Leadership is a key qualification for admission to top colleges and especially, business schools. When they think of leadership, many people think of titles: captain of the chess team, president of the student body, valedictorian.
It’s Not About Titles Or Individual Achievement
However, highly selective colleges and business schools are looking for something that goes beyond titles. After all, if titles were all that mattered, the admissions committee could spare itself a lot of work by running applications through an tracking system that looks for certain key words.
This is not to detract from extraordinary individual accomplishment. National and even international recognition certainly makes a candidate stand out. Winners of the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, for example, have proven beyond a doubt that they are brilliant and hardworking.
But leadership is something different.
Leadership is less about individual accomplishment and more about inspiring a team. Wojciech (Voytek) Majewski, who teaches leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, explains it this way on LinkedIn: “Our definition of leadership is motivating and inspiring a group of individuals to achieve a shared goal.”
Majewski confirms, “I do not associate leadership with job-titles and formal hierarchies. You can show leadership each time you are confronted with a problem and when cooperating with others is needed to solve it.”
It’s About Other People
So how can you practice this elusive quality, leadership? In a sense, it’s simple: look for a problem, cooperate with others and solve it.
The problem doesn’t have to be enormous. It can be a small problem at school. It can be physical or mechanical, if you are inclined to solve problems using engineering skills. It can be social, if you have a talent for reorganizing the way things are done.
If you’re concerned about climate change, think of one small way you can inspire other students to band together to save energy. If the social exclusion of new kids is an issue at the beginning of the school year, what would help?
Help Other Students
Younger students are always in need of role models and help with both academic and after-school projects. If you have an outstanding talent or a skill at which you excel, consider teaching it to kids in younger grades. Here are some examples.
One accomplished classical musician, a senior at a German school, started a jazz ensemble for middle school students. He was as proud of their end-of-year concert as of his solo performance.
Recent arrivals to your town or city need friends. If they are coming from another country, they may not speak the local language very well. You could offer to teach basic writing skills for school, or hold conversation hours. A variation is provided by a student who went once a week to a local center for refugees, to give guitar lessons. The young newcomers appreciated the break from struggling to communicate.“Music,” said the guitarist, “is a universal language.”
What This Has To Do With Business
Once you begin such a project, see if you can motivate other students to build on your example. That’s how one person’s effort can snowball—or in business terms, “scale.”
You may need to let others know about your project, and that you need their contribution; that’s marketing. You may need a budget and a plan to raise money to expand; that’s finance. You may need to recruit and supervise people; that’s staffing. You may need to rethink your goals and the steps it will take to get there, and make sure people know how to continue without you, once you graduate; that’s strategy.
Perhaps it’s clearer to you now how these skills closely resemble the areas of expertise required to launch a successful business. That’s why business programs, whether undergraduate or graduate, are particularly interested in leadership. They see not only what tends to be first in the minds of applicants, namely the topic or the content, but also the structure of the activity. They look not only what you do, but also why and how you do it.
This is very different from the usual way students and parents go about assessing extracurricular activities. People often begin by asking, “Exactly what activities are sure to demonstrate leadership on college or business school applications?” They wonder which is more important, an economics contest or a sustainability project.
It’s not about the particular topic, but rather the way in which a person engages with others who are inspired to solve a problem together.
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