MGMT 501 Week 5 Group DB Forum 4: Dees Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 4: Individual Thread and Group Summary

MGMT 501 Executive Leadership and Management, Group Discussion Board Forum 4 (individual thread and collaborative summary)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the trucking company and the group members are composites standing in for the course's own; the books, Scripture and the published research are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 501.

In March, ransomware shut down our company's dispatch, routing and billing systems for nine days. We operate 140 trucks from three terminals, and every one of them was on the road when the screens went dark. For more than a week, dispatchers tracked loads on whiteboards, called drivers on personal phones and rebuilt delivery schedules from printed customer orders. All three terminals kept freight moving, but the human results differed sharply. At one terminal, the manager lost two of her six dispatchers to resignation within a month. At another, the manager came out of the crisis with a team that, by her account, was closer than before.

The difference was not effort; both managers worked long days. The first worked alone around the clock, made every decision herself and told her team little about how long the outage might last. The second set a rhythm on the first morning: a fifteen-minute meeting at six each day to tell the team everything she knew, rotating breaks so no dispatcher worked more than twelve hours, and permission for dispatchers to make routing decisions without checking with her.

Dees (2013) argues that resilient leaders are prepared before adversity arrives and that they lead others through it by attending to their people as well as the mission. The second manager had built trust with her team over years and drew on it in the crisis; the first had not and could not create it under pressure. Research supports the view that resilience is ordinary rather than heroic. Bonanno (2004) found that, after a death or a frightening event, steady functioning is the usual pattern rather than the exception, showing resilience, a stable pattern of healthy functioning, more often than recovery from collapse, and that there are multiple pathways to it. Luthans et al. (2007) include resilience with hope, efficacy and optimism in psychological capital and show that this capacity relates to performance and satisfaction, and their work suggests it can be developed.

Paul describes being afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, struck down but not destroyed (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 2 Corinthians 4:8-9), and he locates his endurance in God's power rather than his own. Resilience in a leader is less the absence of strain than the presence of something the strain cannot reach. For a Christian leader, that suggests resilience is grounded in faith and expressed in care for the people beside us, which is exactly what the second manager practiced. Our company has since added a crisis rhythm, rest rules and decision rights to its continuity plan.

Group Summary (Group 4)

Our four members brought four very different crises to this forum, each from an organization one of us works in or knows closely: the ransomware attack at a trucking company, a school shooting threat that closed a rural middle school for three days, a measles outbreak that strained a hospital's infection prevention team, and a fire that destroyed the oven line of a family bakery. Each member described leaders who held up under strain and others who struggled. After comparing our threads, the group reached one central conclusion and four shared lessons. The central conclusion is that resilience is built before the crisis, in relationships, habits and faith, and is revealed rather than created when adversity arrives.

The first lesson is that resilience is common and can be developed. Several members came to the forum assuming that resilient leaders are rare and born with a special temperament. Our school member, for example, described her principal as having nerves of steel that no training could produce. The research corrected that assumption, and the principal herself, when the member asked her, credited years of practice drills and a habit of daily prayer rather than temperament. Bonanno (2004) showed that resilience after loss and potentially traumatic events is more common than psychologists once believed and follows several pathways. Luthans et al. (2007) treat resilience as part of psychological capital, alongside hope, efficacy and optimism, and when Avey et al. (2011) pooled 51 samples covering more than 12,000 employees, they found that psychological capital was positively related to job satisfaction, commitment, well-being, citizenship and performance and negatively related to cynicism, turnover intentions, stress and anxiety. If resilience is part of a capacity that relates to so many outcomes, organizations have reason to develop it deliberately rather than hope for it.

