Indiana Kelley Letter of Recommendation Questions
- Please provide a brief description of your interaction with the applicant and, if applicable, the applicant’s role in your organization. (50 words)
- Does the applicant have potential as a leader and a manager? What have you observed that leads you to think the applicant will be successful?
- Are there areas where the applicant can improve his or her potential for graduate study and a managerial career? If so, what are those areas?
- Please include additional comments you feel will be helpful to the admissions committee
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Indiana Kelley Letter of Recommendation Example – 1
Kelley Question 1. Please provide a brief description of your interaction with the applicant and, if applicable, the applicant’s role in your organization. (50 words)
Mitashi joined Unilever in 2015. As a trainee, she completed 4 successful stints and I mentored her during this period. Owing to her exceptional performance in her training period, I brought her into my team in 2018. Currently as a manager in my team she is leading our Innovation, Capacity & Technology teams for South Asia.
Kelley Question 2: Does the applicant have potential as a leader and a manager? What have you observed that leads you to think the applicant will be successful?
Over the past five years, Mitashi has been a manager and has led diverse teams. Hence, I can say with conviction that she has a great potential to be a successful leader. This is also demonstrated in the Inspire Award that she received from our Supply Chain Director, South Asia, a recognition given to 2 people out of several hundred managers.
As a mentor for Mitashi in her training period, I had observed Mitashi’s performance and I was impressed with her problem-solving skills, and ability to build rapport with people. I entrusted her with a challenging role early on in her career as the Sustainability, Safety & Health Manager and she was able to bring about a workplace transformation from a cultural and technological standpoint. For instance, she pioneered initiatives on digitalization of safety operations. She eliminated high-risk operations in the factory. Based on the risk assessment she started working on the highest risk area in the factory: which was Soap Cutting and packing area. Within a period of 6 months, she eliminated all the high and medium risk activities from this area. These initiatives have now become standards for all our home care factories.
Another striking attribute that stood out during the tough COVID impacted period in 2020 is that she does not draw boundaries around her role and goes out of the way to drive business objectives. When COVID altered the entire landscape of priorities, she willingly went out of her way to lead another team’s project which was crucial to land incremental capacity for hand wash products in a record time of three months. This helped us effectively service the demands for hand wash, which skyrocketed during the COVID scenario.
I believe that Mitashi has a great potential to be a leader and she has demonstrated the same time and again. As can be seen from the examples mentioned above, she has time and again shown that she can lead innovative initiatives, she can manage diverse stakeholders, and she has the ability to look over and beyond her immediate responsibilities to support business requirements. These are key requisites for a leader to be successful.
Kelley Question 3: Are there areas where the applicant can improve his or her potential for graduate study and a managerial career? If so, what are those areas?
In her current role, she is the face of Supply chain for 4 different categories which are innovation-driven and highly agile, and hence there are always a huge number of projects in line from different categories. In order to support such agile business requirements, she often committees unrealistically stringent timelines for projects and this is one area where I have given her regular feedback on.
One such example was when she was working on the renovation of an eyeliner. Although this project needed a technology capability development which would need longer time, Mitashi committed to a very stringent timeline. Though she pushed herself and her team to meet the committed timelines, due to the nature of the project the timelines could not be met. She came to me asking for suggestions to deal with such situations. I discussed the issue with her at length, post which I gave her feedback that it is good to be ambitious, but it is important to make everyone aware whenever timelines are unrealistic and there are risks associated with it. I asked her to create a regular review process in place with senior stakeholders to keep them updated on the road blocks or any delays in the project. This approach is important to cover the width and depth of the project regularly with all stakeholders. With this approach everyone will be on the same page and will be aware of the efforts going behind the project.
She took the feedback positively, and she now proactively incorporates the suggestions. For instance, she is currently working on a new factory setup, a project that had to be preponed due to COVID. Even though the project was not aligned for this year and came in at a time when regular operations were disrupted, she has been able to land this project in just 3.5 months. She used a structured review process and ensured timely updates to all relevant stakeholders. She also ensured to utilize her resources well to manage the workload more effectively.
Kelley Question 4: Please include additional comments you feel will be helpful to the admissions committee
Due to Mitashi’s efforts and work in safety and sustainability, our factory won various awards. For instance, she led the factory in the Frost and Sullivan audit in which the factory won awards for the results achieved. Overall, I believe she has gained enough experience to be ready for the opportunities that a B school can unlock.
