Seven capabilities through which people make a chosen position real
Where does the difference show?
An accounting firm has chosen to be a trusted advisor to business owners in its region. One afternoon, a business owner brings his advisor a question whose answer still has to take shape: can the company pass to the next generation? The advisor knows the questioning techniques; he practiced them just last year. And still, in the silence after the question, he offers the first solution that comes to mind.
At an insurer that has decided to develop new services together with entrepreneurs, a fully worked-out proposal is already on the table halfway through the first session, and the entrepreneurs nod politely. And a leadership team that carefully explained a new direction hears a manager ask, a few weeks later, where the energy is.
In all three situations, a clear choice has been made, and people know what their organization asks of them. Yet at the moment it matters, the old reflex takes over. That's human, and it shows that a choice only gains meaning in what people do in that moment.
It's also a pattern we see again and again. You can write down a position in the client relationship quickly, and many organizations pick up its language just as fast. The capability to make that position real grows more slowly, because a good insight changes little as long as people keep seeing their own work the same way. So choosing a position also means choosing what your people need to be able to do to carry it.
What makes a position credible?
The position you choose is your answer to the question of what your clients will need you for three years from now. We distinguish five positions in the client relationship. You recognize them by what clients say to you:
Provider: "Deliver this to our specification."
Advisor: "We need your knowledge on this problem."
Trusted Advisor: "We trust your judgment on what matters to us."
Partner: "Let's work out together what this could be."
Steward: "Help us handle this, and make sure we can handle the next one ourselves."
There is more on the five positions in the background reading The Service Evolution Continuum.
People seeing the list for the first time tend to read a ladder into it, with Steward at the top. We see the five positions as choices that stand side by side. To us, service evolution is a service provider's ability, as its clients' world shifts, to choose deliberately the kind of relationship through which it stays meaningful and relevant to them.
Each position has its own way of thinking and working. Each is sound, and each asks something different of the people who do the work.
A position is only credible to clients when two things fit it: how your organization and your professionals see the work, and what your people do at the moment it matters. For the seeing, we distinguish eight shifts. Where you stand on each follows from the position. The background reading 8 Mental Shifts for Service Evolution describes them. For the doing, we distinguish seven capabilities, and they are the focus of this piece.
A capability is an ability that holds up under pressure, and so more than a skill. It holds four things together:
what you know (Head)
what you do with it (Hands)
who you are in your work (Heart)
the courage to stand your ground in the tense moment (Heels)
You can build knowledge fairly quickly, and sometimes simply bring it in. The other three grow more slowly, through practice, honest feedback, lived experience and the people around you. That's why naming capabilities is the easy part, and building them takes patience and a deliberate choice.
Which seven capabilities carry a position?
1. Observing Without Judgment
In plain words: listen first, judge later.
This capability asks you to hear what someone actually says, even when it departs from what you already thought, and to make room for a new perspective before you form a judgment. For an organization, it also means that what professionals hear from clients reaches the place where the organization prepares its choices.
The question for you: where does what our people hear from clients end up?
2. Stewardship
In plain words: knowing when to give the answer and when to guide the discovery.
Stewardship is the ability to choose between giving the answer and guiding the discovery, and to genuinely handle that second role. It touches who you are as a professional, and it asks for ease with a question that's still open. Edgar Schein calls it the step from telling to asking. Which role fits depends on the position: sometimes the answer is exactly what clients come for, sometimes it's the discovery.
The question for you: which role do we ask of our professionals, given the position we choose?
3. Systems Thinking
In plain words: seeing how the parts connect, also beyond your own organization.
Value emerges across the boundaries of your own organization: in your contact with clients, in what you create together with them and with partners, and in how clients use what you offer. People who think in systems keep asking what an intervention does for clients and partners, and how it comes back to their own organization. Effects often return by a detour and with a delay, producing outcomes nobody intended.
The question for you: do we see what our choices do for clients, for partners and for ourselves?
4. Navigating Paradox and Tension
In plain words: holding on to two things at once, both of which you need.
