Not having leadership experience is one of the most common hurdles applicants face when they start preparing their applications. Demonstrating a track record of leadership is vital to get into HBS, Stanford, or any top school. It’s a problem you can’t dance around and close your eyes to, hoping the adcoms will miss.

Fortunately, we have a solution. A real solution, not simply a tactic or awkward patch. You can’t create leadership experience where none exists, but you can dig deep and find real leadership experiences to talk about.

So what’s the solution?

Applicants who panic about not having leadership experience are typically those who never had formal leadership roles in the traditional sense. In other words, you weren’t the president of your student body, you never held an officer position in a club, you never started a nonprofit organization, and you never captained a sports team. This includes all of you introverts out there. You know who you are: You perceive leaders to be social butterflies who enjoy being in the limelight, making speeches, and giving themselves fancy titles while you’re more comfortable fading into the background and doing the grunt work.

The truth is that almost everyone has demonstrated leadership at some point in his life and that it may not even have looked like leadership to you, then or now. Leadership often comes in subtle forms and in subtle moments. Unless you’re a total recluse who has never interacted with another human being, it’s likely you’ve been a leader in some way at some point in your life.

Admissions officers want to hear stories about instances of genuine leadership. Fancy titles can help create the image of a leader, but powerful stories of real leadership are what move the hearts of TPTB (the powers that be). After all, anyone can call himself a leader, but not everyone can actually pull it off in real life.

Your mission? Dig deep to uncover those times in your life when you demonstrated leadership. You may not even recognize your role in these situations as one of leadership, so here are some tips for thinking outside the box.

Don’t overlook these great leadership moments

Think about the following examples. Do you see yourself in any of these situations? Then you’re a leader.

• Mentoring a fellow colleague or student. Strong leaders help others succeed. Strong leaders put their own interests aside and help those around them do their jobs better. Strong leaders serve others. Mentorship doesn’t have to be a long-term relationship; it can even occur when you identify an issue someone is struggling with and help him find a solution.
• Being infuriated about something and taking action. It doesn’t matter what pissed you off. If you did something about it, that’s demonstrating leadership—especially if you brought other people onboard. Taking the initiative to shoulder responsibility for something is leadership. Being able to organize people around a cause is leadership.
• Gaining the support of others to accomplish a goal, even if you did it quietly. Similarly, corralling others toward a goal is a great example of leadership. You don’t have to be the one at the podium, making a heroic speech. You can be the one who gathers support quietly by collecting signatures on a petition or aligning key influencers through one-on-one conversations.
• Organizing something (anything). We never give enough credit to people who plan events. Getting people together to do something is an act of leadership. It requires selling ideas to people, convincing them that something is worth their time. It requires getting everyone to play together nicely. It’s about getting something done that wouldn’t otherwise have gotten done at all. Organizer isn’t a glamorous title, but, then again, leadership isn’t a glamorous role. Effective organizers have amazing leadership qualities. Barack Obama was a community “organizer” before he became president of the United States. Think about that.
• Getting others to go above and beyond. Have you ever gotten someone to do something outside the scope of his normal responsibilities? Did you ever get someone to stay late, even if he didn’t have to? If your answer is yes, you empowered or inspired that person. That’s what leaders do.

Notice in these examples that it’s not about titles you’ve held or grand things you’ve accomplished. It’s about the subtle, perhaps underappreciated actions you took to accomplish something. Heck, you probably didn’t even get any credit for it. This brand of leadership may not be loud and in your face, but it’s authentic and shows potential for true greatness in future leadership roles.

