Driven by Purpose. Powered by Partnership – Tina Arnold
Tina Arnold has spent her entire 20 year career in trucking at Greeneville, working extended coverage on third shift. When Covenant acquired Landair in 2018, she moved to the enterprise extended coverage team, creating an even bigger community and connecting her to a larger Extended Coverage operation supporting multiple locations.
Extended coverage means Tina wears a lot of hats. On any given night she might be dispatch, customer service, and planning all at once, handling whatever comes up until the next morning. For years she and her coworker Carolyn Hoffer managed that world largely on their own. Since joining the extended coverage team, Tina says the work feels different. She is no longer on an island. She is part of a group that leans on each other and helps each other through whatever the night throws at them.
"Empathy comes easy," Tina shared. "You always want to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and see what they're going through."
That empathy shows up in how she treats drivers. When weather shuts down a route, she is glad drivers get the permission they need to stop rather than push through unsafe conditions. When a driver's house caught fire while he was 500 miles from home, Tina helped get him on a flight so he could be with his family. She has learned to balance compassion with judgment, knowing when a driver needs grace and when a situation calls for a firmer hand.
That same instinct led her through one of her toughest calls this year: a predatory towing situation in Texas that had every mark of a scam, but nothing she could point to as solid proof. Even without backup from local police, Tina pushed to validate the situation the right way before deciding how to handle it, protecting both the company and the driver from being taken advantage of.
"Doing the right thing is hardly ever the easy thing," Tina said. "You do the hard thing because it's the right thing."
For Tina, servanthood and empathy go hand in hand, and virtue means doing right even when no one is watching. Twenty years in, she still shows up every night ready to be the steady hand a driver needs. It reflects our values in action: empathy in how she listens, servanthood in how she shows up for drivers, and virtue in the choices she makes when it would be easier to look the other way.
Tina reminds us that being Driven by Purpose, Powered by Partnership is not just a phrase. It is a way of life. And it is people like her who bring that purpose to life across our enterprise.
