The Third Discipline of the Trusted Strategic Advisor: Develop a Management Perspective

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

Management advisors need to talk about the boss’s goals and objectives. You need to be able to see the business or organization through the leader’s eyes.

Staff functions tend to work as though their recommendations, big ideas, or silver bullets will save the day for management.

In reality, silver bullets, big ideas, and brilliant strategies are extraordinarily rare. Those in operations learn relatively quickly that most progress is actually made incrementally, often following established patterns of thinking, experience, scientific or at least rigorous exploration and study, with a hint of intuition and strategic thinking. Most real solutions arrive by accident and chance, as the by-products of some incremental approach.

The Trusted Strategic Advisor, first and foremost, develops the discipline of understanding management and relying on management points of reference. Before you can be invited into the inner circle, you have to sound like you know things that matter there.

Often people in staff functions assume that when they get to the top of their function they will be automatically admitted into the inner circle. And they are baffled by the realization that they are not. And they sometimes become resentful. It shows.

Fred spends a lot of time with such leaders who assume an entitlement to entry into the inner circle. He tells them the tough news, quoting the late former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Dr. Henry Kissinger: “In a bureaucratic dispute, the side having no greater argument than their hierarchical right is likely to lose. Leaders listen to advisors whose views they think they need, not those who insist on a hearing because of the organization chart.”

So the signal question is: How do you become the advisor whose views the boss thinks they need?

Admission to the Inner Circle

Despite the fact that many senior and top managers are loners, or at the very least, selective about who gets near them, there almost always is an “inner circle.” Those who populate this special group can be surprising. The variety can range from a person in the shipping department to the President of the United States. What does the shipping clerk have in common with the president? It’s all in the eyes, emotions, and needs of the beholder, the CEO.

One thing these advisors all seem to have in common is the ability to provide the leader with suggestions and options from which the leader can then fashion a solution or process to reach a decision.

An early client of Jim’s, we’ll call him Armando, was the head of corporate security for one of America’s largest companies. He was, in that position, an extraordinarily sought-after advisor to the CEO and senior management. Armando told Jim that when he first joined the company from the FBI he came to the attention of the CEO because he had to be a stand-in for his boss at a social gathering. When the time came for someone to organize the presentations, Armando stepped forward. In the process of carrying out this assignment, he told a couple of stories and, he said with a straight face, he sang a short song. As it turned out, the CEO was quite taken by Armando’s extemporaneous ability and began inviting him to other meetings. Armando’s stepping forward in this circumstance brought him unexpected, important attention from people who mattered. With what started out as a unique, chance circumstance, he was able to build a career based on powerful relationships with very senior people involving some of the most important issues the corporation was facing, in the United States and globally.

From this early accidental platform, Armando was able to turn his FBI career experience, spent mostly in Central and South America, and his ability with languages, into a formidable asset to the management of this huge global corporation.

While it sounds like a cliché, your mindset has to be about putting yourself into the manager’s shoes, both operationally and non-operationally. This, among other things, means being conversant with current business plans, key business strategies, and having some familiarity with the metrics of the business. These make up the boss’s world. If you want to be there, get with the terrain. The discipline of management perspective is the discipline of reducing exuberance and instilling a measured, more thoughtful and incremental approach to making recommendations and suggestions.

Familiarity with key or crucial business issues is essential. These are those questions, roadblocks, barriers, and threats that can confound even the most enlightened management and the most aggressive and cohesive organization. If the greatest threat has to do with people’s attitudes, get good at understanding these circumstances. If the problems involve markets and marketing strategy, find a way to become more strategic and knowledgeable in these areas. It’s these key issues that often derail the most well-thought- out plans. What does keep your boss awake at night? What’s left to be done from last week? In many respects, until these issues are addressed, nothing else generally matters.

Define your staff function in management terms rather than just in the terms of staff expertise. Failure to align the activities and goals of a staff function with management objectives is often why the staff person is considered less important to the operations team. Here’s an example using the public relations function, although it applies equally well to other functions such as legal, HR, marketing, finance, or IT.

Both Jim and Fred have had numerous conversations with management that all align on these conclusions:

1. PR staff are rarely thought of as having sufficient knowledge or practical experience to contribute operational solutions.

2. PR recommendations can come across as public relations speak dressed up in the business vocabulary of the moment. When the rhetoric is stripped away, there is only communications speak and very few operational solutions.

3. Management has learned the lesson—from PR staff—that it is far easier to take an operating person and make him or her into a public relations or public affairs practitioner than it is to transform a public affairs or public relations practitioner into an effective operating executive.

4. The PR focus is too often on defending the function, the media, even the words “public relations.” One frustrated executive told Jim, “I wish they’d be as passionate about the needs I have around here as they are about defining and defending what the news media does and needs.”

We’re sure you can come up with a similar list of management perceptions about your particular function. The PR practitioner may resent having to translate professional functions and services, skills, and techniques they care about so deeply into the more turgid language of management. It is simply a practical reality that to be understood by management, translation into management terms is essential, provided the staff expert or outside advisor can actually execute in the management environment.

Paradoxically, PR people are generally good at understanding what matters to the stakeholders they generally interact with. And they embody one of Fred’s axioms: You can’t move people until you meet them where they are. But when it comes to senior managers, PR people often expect the senior managers to meet the PR people where they are. It never works.

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.