Tell your stories effectively

A heartfelt story is a genuine one, and the easiest way to be genuine is to focus on the process, not the end results. It’s the process—and not the end results—that reveals great insight into the behavior and mindset of leaders. Include plenty of details, because details are what make the process engaging to read. Here are a few examples:

• If you rallied for healthier lunch food at your workplace, how did you convince people to take action? Did you write a memo and have people sign a petition? Did you hold a company-wide meeting? How did you decide whom to talk to? What did you tell people to convince them to help you?
• If you had to stay late to finish a project that required the help of others who weren’t necessarily going to get credit for it, how did you convince them to do it? What specific things did you say and do?
• If you helped improve company culture, how did you do it? Did you write a new mission statement? How did you get buy-in? Did you approach people one by one? Whom did you decide to talk to? Why? Did you organize culture-building company events? If so, what kinds of events? How did you do it? Why did it help?

The key to writing a great b-school application is to highlight those moments when you demonstrated leadership. Having a bunch of fancy titles on your resume and in your application is an easy way to shout, “Look at me! I’m a leader!” But if you describe your moments of leadership in a very real and very human way that offers a glimpse into your motivation, you can demonstrate leadership much more effectively and authentically. And that, my friends, is how you win the hearts of admissions officers.

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Mistake 1: Writing about grand, pie-in-the-sky ideas that don’t have a strong tie-in to your background

A lot of applicants think their ticket to getting into Harvard, Stanford, and other top business schools is to come up with some brilliant, new plan to save the world. Show how wonderful a person you are and you’ll be a shoo-in, right? Not really. Unless, of course, whatever grand vision you pitch to the admissions committee actually resembles something in your background.

Say you want to work on developing microfinance programs in West Africa. Does anything in your background signal to the powers that be that you’re intrinsically motivated to reach your goals? Perhaps you’re from Ghana and you even have some relevant skills. Great. Perhaps you’ve been volunteering for kiva.org, a microfinance nonprofit, for the past three years. Even better. You’re already putting your money where your heart is.

The key here is to come across as authentic and genuine, which you can’t really do unless you’re, um, authentic and genuine. Simply talking about going into the nonprofit field isn’t enough to win the hearts and minds of admissions officers. If you’re just trying to sell a story for the sake of getting into business school, you might want to rethink your motives.

Mistake 2: Writing about a career vision that aims too low

If mistake number 1 is aiming too high, mistake number 2 is just the opposite—not dreaming big enough. No elite school wants to take a chance on someone whose grand ambition is to climb the corporate ladder or be a management consultant forever. Give the admissions committee a reason to believe that you could become the next Bill Gates or Meg Whitman. You may never reach Steve Jobs’ status, but top schools want to believe that every single student they accept is at least trying to achieve greatness. Don’t sell yourself short: Aim high, back up your goals with relevant experience (see Mistake 1), and, as Thoreau encouraged, go confidently in the direction of your dreams!

Mistake 3: Not reviewing your application before you send it: One inconsistency can be the kiss of death!

Let’s talk about inconsistency. Say you pick two leadership qualities to emphasize—your listening skills and courage, for example. All of your essays and recommendations must support those two qualities. If one of your managers talked in his recommendation letter about your need to improve your listening skills, you can kiss your chances good-bye. Either you’re not being genuine about your qualities or your manager doesn’t really know you. Either way, you’ve lost credibility, and you can’t get it back.

Or maybe your dream is to build a new yoga franchise but one of your mentors mentioned she was inspired by your dream to revolutionize the insurance industry. Uh-oh. Remember: Inconsistency will crumble your credibility and can expose inauthenticity. Make sure everything in your application package meshes with and supports everything else. Everything.

After you’ve crossed your I’s and dotted your T’s (still with me?), take a giant step backwards and look at your application package as a whole. In other words, see the forest, not just the trees. Each individual piece of your package can be perfect on its own, but if it doesn’t contribute to the overall message you want to convey about yourself, it may need some tweaking—or yanking altogether.

Mistake 4: Sounding arrogant, especially if you’re a finance guy or gal

The best application will highlight your accomplishments in a humble way. It may seem counterintuitive to some people, but humility is a characteristic you need to lead others. It’s fine to come across as confident, but do it without being arrogant. This can be tricky. Do yourself a favor and ask a few close friends to read your application and give you brutally honest feedback. Do you sound like a jerk? Like you’re full of yourself? Like you take your success for granted? If so, a rewrite is in order.

