Being a Collaborative Leader: How My MBA Shaped My Personal and Professional Growth

My transformative UC Davis MBA journey and the collaborative spirit of the Graduate School of Management (GSM) community have tremendously shaped my professional and personal development.

Learning from the Top Leaders

The GSM faculty are trailblazers in their fields. They bring their pioneering research, management best practices, and consulting experiences to every class, and they have helped my cohort and I master essential business concepts.

Studying leadership involves understanding how we interact with others. We were taught how to create an environment to share our collective experiences and acquire fresh perspectives and techniques to enhance our effectiveness as leaders in both virtual and real-world settings.

We learned to cultivate self-awareness, adaptability, and a clear vision for the future. Effective leaders serve as role models by embodying courage, conviction, compassion, and clarity.

What Makes a Leader?

Leaders who effectively manage and communicate change can provide clear direction and build confidence. We shaped our ability to create cooperation through effective collaboration.

We learned how to authentically engage in today's business world and build trust with our internal teams and the external environment. We explored active communication skills and different managerial communication methods for 1:1, small, and large group settings.

We increased our self-confidence, learned how to think fast and clearly under pressure, use our voice and body language more effectively, and how to be deep and brief. We learned how to negotiate effectively and what it means to think critically and articulate ourselves as leaders and among collaborative teams.

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What Does it Mean to be a Collaborative Leader?

The GSM Collaborative Leadership Program and student government involvement allowed me to become a more collaborative leader. That is a leader who inspires, helps to motivate, builds trust, brings positive energy, and is willing to learn from others.

Collaborative leadership creates a culture of psychological safety, ownership, and trust. It empowers team members to become their best selves, develop a growth mindset, and produce superior results.

Motivating and exciting those around me to participate in GSM activities and greater community efforts have been genuinely rewarding. I have had the privilege to work with fantastic student leaders, GSM staff and professors who inspired me and allowed me during my MBA journey to:

• Grow on a personal level
• Become an authentic and intentional leader
• Apply what I learned in the classroom in the real world.

Our team at the GSM Student Association Online MBA developed a more agile, innovative, and high-functioning structure for the student association to make a lasting impact. We introduced valuable initiatives that enhanced the Online MBA student experience by focusing on building community. We also successfully worked with the GSM to improve student-related processes, from onboarding to class registration. 

It made me realize that the work ethic, energy, passion, and commitment I put into the program determined what I would get out of it.

The most valuable outcome of the UC Davis experience has been meeting so many unique and bright individuals, building profound connections and genuine friendships with them, and cheering on my colleagues as they excel in class.

Internship to Career: Kaiser Permanente

Another significant outcome was landing a job at Kaiser Permanente. I worked extensively with the Graduate School of Management's Career Development team during the second year of my UC Davis MBA journey.

Senior Director of Career Development Antoine Broustra guided me through career counseling sessions, helping shape my consulting roadmap and introducing me to a job opening with the business consulting services team at Kaiser Permanente.

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Today, I am a project manager providing support in areas of governance and reporting on the deployment and execution team for the KP MembershipConnect application, a $1 billion implementation mega project.

My Five Personal Principles to Build Resiliency

My favorite Japanese proverb about resilience is "Fall down 7 times, get up 8." It means choosing never to give up hope and always striving for more.

So, never give up, conquer your fears, and don't wait for the right time. Just move. To be successful means to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

This mindset allowed me to embrace the following principles during my UC Davis GSM journey:

1. Focus on the process, not the outcome.
2. There is always room for improvement.
3. Taking responsibility is powerful.
4. Failing is okay. Learn from it.
5. Embrace change.