Upping Your Leadership Game

We approached several clients, many of whom were at Lehman Brothers (RIP). Fortunately and unfortunately, most of these fourteen-hour- a-day junior investment bankers (also known as worker bees) were already deep into extracurricular activities we’d already helped them discover and/or launch months earlier. But busy people tend to know other busy people. Enter Rudy, who heard through the Lehman grapevine that these two wacky guys who help people get into grad school needed a volunteer coordinator to help launch a really cool program. He wasn’t even sure he was going to apply to b-school; after all, he was at the top of his analyst class and the right-hand analyst to a serious big shot in the company.

Being Mr. Big’s bitch kept Rudy quite busy. Talk about not being able to tell your boss, “I have to duck out today at six o’clock sharp.” (If Rudy could do it, so can you. Don’t argue with me unless you’re Obama’s bitch.) Despite his schedule, Rudy managed not only to make the Friday Night meetings for two school years, but he helped to recruit the first-ever group of mentors who would learn to navigate the college admissions process “the Auntie Evan way” and send CIS’s college-bound students to such competitive schools as Trinity College, Union College, University of Virginia, NYU, and Wesleyan.

Rudy’s leadership breakthrough was refusing to hear his friends say no when he asked them for help. At first, he was nervous about asking his buddies in the office to spend their Friday nights with surly seventeen-year-olds who were nervous about applying to college. One friend in particular he asked several times to attend, and finally got him there with the promise of going out together afterward. That guy ended up volunteering for two years in a row, and he wasn’t even applying to business school. He spread his wings and asked a friend at a different investment bank to start asking his friends as well. They turned it into a competition: Who could get the most mentors there. He kept his mentors inspired, helped them work through trouble spots, and had to deal with me. Ultimately, Rudy not only put this group together but also made certain it would exist without him, and because of his work, the mentor arm of this Friday Night mentor program was passed down to other leaders and is now larger than ever. And by the way: It made for one hell of a leadership essay when he applied to HBS. He got in.

Candidate Profile 2: You’re not involved in any organized extracurriculars, but you do spend a lot of time on a hobby or other activity you are passionate about.

Consider doing what Caleb, a Goldman Sachs analyst, did: He brought together two things he cared about and formalized them.

Caleb didn’t just answer yes to Quiz Question Number One about gym attendance, he wrote the book on it. He spent two hours a day, from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m., working out in the gym. And from my vantage point, it was worth every push-up. Now we had to help him sculpt his extracurricular profile. Caleb wasn’t willing to give up his gym time—and I agreed; Caleb giving up the gym would have been a loss for everyone. Thank God for Uncle David, who sometimes is just a wee bit more practical: “Why don’t you create some kind of awesome leadership activity right there in the gym?” he suggested. While my mind considered what that might look like, Uncle David remembered what Caleb had mentioned he would love to do if he “only had the time”: resurrect his involvement in the Big Brothers organization, which he had enjoyed in college.

Do the extracurricular math. Instead of being a Big Brother himself, which required he be available consistently at established hours—something he had difficulty committing to, given his crisis management role at the office—Caleb leveraged his relationships in his Seattle gym to create a three-month health and wellness program for kids—set right there in his gym. Caleb recruited the gym owner and three trainers (people whose trust he already had) to help with the program, and he wrote a few promotional emails that the organization sent out to members. Instead of writing the curriculum himself, he inspired the trainers to write different aspects of the curriculum, from nutrition to exercise. Caleb then got the whole thing approved by the Big Brothers organization.

The summer event was extremely well attended, and both the Little Brothers and their Big Brothers gave it high marks. And Caleb impacted an entire community, making a difference in the lives of thirty-five kids and the gym itself, without having to barely lift a dumbbell (and sometimes without even leaving his desk or the gym he already went to every day).

You have enough time. Imagination—and the willingness to potentially fall flat on your well-toned ass—is all you need to accomplish something if you know how to wield the resources you already have.

What do you spend time on besides work, eating, and sleeping? Take a look at the Wall Street Myth quiz again: What is your equivalent of Caleb’s obsession with working out? You can turn anything into leadership. You love watching Survivor? Throw a benefit party for the survivors of the Samoa tsunami (that’s where they filmed a season of the show, for those of you who don’t watch), and turn it into a quarterly event. Remember, writing checks isn’t real leadership: It’s organizing the parties that requires a lot of organizational skills, persistence, and charm.

Evan Forster and David Thomas are the founders of admissions consulting firm Forster-Thomas Inc. and the authors of The MBA Reality Check.