MBA Essay on Leadership through mentorship

Please describe a time when you coached, trained, or mentored a person or group. (500 words )

My goal for starting an 'Effective Communication' club was not to improve the communication of the club members but, strange as though it may sound, to help them write better computer code. Sprouting from my surprising discovery of 'Mother-tongue influence' as the root cause for the lower-than-expected quality of many software created by my team working in (location X), I decided to take immediate and affirmative action: bi-weekly training sessions on the English language for my team. But, in a twist to a seemingly easy task, additional persons in positions of leadership were 'required' by senior management to voluntarily participate. One week into the training, I realized that the team was poorly cohesive and highly pessimistic. Although I was aware that previous such attempts had met with failure, I believed that I could, with my minimal skills, make an impact. I also realized that, in order to influence people, I had to master the key elements of leadership, build a shared vision, and align measurable goals.

With this newfound enlightenment, I changed my traditional approach (content intensive lecture series) into a three-pronged one aimed at accomplishing quantifiable, tangible and immediate results. I would conduct personal sessions to address specific issues with the language, toastmaster sessions to encourage public speaking and interactive propel sessions to address non-verbal aspects of communication.

However, several hurdles lay in my path of successful empowerment, the most significant of which was members' lack of confidence. In order to bootstrap their confidence, I showed inspirational speeches and movies on video and even shared my personal story of transformation from an extremely introverted person to a confident public speaker. I started to record the objective feedback from toastmaster sessions in order to plot a growth graph and show improvements. I also conducted short parodies of the work life to help bring out natural expression. I also tackled the lackadaisical attitude of senior members by urging them to speak on stage followed by gentle critiques on their presentation, which, along with demonstrations of impactful body language mechanisms tipped them over into mainstream participation. But the biggest hurdle was in maintaining consistent participation. Considering the hectic workload of members such as project leads and managers, I needed to imbibe in them a reason to look forward to these meetings. Through team building games targeting specifics of communication and through surprise quizzes with secret prizes, I was successful in keeping the interest flowing.

Word soon spread around and within two months, participation increased to 60 persons. I made the original ten persons as 'co-owners' in managing and conducting these sessions with monthly gathering of the entire club. Surveys of the clients across the enterprise taken before the start of the club and after 6 months of active participation showed over 40% of respondents noticed positive changes in the style and effectiveness of communication of the participants. The results were gratifying. What started as a simple goal of mentoring a team of 5 became an enterprise wide effort in coaching persons to speak confidently, express ideas better and influence decisions through new found courage to communicate effectively.

What I learnt from the whole experience was that no matter how hard the challenge, if you believe in change, you have to be it and then push it - especially if business demands it. By bringing about positive self-awareness in a disjointed group and through learning by leading, I was successful in bringing about a long awaited change .

you probably wouldn't want to discredit yourself here, even if it's for modesty purpose. Using a word that qualifies your skills without sounding arrogant would be much stronger


great! shows your understanding of business management


if your one here refers to lecture, it will not be understood because of the parentheses. I suggest that you explicitly state what's "one" here.


unless these different types of sessions are very common and obvious (and I'm just ignorant) you should say what they are. True, you mentioned what they do, but try to incorporate how they work also...unless you talk about them later


the members'


you prob want to tone down on the extremely...makes you sound like a complete socialpath, even though you clearly say that you changed...extremely instills doubt


you already used also in the previous sentence. You prob want to put Furthermore or another transition


The biggest hurdle, however, was to maintain...
didn't you already say that the most significant hurdle was lack of confidence? you might want to say instead:
having established confidence in my group, I noticed that the biggest hurdle that remained was to maintain...


are those workloads? manager at least sounds more like a person to me, not the job. management maybe?


take out the through, once is enough.


the number of members increased to sixty


These results


a bit of a structural problem here. I don't get what you mean.


You did a very good job in not engaging the reader previously. don't start now. avoid you's


use "the change" or "the difference" instead of "it"


I don't really get where this comes from. You didn't say that you did the whole thing for business right? Wasn't it more like a personal challenge? and what kind of business?


now, you're just pushing the idea of change way too much at the end. You already talked about being the change, so you should come up with a more meaningful end, like how this experience changed you, instead of keep reminding the reader of how big a difference you made.

Overall, very nice structure, clear theme, and you covered pretty much everything. You had a lot of business insight throughout, even though your club didn't have to do with business directly. You covered enough of that that you don't need the "if business demands it" to stay on topic. This is a meaningful achievement and I really think that you pulled off giving it the meaning it deserves. There's a few minor errors here and there, but the main ideas were great.

But, in a twist to a seemingly easy task, additional persons in positions of leadership were 'required' by senior management to voluntarily participate.--- what a beautifully constructed sentence this is! They are lucky to have had your help as they practiced English.

I don't know if "poorly cohesive" is the right way to express this.
...the team lacked cohesion and was highly pessimistic. ---- how about this way?

I like everything about this essay! I see the merit of Yang's criticisms, but it is just playing the devil's advocate, I think. It helps to see what other people have to say about various lines of the essay... what criticism they can come up with, but like Yang said, it is well-structured and very impressive.

:-)

haha that's not true! i'm not trying to instigate argument for the sake of it. I simply believe that every essay can become better, so I'm simply pointing out things that I think would strengthen the essay lol. If the reader shares my opinion, wouldn't this essay be a lot stronger?