Acumen Capacity Index™ Series – Understanding Others
Today we continue our discussion on Acumen Capacity in the protection industry series. In this article, we will focus on the first of six dimensions “Understanding Others”. This is a critical aspect of assessing your specialist for assignments and matching the principal’s needs. It sounds like a simple concept, yet a large number of professionals either cannot or choose not to develop their ability to understand others. The definition for “Understanding Others” is the individual’s ability to identify uniqueness and individuality in others around them. The goal for understanding your specialist’s level of clarity and bias on this is to provide you the insight to align your specialist with the needs of the assignment. This results in an overall improved client experience.
Top 6 Benefits for “Understanding Others”
- Clearly Understanding People
- Ability to adapt to different people
- Perceiving the needs of others
- Ability to see things from a people perspective
- Ability to appreciate others
- Ability to apply an understanding of people
Each of these show up in different ways for your organization, your client, and principal themselves. If we think about the day to day tasks and responsibilities associated with protection details you certainly can recall situations where these helped or hurt the assignment. This can range from a specialist who is unable to be flexible and adapt to the strong behavior style of a principal in one assignment to the extremely detailed behavior of the next.
You might even think about a prior situation where you had multiple specialists on an assignment and not everyone was able to work together. You may have that one person who the rest of the team does not like working with or can’t get along with no matter what you have tried.
When one team member does not see the value in his or her teammates and is disengaged it can be a distraction to the entire team putting the principal at risk. When the team has high clarity in understanding others they have the ability to connect easier and work more cohesively as a unit. This results in successful assignments, happy clients, happy principal, and even happy specialists who conducted the assignment.
Let’s take a look at a very common scenario for executive protection specialists.
Does this scenario sound familiar?
Your specialist is on assignment with the principal. During the assignment, the principal changes the plans. The principal decides they want to visit a restaurant, nightclub, or some other event. The specialist is now being asked to make it happen.
The specialist’s ability to understand people and connect with others is critical to achieving this goal. This might be the manager at a restaurant or club that you need to influence to get your principal into the location or get a reservation short notice. This may include the ability to build rapport with local security or law enforcement to park in a specific area for your principal not normally allowed.
Those with strong clarity in this area will successfully navigate this situation and result in a positive client and principal experience. Those with low clarity will likely fail and result in a negative client experience and possibly lose the client. Granted this request by the principal may or may not be part of the original scope of work. However, it is now being asked of them and the specialist’s ability to successfully navigate this request is essential.
Let’s take a little deeper look into this dimension of Acumen Capacity™.
The Understanding Others dimension is evaluated in two ways first is the clarity and second the individual’s bias. The clarity tells us how well the individual understands the uniqueness of others and connects with people. Bias provides additional insights into the individuals world- and self-views. Does the individual have the capacity to see the other person’s perspective?
Psychologist Sherri Campbell shared with Entrepreneur.com “Success in life and business boils down to effective interactions, humility, self-awareness and the all-important skill of perspective taking. These elements are the keys to success of any kind” (Campbell, 2016)
Premier Risk Solutions LLC has developed a Personalized Culture Fit Model™ that measures this dimension to match clients and specialists creating a truly best-in-class experience.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out and contact us!
Co-Authored by: Michael Delamere
Works Cited
Campbell, S. (2016, May 12). Understanding the Other Person’s Perspective Will Radically Increase Yours. Retrieved from Entrepreneur: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/275543
