Analysis of the Chilean Mine Rescue. Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay

The Chilean Mine Rescue: A Case Study
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The Chilean Mine Rescue: A Case Study
The Chilean mine rescue is by far the single most important occurrence that accurately reflects the current turbulent business environment in which leaders must work under extreme pressure to achieve organizational objectives with limited expertise, time, and financial resources. This paper explores the multidisciplinary and multinational event that occurred nearly a decade ago as it grows increasing relevant in understanding organizational leadership today. Focusing on one goal –rescuing the Los 33 – underpinned the Chileans total success in highly unlikely situation.
As the reality of the challenge changed, leaders insistently demonstrated flexibility and adaptability. Situational awareness became the cornerstone of the entire rescuing mission. Notably, under the leadership of their supervisor, the entrapped miners accepted their grim situation, and adopted a democratic leadership structure as they anticipated rescue. Atop, leaders were calm under immense pressure, tolerant to imperfect execution, and encouraged fluidity and innovation; these enabled faster learning and outsourcing expertise and technology as needed – even at the recommendation of a 24-year-old field engineer (Rashid, Edmondson, & Leonard, 2013).
The Path-Goal theory stresses that leaders should be conscious of environment and employee characteristics, and use the knowledge to decide whether participative, supportive, directive, or achievement-oriented leadership style would be suitable under the prevailing circumstances (Alanazi, Alharthey, & Rasli, 2013; Polston-Murdoch, 2013). To help the team in the Chilean mine rescue to cope with vague and unclear responsibilities of the unique situation, leaders employed a directive style to articulate the gap between reality and hope, encouraging participants to exhaust available options to “bring home the miners, dead or alive” (Rashid et al., 2013, p. 115). Also, the participative and achievement-oriented approaches were demonstrated by using merit-based tactic to assign members their respective roles; encouraging the team “to fail fast and learn fast” (p. 118); and when Sougarret employed skillful inquiry to push thinking deeper while li...