The way to circumvent this dilemma is to let your recommendations speak for you and brag about you. A testimonial from a mentor or advisor will always carry more weight than your own self-analysis. This way, you get all the kudos you deserve without coming off like MBA-zilla.

Mistake 5: Talking too much about the end results of your accomplishments (i.e., the destination) and not the process (i.e., the journey)

People in finance, especially young bankers, like to brag about how many deals they worked and how much those deals were worth. Know what? This is irrelevant to admissions committees. They. Don’t. Care. To them there’s no difference between a $200-million deal and a $5-billion deal. What they do care about is how you accomplished something in a certain situation or environment—in other words, how you worked the deal.

People in the CPG industry value things like how much you grew sales or the number of new products you successfully launched. Again, it’s helpful to mention some of this information, but admissions committees care more about the process—how you achieved the results, not the magnitude or quantity of your accomplishments.

A common success metric for insiders in the consumer internet industry is the number of users your product reaches. But admissions committees don’t have the necessary information to judge whether one million users is good or if ten million users means you have ten times more potential to be successful in business. The quanta are irrelevant: You could be working at a big company with lots of existing users, or you could be working at a small company on a completely new product. It’s important to provide some numbers for reference, but it’s more critical to describe how you overcame challenges to realize your end results.

The Good News: You can turn these mistakes into opportunities!

The most savvy applicant won’t simply avoid inconsistencies in his application. He’ll make sure every part supports a single, focused career vision. He’ll make sure his essays, recommendations, and resumé form a strong, cohesive, unforgettable image of him. He won’t limit himself when it comes to defining a career vision. Instead, he’ll shoot for the moon and introduce something game changing, backing it up with various experiences in an honest, humble way.

Good luck!

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Before I begin – just a few caveats to what I’m about to say. First of all, this doesn’t apply to any MBA program. A low to average-ranked MBA program might very well not be worth the investment in time and money. I am referencing top 50 programs, which have an impressive alumni roster with influential people in industries you’re interested in. Secondly, if you are a web developer looking to start the next Facebook or if you’re already a successful hedge fund manager, you also don’t need an MBA. In these two cases, you are less dependent on relationships for success. Success in business comes down to who you know. That’s where the exponential value of an MBA lies.

My own experience is a perfect example of this. I was working in finance when I applied to business school. My salary was exactly $200,000 a year. Not bad for a 26-year-old. So why would I spend $50,000 a year on tuition plus $200,000 of forgone salary a year to go to Harvard Business School? That’s $50,000 x 2 plus $200,000 x 2 = $500,000 over two years! Call me crazy, but the moment I stepped on campus until now, a few years since I graduated, I’ve never doubted the value of my business school experience for a single minute.

The two areas where you’ll see the most value of an MBA is 1) social status and credibility and 2) building personal wealth. While I haven’t changed as a person, my MBA definitely changes the way people look at me. You immediately have credibility before you have earned it. People perceive you to be smart and capable from the start, and you really need to botch things up to change that perception. This respect is something that an average person needs to earn, but it has been gifted to me because of my MBA – and that pay-off comes anytime I’m recruiting, starting a job, or just meeting people for the first time.

The other pay-off is in the area of income potential. I’ve always wanted to be in a position where I didn’t need to worry about prices on a restaurant menu and could travel wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I wanted to buy myself freedom from the daily grind of the 9-5 job, and gain access to opportunities that would enable me to make several million dollars a year. I wanted to build real, generational wealth.

An MBA opens the door to that possibility, and here is how: most of business today is still done based on relationships, and business school is one of the most important places to build relationships because every single person there 1) has chosen to pursue a career in business and 2) has already been pre-qualified by an admissions committee as ambitious and likely to be successful.

These relationships will prove invaluable as you progress in your career and 5, 10, 15 years after graduation, your friends and classmates will likely be in senior positions of power. This is when just one or two relationships could change your career overnight.

