The Second Discipline of the Trusted Strategic Advisor: Be a Verbal Visionary

The following is an excerpt from Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor by James E. Lukaszewski with Helio Fred Garcia.

Jack Welch, the late former CEO of General Electric, is an excellent model of a highly verbal executive. His life and work, as described by him and others, provide a rich mixture of both complex and extremely simple but powerful lessons for those of us who are trying to run our organizations and advise others.

In his first book, Straight from the Gut, Welch talked about one of his early essential goals as he took over GE, the elimination of a vast mid-level bureaucracy that enveloped anyone with career potential and chained their lives to notebooks under the command and control of various mid-level managers, human resource staffers, and others. Throughout their careers at GE, their experiences, infractions, successes, muddles, and occasional assessment all wound up in these notebooks.

Once chairman, Welch committed to uprooting and removing the huge layer of bureaucracy that was paralyzing GE and holding the company back. He fired more than 100,000 people in his first 10 years as chairman. They called him “Neutron Jack,” on the model of the Cold War neutron bomb: The buildings remained intact, but there weren’t any people in them. During his last 10 years as chairman, he proceeded to rebuild the company on an entirely different basis. The new GE employed even more people than Welch originally fired, but the new management style was radically different.

Mr. Welch transformed GE in the 1980s and 1990s from a bureaucracy into a far leaner company driven predominantly by a verbal vision and approach. Welch’s style is exemplified by a specific area called “The Pit,” located in GE’s world education headquarters in Crotonville, New York. As he and others described it, every two weeks or so, he would visit The Pit to talk with large groups of managers—face-to-face, voice-to-voice, person-to-person. The only communication aids allowed were note cards. PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and other more typical management communication aids were banned. Welch’s goal was to get his managers to talk more about their businesses, challenges, issues, and approaches. He moved them away from elaborate, expensive, glossy-but-superficial communication techniques.

What Jim extrapolated from all of this is that one of the keys to Welch’s great success was converting GE from a culture of bureaucratese, where everything is documented and stored, into a verbal culture of real-time decision-making and action. With Welch, your ability to explain yourself, debate, discuss, and decide, pretty much on the spot, was a greater determinant of your continued success than whether or not your notebook was up to date.

This is a profoundly different management approach, which, it would seem, only a very strong leader could execute. This approach brings with it a great insight about management and, therefore, it becomes a discipline of the Trusted Strategic Advisor: The business world, the political world, and the nonprofit world all really run at a verbal velocity. Although we do use manuals, memos, slick media programs, and all kinds of high technology communications tools, it is how we speak and verbally direct each other that get things done. Even in this era of the internet, blog, social media, Teams, Zoom, and AI, it is the conversation between and among people that ultimately drives progress.

The trusted advisor has to be able to engage in fast paced discussion in real time, which requires strong verbal skills, and do so in the territory of the executive, which is the future the boss is steering the organization toward. You need verbal skills and a vision of the future; you need to be what we call a verbal visionary. 

Be Visionary

The greatest responsibility of leadership is identifying the vision or destinations toward which the organization is moving. The ability to do this is part of the genius all leaders must bring. Some are better at it than others, but all have to have a larger sense of where we are going than anyone else in the organization.

The Trusted Strategic Advisor is a crucial partner in that visualization of an organization’s destiny. The advisor’s ability to help formulate, organize, structure, and then verbalize this vision is extraordinarily valuable.

Let’s delve into this concept of vision, being a visionary, and tie the two concepts together. Jim defines vision as a meaningful, useful, positive goal that many can willingly contribute to achieving. When corporate vision programs fail to reflect this definition, people ignore them because vague visions are simply irrelevant. They often are framed in rigid jargon-driven concepts like “sense of urgency,” “hyper effectiveness,” or “beyond wow.” Even the boss fails to follow them. This is why many corporate vision statements are just nice plaques that hang on the wall.

A visionary is an optimistic individual who can get others to focus on the future, or some meaningful, useful, positive goals, which they willingly contribute to achieving. A verbal visionary is someone capable of moving leaders through sensibly applied speech power, focus on the future and the ability to interpret their vision in ways that energize, mobilize, and inspire.

