Principled Leader -- 2022

Georgetown Essay 1, 2022: Principled Leadership Georgetown McDonough places a strong emphasis on principled leadership, providing both curricular and co-curricular opportunities to strengthen your leadership skills. Describe a time when you have led a team in a professional environment to implement a new idea or process. What leadership characteristics did you utilize? What could you have done to be more effective? And most importantly, what skills will you be able to bring to the teams you lead at McDonough?

In 2015, I was assigned to Zim Shipping’s central contracting office in Ashdod, Israel. Two years earlier, a contractor had defrauded Zim of $2 million by overcharging port services, and Zim resolved to overhaul how it managed port services worldwide. In support of this effort, I was given a team of seven senior Israeli and Norwegian contracting professionals, with the task of developing a set of standardized port services and prices.

I immediately faced a challenge from my team: they didn’t understand why standardization was the solution. They had been contracting professionals for years, but they had never participated in a global port visit in person. I needed to build buy-in from my team.

To win that buy-in, I brought Moshe, the most vocally opposed member of the team, to a port visit in Norway. We immediately uncovered an example of site-specific contractor fraud: a tugboat vendor was providing a “unique” service to stifle competition and increase costs, and had convinced Zim that only he could provide this service. I standardized the service to allow all contractors to bid, saving Zim $250,000. When Moshe saw first-hand how effective standardization could be, he embraced our task.

Once Moshe was on board, the other team members rapidly followed suit; when I saw this, I realized Moshe was the thought-leader of the group. In retrospect, it would have been more effective had I recognized this earlier, but once I had his support, we gained momentum. Over the following months, I brought each of my team members to a different port, from Scotland to Odessa, to have the same in-person exposure. With their support, we created new standardized services which are now the framework for Zim’s multi-million dollar port services contract covering every commercial port worldwide.

Winning the support of my team was a challenge, but I could not have achieved global standardization without their engagement. I look forward to bringing my ability to win buy-in and maximize collaborative perspectives to Georgetown classes such as Professor Christine Porath’s Leading Teams for Performance and Impact.