Here are just a few examples of how relationships from business school can transform your earnings potential:

• Landing a Major Client. If you become an investment banker, the most important driver of success is the ability to win new clients. If one of your business school classmates is the CEO of a company that sells for $500 million and your relationship with him or her earned you the opportunity to represent his or her company, you would generate $5-10 million in fees. That’s just from one deal. Now imagine if your business school network helped you win several M&A assignments. This is how many investment bankers become as successful as they are, pulling in $2-5 million annual salaries.

• Or, if you are a management consultant, once you begin winning new clients is when you begin pulling in a 7-figure salary. Your business school classmates will become chief executive officers, chief financial officers, managing directors, heads of divisions, and other high-ranking corporate officers who look to hire consulting firms like yours. They will become a great source of new client leads for you. All you need is to land one major client and your career could take off overnight.

• Raising a Fund. If you are an investor and you are raising your first fund, access to pension funds, endowments, fund-of-funds, and wealthy individuals becomes critical. Many MBAs become money managers at these types of institutions with authority to direct millions of dollars into new investment funds. If you leverage your relationships and raise a $500 million fund, your annual management fees alone would be 2% x $500 = $10 million. A successful fundraising process often comes down to knowing one person who can help introduce you to the right circle of people, or that one person who knows you from business school and is willing to make that first $50 million commitment to your fund based on the trust built during school.

• Breaking into Finance. Even just breaking into the finance industry could transform your earnings ability. Careers in investment banking, venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds are in a completely different bracket from other jobs and could equate to annual salaries of anywhere from $200,000 on the low end to $1 million and above on the high end, just a year after business school. Because thousands of people apply for high-paying Wall Street jobs each year, firms focus only on sources where candidates have already been pre-qualified, such as the top MBA programs.

When you go to a top business school, you become friends with people who will move into positions of power. People in positions of power have access to opportunities. When these people are your friends, that’s when you have real leverage to make money. Doing well in life and making money often simply comes down to knowing the right people to bring these opportunities to fruition.

And these opportunities go beyond just the finance and consulting industries. It could mean knowing someone who is involved in a new commercial real estate development opportunity where you can buy some property on the cheap before the public knows about it. It could also mean meeting a manufacturer who knows how to create a new high-tech fabric, which you then license exclusively to launch a new sports clothing brand. It could mean getting preferred access to a unique restaurant franchising opportunity. It could mean getting introduced to the founder of the next Google, where you could make millions of dollars as an early employee or investor. It all comes down to number of opportunities and the possibilities are endless when you know the right people.

You don’t need an MBA to do well in life, but an MBA gives you access to those relationships that can open doors that others don’t have or need to work much harder to earn.

So is an MBA worth $1 millon dollars? We think it’s worth more.

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That is not to say that your GPA is not important for business school admissions, as schools still want to see that you have enough intellectual horsepower to reach the top. It can also signal work ethic, perseverance, and ambition. Candidates with a high GPA have also usually developed a pattern of success, since the most competitive jobs out of college typically filter by GPA. While it doesn’t guarantee the candidate’s success in business, it does make them a safer bet than those with low GPAs. So what is the average GPA for top programs? Class profiles of top programs show that it’s usually anywhere from a 3.5 to 3.7.

If you fall below that average though, not to worry — you just need to address it in the right way, and there are many other ways you can differentiate yourself. If you can show that you have 1) sufficient intellect and 2) work ethic, drive, and ambition despite your low GPA, you can overcome any doubts that it may raise.

