting and personal, and all of that was wrapped up with a bow in his essays, the mission had been accomplished. When he received an interview invite at a top-10 school, we prepped him for the interview and showed him how to bring that goal narrative through to the interview setting. However, here is where it fell apart. How and why? As best as I can tell, he got unlucky with his alumni interviewer. Instead of hosting a friendly interview, this person demeaned the applicant and tried to poke holes in his resume and aspirations. This is a tough break, for sure, but something that future applicants can deal with. First, if this happens, call the school and ask for another interview. The schools know that there is some risk inherent with a heavy reliance on alumni interviewers, so they won't be surprised nor will they likely refuse your request. Second though, you have to ditch that experience and approach the new opportunity with the same level of confidence you had before. This is where our case study client failed. He got rattled by the first interview and lost confidence in his whole narrative. Now, this is partly because he had bad luck but in equal part because he never truly owned his goals. He was too reliant on me to formulate a plan and he was never strong in what he wanted from an MBA and his life. When you don't own your story (the first piece of advice I give for interview prep, by the way), you

can too easily be bowled over by the first raised eyebrow or harsh word. And if you start scrambling to explain yourself or start getting wishy-washy with your goals, it is game over. After all, if you can't sit there proud and strong and say “this is what I want” with conviction, what can you stand strong for? So this is Step 5: own your goals. It's your story, not the interviewer's. It's your life, not anyone else's. If you can't get comfortable with the goals in the essay, rethink your goals until you do.

If you follow the above five steps, you will never fall victim to the pitfalls that have taken down thousands before you. You won't be rejected for asking too much (or not enough) of the school in the short term, you won't lose the reader's interest with impersonal long- term goals, and you won't blow your interview by losing conviction in your own path. Remember that if everything makes sense and follows these steps, nobody can tell you what to think about your life and path.

How to Build a Winning MBA Resume

There are many things about the MBA application process that can feel out of your control. You can’t control who you’re competing against for a spot in an elite MBA program. You can’t control the current mood or unconscious bias of an MBA admission officer reading your application. And you can’t control what questions or prompts you’ll be asked to answer in your MBA applications.

However, there are many things we can control. At the top of that list is controlling how you present yourself as a qualified and ready MBA candidate through your resume. Beyond the obvious need to make the 1-page MBA resume concise, error-free, easy-to-read, and honest, there is one key additional step you can take to make yourself stand out from the pack: focus on accomplishments that reveal transferable skills like leadership, teamwork, and innovation.

To do this, there’s a simple formula you should follow:

Accomplished [X] by doing [Y], resulting in [Z]

In other words, start with an active verb (click HERE to review a great list of action verbs provided by MIT), detail what you did to achieve your goal, and numerically measure what you accomplished. Take a look at two bullets of the same work/accomplishment. Then ask yourself which would look better on your resume:

1. Trained internal team and clients on the use of a Workforce Management software to establish a new specialty team.

2. Created and led specialty team responsible for adding clients onto a new Workforce Management (WM) platform by documenting procedures and delivering training program, resulting in the training of approximately 15,000 clients on the WM platform within 4 months

The addition of the “15,000 clients” makes the statement much more powerful. And adding “within 4 months” shows the MBA admissions officer that this was accomplished in a short and impressive timeline. Finally, sharing how you accomplished this adds credibility and gives insight into your transferable skills.

Overall, your MBA resume is a sales document and by using the formula “accomplished [X] by doing [Y] resulting in [Z]” and MBA Admissions officers will take notice. It not only tells the admissions officer in a snapshot who you are, but it also tells them that you have this vital business/recruiting skill down cold. 

If you’re interested in learning more or discussing your own resume, please CLICK HERE to schedule an initial consultation with one of our MBA admissions consultants.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR MBA CANDIDACY DURING THE CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR MBA CANDIDACY DURING THE CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN?

Considering GMAT testing centers are temporarily shuttered with online only options, MBA programs have yet to release their applications, and you’re working from home, you may think there’s little you can do to shape and improve your MBA candidacy.  This isn’t true.

While your life may be turned upside down as you navigate your job from home, deal with GMAT logistics, and are unable to contribute to your chosen non-profit as a volunteer, there are still things you should be doing NOW – from the safety of your home – to improve your MBA candidacy.

IMPROVE YOUR MBA CANDIDACY BY STEPPING UP AT WORK

Now is the time to be creative and show that you’re someone that can provide solutions in even the toughest of times.  As your peers (and future MBA competition) complain about being bored or binge watch Tiger King, explore ways to make an impact at work.  Try to develop new ideas and solutions that streamline communications or overhaul a cumbersome process.  If things are running smoothly for you and your company during the lockdown, find other ways to push yourself.  Be a leader. You can guarantee that MBA admissions committees will be interested in how you stepped up during these difficult times.

BE CREATIVE WITH HOW YOU SERVE YOUR COMMUNITY

With the spread of the coronavirus, there are countless individuals, families, and communities in need across the globe.  While I understand that you’re unlikely trained to serve as a first-responder or in any medical capacity, unprecedented numbers of people and business are struggling to survive financially during this time.  Reach out local financial literacy or debt consolidation organization – see if it’s possible to counsel recently unemployed people through this time.  Or contact your favorite local restaurant or business and offer to provide marketing assistance or to help them make cost cutting decisions.  The key here is to DO SOMETHING.  Especially if you have finance or social impact goals.  Again, after this pandemic passes, MBA admissions committees will want to hear how you impacted or served your community.

GMAT

If you were studying for the GMAT before the Coronavirus lockdown, and feel good about your understanding of the material and your readiness, you can set the GMAT studying aside for now.  Return and complete your studies once testing centers announce that they have reopened and you can reschedule your exam.  Or, take a crack at the new online option.

Use your study time to focus on other aspects of your candidacy.  Begin to refine your resume (blog post coming next week on “Creating an MBA Resume”), start to reflect on and form your career goals (blog post coming on “Owning your Career Goals”), and seek out guidance through a skilled MBA Consultant.

Click HERE for a complimentary MBA Admission consultation with a skilled and experienced MBA Admission consultant.