A true verbal visionary is also quite strategic. A strategist is one who is able to analyze effectively, forecast pragmatically, focus realistically on issues and problems, interpret events and ideas and their impact candidly, and generate ethically and morally appropriate options for decision-making, action, and progress. All top executives are the key strategists in their organization.

Very few managers or senior executives are verbal visionaries. Some will resist the notion of being visionary because they feel their approaches are, at the very least, pragmatic and useful. They may want to resist overstating their face value. A non-visionary is someone who follows rigid rules, someone who is so emotionally attached to personal concepts and ideas that they can’t possibly adapt what they are doing to the needs of others. A non-visionary has little tolerance for anything outside the patterns of their own beliefs; they test suggestions and new ideas against their own consistency, the past, and their view of existing culture. Their view of vision accomplishment is more focused on getting “stuff ” done, rather than achieving strategies that might yield larger results.

Verbal Visionaries Understand What People Value

A verbal visionary understands people and what people value. Values, in our experience, are protective personal beliefs. Personal core values are almost impossible to change because they serve as such a powerful personal protective mechanism. We’re talking about health and safety issues, environmental issues, quality of life issues, work and employment issues, and truly personal values like honesty and integrity. This may well be the opposite of how conventional corporate values are understood, which is why they fail.

Organizations avoid imposing a value system on people; people bring their values into the organization. Wherever these value systems agree, there will be values-driven behavior. Where these values conflict, it is the individual’s values, in other words, personal protected beliefs that will prevail and determine behavior and results.

Values exist, individually, person-by- person. Just look around and listen to what people are concerned about, want to protect, or want protection from. By the way, these are the true values of any organization. You can spend a lot of time PRing vision and values and mission documents, but if they don’t directly relate to the personal protective beliefs of the people directly affected, they are worthless and, in fact, cause people to distrust those who promulgate such ideas in writing or in words. When bosses and businesses try to change behavior using values-related

concepts, hold on to your wallet, especially if the approach is fuzzy, flowery, and obviously meant to substantially change what people already believe. People’s values dominate.

A Verbal Visionary Is a Trustworthy Person

Remember, trust is the absence of fear. You trust someone because you feel safe around them. They won’t hurt you or are unlikely to hurt you. A trustworthy person has specific attributes: candor, credibility, empathy, integrity, and loyalty.

A Verbal Visionary Has Judgment

So, we now know that a verbal visionary is a person who is trustworthy; a person with integrity, credibility, and a personal set of values and principles; and, in fact, someone with these habits who is likely to have better judgment than the staff person who just blurts out ideas.

Jim was talking about judgment with a group of senior staffers recently. Afterward, someone sent him a note with a little story explaining how one learns to have good judgment. It’s a story about a man speaking to a wise rabbi. The man asks, “How did you become such a wise man?” The rabbi responds, “Study and hard work.” The man asks, “What did you study?” to which the rabbi responded, “A lot of my personal experiences.” The man then asks, “How did you get a lot of experience?” The rabbi responded, “I have good judgment.” The man then asked, “How did you get good judgment?” The rabbi replied, “A lot of bad experiences.” Yes, having had bad experiences is a useful prerequisite to being a leader and being an insightful visionary.

Or as the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was said to observe, “Good judgment is often the result of experience, and experience is often the result of poor judgment.”

Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor provides the proven framework for becoming a trusted strategic influencer partner that leaders turn to when facing critical decisions. The book presents seven essential disciplines: establishing trustworthiness, mastering verbal influence, developing management perspective, thinking strategically, recognizing patterns, structuring constructive advice, and teaching leaders to apply counsel effectively.

Influencing Leaders is perfect for mid-career professionals, external consultants, and anyone aspiring to influence organizational leaders. Influencing Leaders demonstrates that true influence is about mastering the disciplines of foresight, strategic thinking, and trust that make trusted strategic advisors and influencers essential to leaders making their most challenging decisions.

Pre-order your copy of Influencing Leaders here.