Write a professional letter of recommendation on behalf of yourself.

I’m pleased to recommend John Smith to the MIT Sloan MBA program. Due to a change in management, I met John in his first day at Company A and have been his manager for seven months, but it didn’t take long before he impressed me. At our first meeting, I gave him a binder with several presentations explaining our processes, organization and performance indicators. I thought this would keep him busy for a while, but on the very next day he already had gone through all the material and had a list of questions, many of them quite insightful. At this time, I had a good feeling that he would be able to provide good contributions to our area.

John is among the top 5% of employees at his level. He was hired to help us on an important project aimed at redesigning our processes and tools used to support the Sales & Operations Planning team’s strategic decisions and daily management of the international markets. Before my arrival, the area had suffered a huge turnover and many of the work processes had been lost. We hired external consultants to help us, but I needed someone to closely manage the project and to deeply understand what was being implemented. After some project meetings, I was assured John was the right person for the job. He actively participated in the discussions, brought new ideas and was always helping to quickly put into practice the concepts we were designing. Also, he was interacting very well with the team and was quickly earning their empathy and respect. By the end of his first month, I trusted John to manage two analysts. I planned to make this move three months later, after the project was completed, but he showed me he could handle the important initiative.

John is constantly looking for opportunities to innovate systems and processes, which led him to deliver substantial impact to our organization. When an unfavorable exchange rate was threatening to turn our business units’ quarterly profits below budget, he revamped our inventory management policies and used it to identify which products represented additional sales opportunities and which markets were most attractive. As a result, the company could rationally reduce inventory levels by 17% and identify profit opportunities of $10 million in one quarter. Along with other initiatives, this helped the company to reverse the negative forecast and end the quarter above budget. This was so impactful, that those inventory and opportunities analysis became a required topic in executive monthly meetings and similar additional sales results have been achieved in subsequent quarters.

John interacts in a very collaborative way with his team and shown he has the capacity to inspire others to achieve substantive goals. He is one of the younger managers in Company A, and was able to develop a strong group by investing in his colleagues’ development and working with them to cultivate a clear sense of ownership. Even though he was new to the company and industry and was the first time he was directly managing a team, he was able to organize the areas’ activities and define the owners of each process. Also he took the time to engage in constant feedback and coaching sessions with the analysts he works more closely with. As a result, our team began to deliver much more and other members of the company that interacted with our area recognized the increased performance. This boosted the motivation and productivity level of the group and created a virtuous cycle.

In order to achieve even greater goals, I believe John could continue to work on his delegation skills. Probably due to his previous experience as a consultant, where he had to deliver results in tight deadlines, he sometimes does the work himself. However, he has been working on this area since he received this feedback and there are visible improvements. For example, last month, he delegated to one of his analysts, an important part of a presentation he is responsible to deliver every month.

In summary, John is among the best of his tenure I have worked with in my 20 years of industry experience and I believe he will be a great addition to the Sloan MBA program. His hardworking and collaborative nature coupled with his broad business experience for his tenure will certainly make him an important contributor to class discussions and extracurricular projects.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you have any questions.