The MBA question archetypes
ARCHETYPE 7: TEAMWORK 1. Examples
a Sunday school picnic. Don’t be facile. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of being ethical, particularly under competitive conditions where big promotions, adoration, fame and fortune come to those who win. Rather than claim to be a saint, say that you are human but you have a commitment to certain key beliefs.
5. How to flunk this essay
You will mess up this essay if:
• Your challenge or dilemma event is weak.
• You mix up ethical dilemmas with other types of dilemmas.
• You claim to be ethical, but provide no evidence of your values in action.
• Your self-analysis is insufficient or not self-illuminating. You fail to develop or share insight into yourself or your guiding moral principles.
• You don’t demonstrate growth towards the development of your own set of values.
• You appear as the company gossip.
• You underestimate the difficulties of being ethical.
ARCHETYPE 7: TEAMWORK
you will do it largely in groups. Your team skills are therefore highly relevant to your future success. They are also relevant to your ability to function at school, as most schools require intensive team projects and even team exams. Like your quantitative skills and your English skills, your team skills have to be good on entry to business school.
The challenge of the team essay resembles that of the ethics essay, in that everyone claims to be ‘a team player’, but there are many who are quite clearly not. Therefore, the attention of the committee is once again on the evidence.
Do you have solid experience doing serious projects collaboratively? Can you show a sophisticated understanding of group processes? Does your record show your ability to master them? What evidence shows you can promote group goodwill, balance competing priorities, foster multi-stakeholder solu- tions and integrate your preferences and skill-sets with those of others in sorting out tasks and timelines? Or are you just another Joe who has learned to mouth the right touchy-feely phrases?
The team essay also overlaps with the leadership essay in that both involve your relationship with groups. But where the leadership essay stresses your ability to motivate or enhance the contributions of others, the team essay is primarily looking for the complementary set of team skills: respecting differ- ences, fostering goodwill, deflecting conflict, tolerating, accommodating and compromising. In this essay, it is not a crime to show that you know when to ease off and let someone else lead while you play a support role, particularly in a field where you are a non-expert.
4. How to tackle it
Choosing a teamwork experience story seems simple enough, but take care with it. It will work better to have a story where team synergies applied – where the team worked to be more than the sum of its parts – and you can elaborate on the processes that created this happy outcome. As ever, don’t overlook the opportunity to pick stories that reinforce your themes. If you are positioning yourself as a future Asian private equity dealmaker, don’t pick a team story from your Rutgers college dorm. Pick one from your Ernst & Young days in Taiwan. Then show how teamwork leads to self-insight: why the team experi- ence you mention is indicative of you, why it demonstrates your skills, how it illuminates you as a person and what it suggests about you as a team member in future situations. If your story was a watershed event in your approach to teamwork, say why. Show also that you appreciate how tough a taskmaster real teamwork actually is – how extraordinarily difficult it is to get teams to be functional and productive, and how much you still have to learn about doing this.
Your analysis must also include an understanding of your own role in teams. Teams need a balance of different types – evaluators, drivers, facilitators, 108 ESSAY MANAGEMENT
conflict managers, detail freaks, etc. – so there are no rights and wrongs to being any one. But you must be able to say which role you normally play in groups and what your style of intra-team interaction is. A detailed appreci- ation of your team-player profile will take you beyond the forbidden banality that applicants come up with all the time in this essay: ‘I’m a good team player.’
Exercise
If you are unclear what your team profile is, do some elementary behavioural testing. You may, for example, take the Belbin assessment, which specifically analyses role profiles, or any one of the more general personality assessments such as the Myers Briggs, Neo 5-factor or Omni, among a host of others. You don’t need to make any life choices based on these instruments, but they should give you significant material to chew on in this essay. If you can say,
‘According to my Belbin team profile I am a “monitor-evaluator” and this has the following implications for how I work in teams . . .,’ your team essay will contain specific, topical, unusual information about you and will therefore be a better essay.
5. How to flunk this essay
You will mess up this essay if:
• You don’t show significant team experience.
• You appear to lack genuine teamwork instincts or you don’t under- stand what they are.
• Your teamwork story lacks detail and interest, or is not followed by meaningful analysis.
• You fail to develop or share insight into your specific role in teams and the strengths and weaknesses of this role. You can’t identify anything you do in a team other than ‘strongly lead’.
• You don’t provide detail or evidence of the good teamwork skills you claim.
• You don’t show a sophisticated approach to team dynamics.
• You underestimate the difficulties and commitment team interactions involve.
A note about sports
Talking teams brings up the question of sports. And the answer is, yes you can talk about sports in your essays so long as you avoid talking about season averages, topspin, point spreads, Manchester United’s goalkeeper, or any other factual or technical data. Get off the fanzine stuff and onto the topic: you. What THE MBA ESSAY QUESTION ARCHETYPES 109
is your personal experience of the passions and emotions that make sports great? It is always fine to talk about competition, adversity, personal battles, team struggles, fears, performance pressure, team bonding and team-mate reliance, split-second decisions, triumphs, overcoming odds, disappointment – and how these experiences have made you or changed you.
ARCHETYPE 8: KEY INFLUENCES, MENTORS AND ROLE MODELS