The second lesson is that the leader's own resilience is only half the task. Dees (2013) distinguishes the leader's personal resilience from the leader's responsibility to build resilience in others. The trucking and bakery cases illustrated both halves. The bakery owner, a member's father, worked tirelessly after the fire and kept the business alive by renting oven time at a competitor's plant overnight, but he nearly lost his health doing so and did not notice that his bakers were exhausted. The trucking manager who protected rest and shared information each morning kept both herself and her team functioning. Kossek and Perrigino (2016) note that resilience is shaped by occupational demands and context, not only by individual traits, which suggests that leaders must design work so that people can recover. In the bakery case, the member's father has since hired a second production supervisor so that he is no longer the only person who can run the night shift, a change he described as the most important lesson of the fire. The hospital member noted that her infection prevention team now has a written relief rotation for any outbreak lasting more than a week, because the team discovered during the measles response that nobody had planned for its own fatigue.

The third lesson concerns communication. In every case, the leaders who held their teams together told them the truth early and often. The school principal in our member's case met with teachers every morning at seven during the closure, shared what law enforcement had told her and admitted what she did not know. The hospital's infection prevention manager held twice-daily briefings that included nurses from every affected unit. By contrast, the leaders whose teams struggled tended to withhold information, either to protect people or because they were overwhelmed. The group concluded that honest communication is itself a resource that sustains others' resilience. Information reduces the uncertainty that drains people during a crisis, and admitting what is not known builds more trust than false reassurance. Our trucking member observed that the dispatchers at the terminal that lost two people later said the silence had been harder to bear than the workload.

The fourth lesson is that resilience for Christian leaders has a spiritual foundation. Every member drew on Scripture. Paul's description in 2 Corinthians 4 of being afflicted without being crushed was cited by two members. Our hospital member pointed to Isaiah's promise that those who wait on the Lord renew their strength (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Isaiah 40:31) as the passage her manager read aloud to the team at the start of the outbreak's hardest week. Dees (2013) writes from this conviction, presenting faith as a source of the strength leaders need. The group agreed that faith does not remove strain but changes a leader's relationship to it, and that it frees leaders to rest, ask for help and admit limits. The bakery member put it simply: his father survived the fire because his church carried meals to the family for a month, and he learned that a resilient leader is also one who lets others serve him.

The group did not fully agree on one point: how far organizations should go in training resilience, and whether formal programs or informal habits matter more. The hospital member favored formal resilience training for all managers, noting that her system now offers it. The trucking and school members were more skeptical of programs and argued that resilience grows mainly from trusted relationships built over time. Britt et al. (2016) offered a useful caution here, arguing that much research on employee resilience has failed to confirm that participants actually faced significant adversity, so claims about training effects should be read carefully. We settled on a shared position: training can help, but it cannot substitute for the daily practices that build trust before a crisis. The hospital member agreed that her system's course was most useful for managers who already met regularly with their teams, which seemed to confirm the point.

From these lessons, the group proposes three practices for leaders, each of which every member has agreed to bring to their own organization's continuity planning. Build trust and communication routines before adversity, such as regular briefings and clear decision rights. Plan for rest and recovery in any crisis, for the leader and the team. And cultivate the spiritual and relational resources that sustain resilience, so that when adversity comes, as it will, the team has something to draw on.

References

Avey, J. B., Reichard, R. J., Luthans, F., & Mhatre, K. H. (2011). Meta-analysis of the impact of positive psychological capital on employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 22(2), 127-152. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.20070

Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20-28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20

Britt, T. W., Shen, W., Sinclair, R. R., Grossman, M. R., & Klieger, D. M. (2016). How much do we really know about employee resilience? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9(2), 378-404. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2015.107

Dees, R. F. (2013). Resilient leaders: The resilience trilogy. Creative Team Publishing.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Kossek, E. E., & Perrigino, M. B. (2016). Resilience: A review using a grounded integrated occupational approach. Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), 729-797. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2016.1159878

Luthans, F., Avolio, B. J., Avey, J. B., & Norman, S. M. (2007). Positive psychological capital: Measurement and relationship with performance and satisfaction. Personnel Psychology, 60(3), 541-572. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2007.00083.x