Leading a Night Shift That Stopped Speaking Up: A Self-Assessment, a 1.3-Point Accuracy Loss, and a 90-Day Development Plan
Student Name
Master of Business Administration Program, Walden University
WMBA 6000: Dynamic Leadership
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
The Site, the Problem, and My Place in It
Meridian Supply Company is a composite regional distributor used here to carry the analysis; no real employer is described, and every figure is illustrative. I manage its Columbus distribution center, 210 associates across three shifts, and I have led the site for two years. Nine months ago we cut over to a new warehouse management system. Since the cutover, order accuracy on the night shift has fallen from 99.4 percent to 98.1 percent, annualized voluntary turnover on that shift has run at 34 percent against 19 percent on days, and two of the four night supervisors have resigned. Nothing in the system's own performance reports explains the split, because days and nights run the same software against the same racks.
The gap is worth stating in money before it is stated in behavior. The night shift picks about 41,000 lines a week, so 1.3 points of accuracy is 533 error lines a week. At an internal rework and credit cost of $18.00 a line, that is $9,594 a week and roughly $499,000 a year. Turnover adds to it: 34 percent of 68 night associates is about 23 departures a year, and at a replacement cost of $4,200 each, covering recruiting, onboarding, and a six-week productivity ramp, that is $96,600. The two lines together are just under $600,000 a year, which is what makes this a leadership problem rather than a training complaint.
The behavior underneath the money showed up in the quarterly pulse survey. Fifty-one of the 68 night associates responded, a 75 percent response rate, and the item reading 'I can raise a problem here without it being held against me' scored 2.9 out of 5 against 4.1 on days. In the same window, four of the system defects that eventually reached the vendor were reported first by day associates who had inherited them from the night shift's exception queue. The site did not lose a system; it lost the willingness of the night shift to tell anyone when the system was wrong.
What the Self-Assessments Say, and What Confirms Them
Three self-assessments completed at the start of the term point the same direction. On an emotional intelligence inventory I scored high on self-awareness and self-management and lowest on the empathy and relationship management competencies, which are the two that carry influence rather than control. A conflict-mode inventory put my dominant mode as competing, with avoiding as the backup I fall to under time pressure. A values inventory ranked results, accountability, and learning first, second, and third, with harmony well down the list. Read together they describe a leader who is fast, direct, and comfortable being disagreed with in principle.
Scores on their own prove nothing about how a leader is experienced. A self-assessment that no one outside my own head has confirmed is a preference, not a finding. Three sources outside the instruments say the same thing in harder language. My last performance review recorded 'decisive, sometimes ahead of the room.' An exit interview in month six recorded that the night shift had stopped raising system errors because 'it turns into a coaching conversation about the picker.' And a twelve-minute shift huddle I asked a peer to record contained fourteen directive statements and two questions, neither of which was answered by anyone but me.
The triangulation matters because it changes what a development plan can target. If the instruments were the only evidence, the reasonable conclusion would be that I should work on empathy in general, which is not a behavior and cannot be practiced on a Tuesday. The three outside sources point at something specific and countable: in the moments when a night associate arrives with bad news, my first response closes the exchange instead of opening it. Goleman's finding that a single dominant style narrows a leader's range, and that the commanding and pacesetting styles depress climate when used alone, describes the mechanism precisely (Goleman, 2000).
Diagnosis: A Directive Strength Meeting a Silence Problem
The strength and the problem are the same trait seen from two ends. The competing mode that carried the cutover, when someone had to decide inside an hour and hold the line for a weekend, is the mode that now meets an associate who suspects the system is mislabeling a pick location. Edmondson's account of psychological safety explains why the second situation punishes the first behavior: teams report problems in proportion to their belief that reporting is safe, and a leader's immediate reaction, rather than a stated open-door policy, is what sets that belief (Edmondson, 2019). A pulse item at 2.9 is not a morale reading. It is a forecast of how many defects go unreported next quarter.
Northouse's separation of the leader's traits from the situation's demands sorts what is fixed here from what is adjustable (Northouse, 2021). My values and my speed are fixed, and on the day shift they are productive. What is adjustable is the sequence I use when bad news arrives, and a sequence is a behavior rather than a personality. Kouzes and Posner's practice of enabling others to act is the closer fit for this site, because the constraint is not that associates lack direction; it is that they have direction and no route by which to contradict it (Kouzes & Posner, 2017).
