by Peter A Arthur-Smith

“Compabilities are a combination of people’s competences and capabilities: where competences = gained know-how and capabilities = innate talent-skills.”  

Here are five members of the six SuperGuard Vanguard incubator team that volunteered to meet with Dan – Super-Guard’s Operationist – and Christine for his first team briefing session. He used the opportunity to ask them who their sixth team member might be. One in-house name came up three times out of the five people present, so he pledged to approach that individual shortly. Since that person was a known male guard; Dan reached out to him pretty quickly after their briefing session was over. Hopefully he would be flattered at being proposed by his colleagues.

In the meantime, Melissa, SuperGuard’s Co-Visionist and Promotionist, held a brainstorming session with her sales team about the SuperGuard Vanguard idea – Vanguard because it would be the initial trial team to test the marketplace. Christine looked-in on this session, too, as she had chatted through Melissa’s meeting approach just a day or two beforehand. Between Melissa and the seven sales team members present, which included their sales team leader, Mike, they listed nine possible client/prospect names. Six were already clients and the other three were potential ones. 

They agreed that whichever “pair” of salespeople – since Melissa’s sales people worked in “pairs,” too – already worked with any of their nominated, current company clients; that same pair would initially sound out their clients on the Vanguard concept. Mike then led a discussion about a potential sales pitch for his three pairings. Melissa and Christine were impressed with what those pairs came-up with after about 45 minutes of spirited debate. The hunt was now on for at least three Vanguard test-case possibilities from their overall nine.  

When it became Dan’s moment to meet with his full team of six Vanguard team members – two to work in the company’s operations center and the other four as on-site guards; he had already primed them to think about appropriate client related issues to enable SuperGuard Vanguard’s success. He knew they all had the talent to do this. Besides, by priming them in advance, they would have so much more to contribute at his meeting. Such a pre-assignment would also build their level of enthusiasm and commitment, too. 

With all six members present, he split then into their designated pairs, because they had self-chosen complementary pairing-partners beforehand – one pair for weekday SuperGuard out-of-hours coverage, one for weekend coverage, and the other for Superguard’s Operation’s Center. He initially invited each pair to discuss those pre-meeting ideas for 45 minutes and list them on a combined flipchart listing. Based upon Christine’s prior advice, Dan rotated among the three pairs to offer encouragement and suggestions.

At the appointed time, they were back together to discuss their overall joint listing. It inspired several questions and further suggestions among the group. Dan popped a couple of additional ideas into the mix, too. Then it came to prioritizing the issues for their client-facing pairs and operation’s center pairs. Through 

confidential balloting, by means of folded-up paper slips, their listings revealed an interesting consensus.

For the weekday and weekend pairs, three issues rose to the top – specialized equipment and uniforms, special guard education and “back-up” coverage. The latter item was based upon their desire to have stand-by individuals in case of sickness, family emergencies, vacations, or unforeseen circumstances. Unsurprisingly, the Operation’s Center pair pretty much came up with the same three items. Dan was especially happy that they had picked their “back-up” item, since it would help define the overall success of their Vanguard test. 

So he then asked his six participants for company nominees, who he could approach within SuperGuard’s operation’s domain. These people would be invited to any initial back-up person initial briefings. They chose 3-4 nominees in each instance to allow for “turn-downs,” as well as have more than one stand-by per pair.

It was agreed that finalist back-ups/standbys would join their respective pairs for Vanguard team education sessions. At this point, at Christine’s suggestion, Dan encouraged them to utilize In-Team Discovery sessions, because they were well-valued activities from other company settings. They were a great alternative to conventional training. An In-Team Discovery session enabled the weekday and weekend pairings, plus their back-ups, to meet as a total group to discuss, list and prioritize all the key factors/issues they would profess-ionally need to know to fulfill their roles.

 Once prioritized, they then split into random, complementary sub-pairs to start preparing Socratic talks on each designated topic. Why Socratic? Their talk would become a series of Socratic, searching questions that would encourage their colleagues to think-through and experience discovery-learning – a great way to digest and readily remember key aspects of every exchange.

The Operation’s Center pairing did the same with their back-ups. They also split into sub-team pairs to bone-up on assigned topics and then gave Socratic talks in pair-rotation over the next couple of weeks – 1-2 hrs per session. Dan sat-in on these whenever he could. In the meantime, Maureen, the company’s Provis-ionist, began purchasing appropriate equipment and uniforms. Melissa’s sales team made positive progress with its Vanguard client prospects. So, based upon all this progress, which Harry had been kept attuned to, he requested an early meeting of SuperGuard’s six Strategists to discuss a potential Green-Light Day.

Author, Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Founding Principal with Leadership Solutions, Inc., is based in New York, and author of Smart Decisions: Goodbye Problems, Hello Options. He has drafted a potential new publication, If You Could Only Lead: Leadership is more about People than Numbers that offers a slew of fresh leadership concepts and practical models. Feel free to follow author at: Linkedin.com/in/peter-arthur-smith-2115722/

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