Out of the blue Christine, a professional facilitator, received a call from a security services company, SuperGuard, wanting help to figure out a fresh approach toward its marketplace. When she struck that working relationship with Super-Guard, based in the Metroplex region, it had already been in business for several years. It was started as a family security guard services firm for local and regional businesses, education facilities, institutions, sports and government entities. Its original owner (subsequent owners’ father) placed great emphasis on quality and integrity. That caused it to grow quickly and become a highly regarded player among an ever crowded number of regional, national and international security company providers.

Christine rapidly discerned that, what was now a mid-sized company, was stalling owing to the owners’ increasing push for efficiencies, in order to offset the cost-squeezing actions of major players. Those major players cut margins to shut-out competitors wherever they could, so as to feed their enormous appetite for revenues, sustain their organizations, and meet Wall Street’s profit expectations. Many potential customers are lured to doing business with major players, due to their public company recognition to make them feel more secure. Evenso, they still bring downsides; like inconsistent service, inflexibility at times, treating clients as pure numbers, and often not feeling respected. SuperGuard was able to exploit such downsides.

Christine, in her initial presentation, explained how she would be introducing enlightened leadership(EL2) concepts such as strong two-way communication versus typical one-way, heterarchical rather than hier-archical thinking, effective more so than efficient approaches, positive instead of negative organization politics, and reinforcing integrity to minimize any forms of corruption. These would all become that more explicit as she shared her EL2 philosophy.

Adjacent is a chart that Christine shared with the owners to help them understand the enlight-ened leadership (EL2) concept; with its ever rotating momentum as it builds and expands. They and their leadership team would effectively work their way seamlessly through these five phases and beyond, as an alternative to conventional manage-ment (CM) and its traditional five steps – Project, Plan, Organize, Direct and Control.

Christine explained than EL2 and CM are designed to be complementary to each other, where the former is an expansionary force while the latter is more of a braking force; the two main balancing forces required in any dynamic venture.