My Leadership Philosophy

I would like you to know about my leadership philosophy and how it has informed the choices I have made. A leader is someone with a habit of taking responsibility to achieve results at the highest levels. I’ve found that my life is more rewarding when I take responsibility in all my activities.

A leader takes responsibility to ensure his activities have a tangible impact. He does not hand his work over to others and walk way. A year ago, I completed a customer research project for ABC, a private equity portfolio company. The research suggested we should increase prices for dental braces. After sharing these findings with management, I periodically checked in with the newly hired executive assigned to oversee implementation. He had difficulty finding an internal resource to build a financial model to set the new prices. I offered to help and together we quickly built a model and got CFO approval to use the model prices. IT was asked to load the new prices into the company’s computer system, but would need to reprogram part of this system to do so. Backlogged with other projects, IT could not complete this task for another year. As a temporary solution, I built a web‐based pricing calculator. This calculator is online and being used by 100+ offices. The success of this project supported the executive’s quick promotion. He recently assumed responsibility for all company marketing activities.

A leader takes responsibility for his personal development. He takes risks to grow. I was shy as a child and continued to struggle with shyness in college. A friend recommended that I begin taking improv comedy classes to get over this. I began taking classes my senior year of college and have continued to take classes and perform live since then. I am much more outgoing as a result of my improv experience. This has been very helpful to me in my current role at ABC Private Equity, where I regularly need to build rapport with new staff at the portfolio companies. It has also helped me to progress quickly through the Toastmasters program, which I joined recently. I want to run a healthcare business one day and decided that I needed to sharpen my public speaking skills early in my career to eventually attain and be successful in a CEO role.

A leader takes responsibility for the success of others. Recognizing that his success was enabled by mentors, he pays their contribution forward. Growing up close to someone with a chronic illness, I had a challenging home life and found it difficult to focus on my studies. I got very poor grades until I met a special teacher who believed in me. Inspired by her confidence, I signed up for the hardest classes, achieved near perfect grades my junior year of high school, and won admission to a top university. Starting in college, where I worked as a calculus teaching assistant, I made a commitment to help others achieve academic success. I now volunteer as a mentor helping high school students apply to college, and as a programmer for XYZ Tutoring, a non‐profit offering free ACT prep classes. At XYZ, I am leading a team of programmers building a web portal for students to take practice tests. I pitched the idea of building a portal to XYZ’s executive director, won approval to begin work, and then recruited two developers I met at a conference to help build it. We completed a pilot version that will be available to students in XYZ’s fall semester class.

At HBS, I would continue as a leader of responsibility in all aspects of my experience including in the classroom, in student clubs and in the Harvard community at large.