Two things follow. First, the leadership problem is time-bound rather than global: for roughly nine minutes of a twelve-hour shift, at the moment a problem is first raised, my default response is the wrong instrument for the job. Second, the correction has to be structural as well as personal, because self-restraint at three in the morning is not a reliable control. The style that produced the promotion is the style producing the silence, and no amount of intending to listen will change a habit that fires in under two seconds. Kotter's point that change fails when it rests on individual resolve rather than on a visible early win applies to development plans as much as to transformations (Kotter, 2012).
A 90-Day Development Plan, With Measures That Can Fail
The plan carries three actions, each with a behavior, a structure that forces the behavior, and a measure with a baseline. The first is a standing eight-minute problem review at the start of every night shift whose only agenda item is what went wrong last night, opened by an associate rather than by me, with my first response limited to a question. The measure is the ratio of directive statements to questions in the huddle, tallied twice a month by a peer from a recording. The baseline is 14 to 2. The target is 1 to 1 by day 60, which is a coaching target rather than an aspiration because someone other than me does the counting.
The second action moves decision rights instead of attitude. Two lead associates take ownership of the system exception queue under a one-page decision rights document, escalating to me only above a stated dollar threshold. The measure is the share of exceptions closed without me, baseline 8 percent, target 50 percent by day 90. The third action is a monthly skip-level conversation with four night associates drawn at random, in which I take notes and issue no decisions in the room. Its measure is the pulse item itself, moving from 2.9 to 3.6 at the 90-day survey with the same population and the same wording, since a rewritten question with a better score proves nothing at all.
Two lagging measures test whether any of this reached the work. Order accuracy on nights should recover from 98.1 percent to 99.0 percent by day 90, which is 369 fewer error lines a week and about $345,000 a year at the same $18.00 line cost. Annualized voluntary turnover should fall from 34 percent toward 24 percent by month six, retaining about seven associates and avoiding roughly $29,400 in replacement cost. Wider engagement research puts the size of the prize in context without making my case for me (Gallup, 2024). Each of the three actions can fail visibly, which is the only property that makes a development plan worth writing.
References
Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.
Gallup. (2024). State of the global workplace: 2024 report. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/
Goleman, D. (2000). Leadership that gets results. Harvard Business Review, 78(2), 78-90.
Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press.
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.
Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). SAGE Publications.
How this WMBA 6000 Week 3 example is structured
WMBA 6000 runs eight weeks and Walden does not publish week-level assignment names, so this WMBA 6000 Week 3 example is written to the genre the unit almost certainly wants: in many sections the Week 3 assignment in Dynamic Leadership asks for a leadership self-assessment applied to a real organizational challenge, or a leadership analysis carrying a development plan, and your classroom's rubric and instructions decide the exact form. The sections run in the order a reader needs them. The challenge comes first, with figures, because a self-assessment with nothing to act on has no criteria left to meet. The assessment results come second and are tested immediately against evidence from outside the instruments. Diagnosis follows, using leadership scholarship as a mechanism rather than as decoration. The plan closes, since an early MBA course at Walden University is grading whether the analysis produced something a manager can be held to.
WMBA 6000 Week 3 questions, answered
What does WMBA 6000 Week 3 usually ask for?
Walden does not publish week-level assignment names, so treat any description as typical rather than official. In many sections the Week 3 assignment in Dynamic Leadership asks you to apply self-assessment results to a real organizational challenge and turn them into a development plan, sometimes alongside a discussion post the same week. Your classroom's rubric and instructions decide the exact form and length.
Can I write a leadership self-assessment in first person?
Yes. APA 7 prefers first person for the writer's own actions, and a leadership analysis about you written in the third person reads as evasion. What the rubric wants is not distance but evidence: keep the first person and make sure every claim about how you lead is backed by something outside your own opinion of yourself.
How much leadership theory should the paper carry?
Enough to explain a mechanism, and no more. Two or three sources used to explain why a specific behavior produces a specific result will outscore six named models introduced and dropped. The sample above uses three, each answering a question the evidence raised, and applies each one to the writer's own site rather than summarizing what the author said.
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