Indiana Kelley Letter of Recommendation Example – 2
Kelley Question 1. Please provide a brief description of your interaction with the applicant and, if applicable, the applicant’s role in your organization. (50 words)
I have known Mitashi for the last 4 years. I was Mitashi’s direct supervision from 2017-2018 where she was Safety, Sustainability & Health manager in my team at one of the largest detergent factories in India. During this time as a direct supervisor, I observed her performance from close quarters.
Kelley Question 2: Does the applicant have potential as a leader and a manager? What have you observed that leads you to think the applicant will be successful?
Mitashi has always been one of the high achievers, amongst the top 2% of performers in Unilever. Having mentored and guided numerous candidates, I can say with conviction that Mitashi is the cream of the crop. She displayed several strengths during my tenure as her supervisor. Some of these are:
Out of the box thinking
In her role, as the safety, sustainability & health manager, instead of depending only on the age-old SOP oriented approach, she used her technical expertise and innovative thinking to digitize factory operations. We were particularly impressed with the Guard digitization project, which captured each machine area’s frequency of exposure, a data point extremely critical for risk management. While her peers were dependent on interviews, observations for recording this parameter, her solution made the risk management process much more robust and automated which reduced overall risk and failure rate.
Ability to overcome resistance and challenges
She not only envisioned ideas but also took accountability to execute them diligently while overcoming push backs and executional challenges. A few examples that come to my mind are her exemplary work on the Rainwater Harvesting project to make our factory the first water positive site in Unilever, a project that she led from ideation to execution. Another example is her work on man material segregation in warehouse risk management, in which she collaborated with small suppliers to build a product from scratch. Subsequently, these became the best practices at Unilever factories across the globe. With her passion for sustainability, she led multiple projects to reduce environmental footprints of factory operations.
Collaborative nature
During our manufacturing excellence audit she not only worked and excelled at the work in her department, but she took responsibility for a few other departments as well where the team was struggling to meet deadlines. To help her colleagues out, she took up projects related to autonomous maintenance and internal factory logistics enabling them to finish projects on time. Another example that comes to my mind is when she got involved in a major breakdown in the factory. Understanding the criticality of the breakdown and its business implications, she jumped in to help her peers to resolve the issue faster. She exhibited excellent team spirit and leadership skills.
Kelley Question 3: Are there areas where the applicant can improve his or her potential for graduate study and a managerial career? If so, what are those areas?
Mitashi has shown good problem-solving skills and she has always been keen to get involved not only in the technical issues of the factory but also the business centric issues and projects. Coming from an engineering background, she could tackle and overcome the technical issues quickly. Though due to her limited exposure to business, she could not confidently facilitate projects that involved a holistic understanding of the business.
I believe her potential was restricted due to this gap. There are various decisions that need to be taken in operations which need strategic thinking, and a big picture view of the various elements of a business. Hence, I gave her this feedback of getting involved in the various business proposal evaluation for projects in the factory from other departments to gain insight on how decisions are taken for project evaluation and to take some courses wherein she can gain more exposure.
Her response to the feedback was positive. She readily accepted that she could benefit by developing her business acumen. She started getting involved in the business case evaluations of the factory.
In fact, she herself got some business cases approved from our finance team, where she lead the discussions from starting to end. She also took Unilever courses for understanding the P&L statement of the company and registered herself for an online micro master’s course for bridging this gap.
To help her develop this skill, she also requested for her next role to be more business facing. In general, she takes feedback positively and believes in growing through these feedbacks professionally and personally.
Kelley Question 4: Please include additional comments you feel will be helpful to the admissions committee
Since I have worked with her for a long time, I know her personally as well.
Once she came to me for doing a SWOT analysis and to make a development plan for herself. I was pleasantly surprised to see how aware she was of her strengths and her weaknesses. She also made plans on developing her skills. Her keenness to make the most of her strengths and her curiosity to work on her weaknesses will take her a long way.
Another factor that I would like to highlight is that she performed exceedingly well during her training period. Looking at her performance, the management team decided to give her much early confirmation. She was the first one in her batch to be confirmed.
Even after she moved out of my team, I have been in touch with her. Mitashi has tremendous potential to take on leadership roles in the future. I believe an MBA from a premier B School at this juncture will take her a long way and provide her with the skills, knowledge, and exposure she needs.
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