Leadership project – Theory of Resiliency

In the Fall semester of 2022 I completed a class called Organizational behavior. In the class one of our assignments was, in groups, to create our own theory of resiliency.

This assignment helped me to better understand not only the concept of resiliency but also aided the development of my communication skills. This development came as I tired to communicate the large amount of information and data that my group and I had collected over the course of the semester. This information and data then had to be presented to both my peers, in the form of a 35 minute interactive presentation, and my instructor, who asked for a paper that laid out a more detailed explanation of the research that we had collected and how it had contributed to the creation of our theories. Presenting through these two different mediums helped me learn a great deal about how to articulate large amounts of information in a clear and concise manner. This assignment and the communication skills that I was able to develop I know will be an asset as I transition into the world of business.

Details of the project:

Due to the complexity of resiliency as a concept and the time limit that we had in terms of completing it within the semester we were asked first to choose, within our groups, an area through which we wanted to explore resiliency. The area that we then picked would act as a lens for the groups research and data collection. Once this focus was picked the assignment had three different parts. The first was for each member of the group to complete 100 pages of reading and research individually. Once this was done they were to come back together and create interview questions that were tailored to stimulate conversation about the groups forming hypothesis. Each group member would then go out with these questions and conduct 10 separate interviews. The people that we interviewed had to be more diverse than just our peers and we were pushed even to look outside of the college for potential interviewees.

Once this data was collected the group was then asked to come back together to discuss and analyze their interview responses. The findings from these responses were then combined with the research that the group had completed in order to create their own theories of resiliency. The presentation of this data, as mentioned above, took the form of a 35 minute presentation as well as a 10 page paper.

My groups presentation as well as our essay is attached below. And although the lens that we choose to investigate resiliency through was sport and the athletic experience we also believe that we made valid observations and conclusions about resiliency as a broader concept.