Describe your most significant professional accomplishment. Elaborate on the leadership skills you displayed, the actions you took and the impact you had on your organization.
Sample One
In mid-2007, Acme’s Consumer Division began an initiative to modernize outdated information systems inherited through years of mergers and acquisitions. As part of this initiative, I led the Infosys team that designed and implemented the forms engine project that unified document generation and printing.
The forms engine was a big undertaking: it needed to host over 400 forms, and be an enterprise solution that could be deployed across many Acme divisions. As team leader, my first step was to break this massive undertaking into smaller, more manageable, pieces. Ten engineers would handle the cataloging and conversion, while the other five would program the actual engine. In the kick-off meeting, I explained this division of labor and laid out my vision for an engine that emphasized modular design, extensibility, and ease of use. I organized regular brainstorming sessions for the full team to draw designs and discuss operational scenarios, thus enabling us to identify potential issues that needed resolution from end-users, senior management, and other stakeholders at the Acme. This ensured that the team was working towards a common goal with appropriate buy-in and input from our key “customers.”
The forms engine was the first customer-facing project for many of my team-members. To ease their anxiety and ensure that each team-member was up-to-speed with the technologies involved, I instituted a peer-review system to diffuse newly gained knowledge, and provide a safety net to catch mistakes. When our collective know-how fell short, I organized training sessions with various experts. Doing this not only built my team’s technical expertise, but also gave them the confidence to successfully execute a complex project. During implementation, I set regular milestones and shared information on our progress regularly, which focused the team’s effort on measurable results and built momentum. I actively sought new ideas to improve our coding from individual team members and gave the group the latitude to identify and test out new solutions before seeking assistance. In turn, this project enhanced team members’ attributes that served them well in future projects: new technical skills, effective teamwork, and a strong motivation to take on difficult tasks.
By mapping out clear goals, developing my team’s talent, and providing feedback early and often, I avoided the technical and procedural roadblocks that frequently plague such large projects. When the forms engine went live, the result was impressive: the project was delivered on time, within budget and with only one minor production defect. Additionally, each team member was poised to take on larger challenges. Today, the forms engine generates a large portion of Acme’s printed literature— over 30 forms every second for branches, back-offices and call-centers across the US—with our team’s original technology still in place.
My success leading this project taught me that managing talented and smart engineers requires aligning ourselves around a shared vision to solve challenging problems. Opportunities at Ross, such as the overarching Ross Leadership Initiative and leadership endeavors inside and outside the classroom, such as M-TREK will help me enhance my leadership skills and develop my personalized leadership toolbox.
Sample Two
In 2008, I was promoted to manage the Large Parcel Order Fulfillment Department at Company X. When I transitioned to the warehouse, my predecessor told me that the department was running well and my role was to maintain the status quo. In many ways he was right, but that approach lasted two weeks before I got bored. I certainly had to push further to identify opportunities for improvement and fight harder for resources, but I am proud to say that didn’t prevent us from making significant progress.
In my tenure, I challenged the group to avoid complacency and led the department to collaborate with upstream and downstream operations to simplify and expedite material flows, provide more effective feedback, and eliminate distractions. We surveyed employees about what made their jobs harder, conducted time studies to see what slowed us down, and reviewed credits and inventory adjustments to better understand our mistakes. In so doing, it quickly became apparent that our biggest opportunity lay in expediting the material transport (tugger) operation. The tugging operation was designed to pick up material from fillers and transport those items to packing and order assembly. To improve throughput, we designed a zone coverage system that made it easier for tugger drivers to understand where to wait for pick ups, introduced a system of signal lights to indicate when fillers needed material taken away, created a more versatile vehicle platform to better separate material, and developed a system for scanning material to provide detailed information about operational and individual performance.
Identifying these solutions and convincing the organization of their merits was a challenging exercise in collaboration and communication of vision. Throughout the process, I involved employees whose opinions were highly regarded among their peers. They were the unofficial leaders and their participation was essential to the success of our experiments. Not only was their feedback helpful, but they also played a critical role in ensuring that employees were engaged and continued to support change. Although both fillers and packers knew how to improve their own productivity, few had the perspective to understand the impact that different approaches would have to both sides. Facilitating buy-in and determining the optimal solution required reconciling disparate experiences and carefully measuring and explaining the net impact to the whole organization.
Our efforts eventually allowed us to reduce staff by one person and resulted in a 12% reduction in ship times. It was unprecedented progress for a department that most had written off to be “as good as it gets,” and I am particularly proud of these accomplishments because they reflect a team effort. I developed an environment that encouraged people to share their ideas and concerns, and created the structure to ensure the best ideas were implemented – a culture that long outlived my time in the department.
Sample Three
One of the first efforts I led when I joined BearingPoint was to develop a pay setting tool for the human resource managers at a Federal Agency (FA). The incumbent tool was merely composed of two excel spreadsheets with a couple of vlookup formulas. The tool was not used in every pay setting case and in some instances allowed for policy and other pay rules to be broken. I soon came to realize that this endeavor required serious process redesign efforts.
I had a functional idea of how the tool would work; it would be Excel/VBA based and pose a series of questions allowing the user to select yes or no. By answering the series of questions, the human resource manager will end up at a final sheet that varies depending on the criteria selected from the questions for a specific type of applicant. It was similar to a web application, the first improvement, but the most difficult part was ahead.
Another team was responsible for creating the tool’s functional requirements document and user guide. After receiving the functional requirements document with the tool’s user guide, my initial thoughts were: not all types of applicants are being accounted for and how did someone create a user guide for a tool that did not yet exist? At this point, I organized a meeting with those responsible for putting together the documents along with a member of the Federal Department (FD) and posed the questions they overlooked. Questions revolved around the applicant’s past salary, pay setting limitations, salary increase eligibility, and the highest previous rate rule. It was obvious from this meeting that FA had no concrete process for setting pay and did not understand FD pay setting policy. To pull the group back together and focus on designing a process, I walked the group through all possible applicants to develop answers that aligned with the policy. This information then enabled me to create a Visio process map. After a few iterations, the process map was approved and implemented, and the team was ready to begin developing the tool. Leading the development was a breeze once the whole process was defined and the limitations were set. While motivating and encouraging the development team to be creative in their solution, I made sure the solution remained within the policy limitations and process design.
Upon completion of the pay setting tool, I arranged a formal demo with the HR directorate and FD. I presented the tool demonstrating how users cannot break policy because of limits put into the back end and its user-friendly design accounting for all possible applicants. The demo was a success and I was asked to train the human resource managers on how to use the tool. Interest for the pay setting tool from the National Security Agency and FD has brought in new business, and I am thrilled that this tool will be used at most agencies associated with the Department of Defense over the next few years.