So first of all, let’s evaluate your situation and look at what is considered low. When you start dipping below a 3.5, you’ll need to highlight your accomplishments in other areas particularly strongly. If you fall below a 3.0, you face a bigger challenge and will need an accomplishment both unique and significant to overcome that. Here are a few additional considerations:

• If you didn’t attend a top undergrad, the bar for GPA will be higher. More likely than not, you were in a less rigorous program or your competition wasn’t as high caliber, so expectations are higher.
• If you had a less than stellar GPA at a top school, don’t sweat it — you’ve already passed the “smart enough” test by even being there, and just need to prove why you have the potential to accomplish great things.
• The further you are from undergrad, and the more work experience you’ve accumulated, the less important your GPA becomes. So if you’re applying straight out of college or just 1 or 2 years out, your GPA will carry more weight b/c it’s a stronger indicator versus if you’re 3-5 years out, and had a chance to prove yourself in a business environment.

So now that you’ve had a chance to evaluate your situation and where you stand, let’s look at the concerns a low GPA can raise and how to address them.

Issue 1: Insufficient intellectual horsepower

Adcoms know that you don’t need to be a genius to be successful in business, but a sufficient level of intellect is important. You can address this by:

• Rocking your GMATs; the lower your GPA, the higher you want your GMAT score.
• Landing jobs at firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs which normally heavily filter by GPA; if you can somehow still get a job at one of these prestigious firms despite a low GPA, it shows that someone there believes you have the intellectual horsepower to be successful.
• Non-academic awards and recognition; maybe you didn’t post good numbers, but you were a rockstar at debate or sales competitions.
• Getting published in academic journals; again perhaps you aren’t good at test taking, but your research work is recognized in academic circles.
• Winning academic competitions; whether it was a business plan or engineering competition, it shows that you’re a great problem solver and can think under pressure.
• Quantitative, technical, and analytical experience in your job; perhaps you weren’t one to do well in school but you excelled at applying analytical thinking in the real world.

Issue 2: Poor work ethic

If Adcoms believe you are intellectually capable, they may then think that your low GPA is a signal that you lack work ethic. There are a few ways to address this:

• Extensive involvement in extracurriculars that show you can be an effective leader, which is a much better indicator of success than a GPA. Being a leader also inherently requires a strong work ethic. Here are a few examples:
• You started your own successful business while in college.
• You ran for a junior government position in your city.
• You were captain of your college football team and ran a non-profit sports camp for underprivileged kids.
• Personal issues such as personal illness or illness of a family member. If this is the case, focus on how you were able to overcome this challenge to still achieve what you did, and be careful not to sound whiny or like you are making excuses.
• Post‐college success breaking into competitive industries and companies. This shows that you have the ability and perseverance to hustle. Also, Adcoms know that jobs at McKinsey, Bain, or any investment bank are demanding, and having that on your resume will appease any concerns about work ethic.
• Held part or full‐time jobs while in school to finance your own education. Being able to do this is an accomplishment in and of itself.
• Extensive involvement in collegiate athletics, or military experience. Adcoms know that both of these experiences require rigorous discipline and hard work.

These are all compelling reasons for why you didn’t have as much time to study and get that 4.0 GPA; they also show that you can be an effective leader.

At the end of the day, the best way to overcome a low GPA is being a high achiever in other areas, and essays and recommendations are where that will come through. You want to let Adcoms know that you may not have been in the top 1% of your class, but you’ve proven that you are smart enough in other ways beyond a GPA, and most importantly, you are a leader. Be careful not to sound defensive or to offer excuses, and instead, use this as an opportunity to shift the focus to your strengths and accomplishments beyond your coursework.

Most of you reading this have already finished school, so your GPA is set. If it isn’t as high as you’d like, don’t let that deter you from aiming high. You’d be surprised at the number of students at HBS and Stanford with low GPAs, and had they decided not to apply because of that, they would have missed the opportunity to attend a great school. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Also, really believe that you deserve to be there because of what you have accomplished. That confidence will come through in your essays and be noticed.

Adcoms like taking a risk on the black horse, especially if that person has an extraordinary background, regardless of GPA. Remember — top schools are trying to produce the next Fortune 500 CEO, or the next breakthrough entrepreneur, and they know that many of these people were not academic over-achievers. They know that it’s a leadership track record, rather than a high GPA that equates to the potential to do something great. If you can communicate that in your application, you can overcome any GPA.

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