Service work is full of tension: between efficiency and attention, between delivering today and renewing for tomorrow, between standard and tailored. Some issues are problems you solve. Others are tensions you keep moving within, because you need both sides. With this capability, you hold both sides, and each position has its own characteristic tension.
The question for you: which tension belongs to our position, and how do we keep both sides in view?
5. Co-Creation Capability
In plain words: creating something together with clients, and sharing the outcome with them.
Working with clients creates a different kind of value than working for them, because value emerges in use, in clients' own lives. Co-creation asks you to let go of control over the outcome and genuinely share ownership. Where that fits follows from the position you choose.
The question for you: where do we create something together with clients, and where do we deliberately keep it with us?
6. Making Meaning of Transition
In plain words: taking people along in what a change does to them.
Change touches feeling, identity and meaning. William Bridges distinguished the change itself from the transition: the journey people make inside. A new beginning only finds room once people have been able to close what is ending. And every choice of position asks your organization to say goodbye to something.
The question for you: what do we leave behind with this choice, and who takes our people through it?
7. Reflective Practice
In plain words: looking back deliberately and learning from it.
People who practice reflection make looking back a fixed part of the work and treat every outcome, including the unexpected ones, as information. There are two kinds of learning: learning that repairs within what you already assumed, and learning that questions those assumptions. Evaluation closes the file; reflection opens the next question. Reflective Practice is the thread that runs through the other six and makes them last.
The question for you: how do we learn from what our position asks of us in practice?
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Which way of filling them in fits your position?
The seven capabilities are the same for every organization. How you fill them in differs, because it follows from the way of thinking and working that belongs to your position.
Take Observing Without Judgment, the listening. For a Provider, it means continuously hearing where things chafe for clients and working that into the standard service, so scale and quality can grow together. For a Partner, it means hearing, together with clients, something that's still taking shape. It's the same capability, filled in differently.
As far as we can see now, that holds for all seven. Observing Without Judgment, Systems Thinking and Navigating Paradox and Tension play a role in every position, each time in its own way. Stewardship, Co-Creation Capability and Making Meaning of Transition take on meaning toward clients mainly when you work on a question together with clients. Reflective Practice runs through all of them.
Capabilities also work in two directions: toward clients and within your own organization. Within your own organization, they play a role in every position. A Provider renewing its standard service asks just as much of its own people as a Partner building something new with clients. What you want to achieve is the same inside and out. Only the form differs, because you lead your own people differently from how you work with clients.
Which choices are on the table?
Choosing a position also means making choices about capabilities, even though those choices often stay implicit. That is exactly why a distance opens between what the strategy promises and what clients notice. Those choices belong at the leadership table, alongside the strategy itself. Three questions help make them explicit:
Where do we invest? Which capabilities does our position ask for, filled in how, and where is the distance from what's there now greatest?
What do we ask of our people? Which role, which behavior in the moment itself, and how much room do they get to learn it?
What do we deliberately leave as it is? Each capability can be developed to a different degree, and the position tells you which ones count most for you.
The answer usually starts with what's already there. Much of what a position asks is already in your people: in their character, and in the way they've worked with clients for years. The work is to make that visible, give it direction and help it grow.
How do capabilities grow?
Capabilities grow in the work itself: by using them on real questions from clients, through feedback from people who observe the work, and through colleagues making the same move. Training lays the foundation for Head. Hands, Heart and Heels only grow once someone has noticed a few times that the new behavior holds up in a tense moment.
For most organizations, choosing or sharpening a position is a transition: it touches what people believe they are in their profession, while today's agenda keeps running. Improving processes runs largely on skills. A transition asks for capability: character and courage, especially when it's tense.
This is our work. We help leadership teams see clearly whether their position, their way of thinking and their people's capabilities fit together. And we build those capabilities with your people while the change is underway, on the questions your clients are putting on the table now. The people who can do this already work for you. We make room for that capability to grow.
The question that remains
The advisor who filled the silence knew the technique. What helps him further is a firm that knows which role it asks of him, and that gives him room to practice exactly that moment.
Does what you ask of your people fit the position you choose?