Some aspects of this work are so obvious that they often are overlooked and become professional potholes. The first is that every organization, whether it is for profit, not for profit, government, or military, can be divided into two parts: staff and operations. And, of course, operations is where the business is done and run. It is where the products are sold or manufactured, where the services are provided, that sort of thing. Wherever the business or organization is generating revenue, that is the operating side of the business.
Operators run the business organization; staff functions exist to help these operators do a better job, every day. The staff side of the business essentially comprises public relations, human resources, law, finance, security, government relations, IT, strategic planning, regulatory affairs, marketing, and other service functions. Staff functions are expenses against revenue. In other words, staff are always on the cost side of the business ledger. Staff often spend a lot of time debating their bottom-line value. To most operating executives, this line of thinking is a waste of time, although operators are often greatly amused by the lengths that staff will go to justify their existence and ideas. The more that staff try to justify their existence based on their contribution to the bottom-line, the more intensively the CEO and other senior operating executives subject staff expenses to scrutiny and measurability. If you are intent in making your staff value case based on your bottom-line contribution, you are likely to be working alone and worrying a lot.
The premise behind being a trusted strategic advisor is that you bring extraordinary value to your relationship with executives, well beyond the cost impact of your advice. Most staff people make the mistake of assuming that if they are in the presence of senior leadership from time to time, that they are automatically looked at as at least an occasional member of the inner circle. This is what I call the face-time fantasy. Actually, you know this in your heart and in your guts that it’s a fantasy. The boss may know the names of your grandchildren or your kids, where you vacation, where your wife or husband was born, where you went to school, or your golf score, but almost none of this has anything to do with running the business. Your job, is to make certain that the time you spend with executives is limited, focused, and overwhelmingly in their operational interest. Right from the beginning, take a breath and lose the self-imposed false impression that the more time you get to spend with the boss in a variety of settings, the more likely they will turn to you for advice.
Five Imperatives for the Trusted Strategic Advisor
Any staff person—or any consultant—needs to do five key things to become a trusted advisor to senior leaders:
- Jettison staff-based assumptions.
- See the whole board.
- Tolerate constructive ambiguity, but strive for certainty.
- Maximize your prerogatives.
- Develop real expertise beyond your staff function.
Let’s examine each of these imperatives to see if you really have what it takes.
Jettison Staff-Based Assumptions
Set aside all of your staff-based assumptions and orient your life, your thinking, and your recommendations to the perspectives, view points, and issues of those you advise.
Failure to do this effectively will simply relegate you to being “just a PR guy,” “just an HR person,” “just a bean counter,” “just a cop without a gun or a badge.” Leaving your staff assumptions behind is among the hardest disciplines of being a trusted advisor. You will be working from a much broader perspective, first and always defined by the issues and questions facing those you counsel.
Although this reality was obvious to me from the early days in my career, it came home to me following a speech I gave in 1991 to the International Security Management Association in Florida. I was talking about my favorite subject, crisis management, to more than one hundred of the nation’s most senior corporate security officers. The presentation and workshop lasted for nearly three hours. By the time it was finished and I had answered all the questions, I was late getting to the airport. As I checked in with my office within the forty-five minutes following the presentation, I had already received about half a dozen messages from participants. Although of course I like to think my presentations are powerful, important, and helpful, this was unusual. Once back at my office, I began returning the calls. It was clear I had said something really important during the presentation, but I was having difficultly figuring out what it was. So I began asking each participant who called, “What did I say that struck a nerve with everyone? My phone seems to be ringing off the hook.”
The senior vice president of security for a Fortune 50 company replied, “That’s easy. We were all buzzing about the comment you made that all problems in organizations are management problems before they are any other kind of problem. You were talking about the fact that if you want to successfully prepare management to deal with problems, you need to go to the CEO first, get his or her buy-in (through understanding what worries the CEO most), and proceed from there. You made the point that doing lots of preparation work and presenting a finished plan and process to management—largely developed by outsiders and even insiders—will probably be rejected by top managers and the boss, if not out of hand, certainly when problems occur—the worst possible time. I thought I could hear a hundred lightbulbs go on in the audience at the same time when you finished this portion of your presentation,” he said. The calls were about helping these individuals, already very senior staffers, get the boss’s ear for that all-important first conversation.
Each staff function tends to apply its staff disciplines to every problem it sees. Communicators look at everything as a communication problem; finance, as a finance problem; HR, as a people problem; security, as a problem of risk—you get the idea.
The principal reason staff people are excluded from operating meetings is that they bring too tight a staff focus. Most leaders, managers, and even supervisors believe they are good communicators, financially savvy, and aware of their surroundings. They assume they know the risks they face and can add, subtract, multiply, and divide. From the start, you are facing an environment that is not exactly staff friendly. This is a powerful insight. Dump the tendency to see everything through the lens of your staff experience. Yes, your perspective does matter, provided that, first, it reflects the attitudes and needs of the managers you are advising.
Pressing Some Issues Gets You Ignored
Let me put this into even sharper focus. One of the more frequent questions I get from staff advisors goes something like this: “I need to know how to convince the boss to change something because big mistakes are being made. But the boss just will not listen to me. If a couple of the things I suggested are implemented, the boss would be much more successful in accomplishing his or her goals.” My response to the staff person is, “Why are you pushing this so hard? Obviously, the boss does not want to take your suggestion. Unless what the boss is doing is immoral, illegal, completely stupid, or financially irresponsible, the boss is the boss for a reason. It is the boss’s career and the boss’s decision to make. Move on to something else. If what the boss is doing is immoral, illegal, irresponsible, or something along those lines, you have to address a professional employment decision.”
Who’s Bus Is It?
The message is this: remember who is driving the bus and whose bus it is. If you have a problem with this perspective, I suggest you put this book back on the shelf and look for something else to read and maybe a new bus.
See the Whole Board
If you have been tutored by or taken classes from a skilled chess player, you know that one of the most important lessons is that you have to keep the entire board in mind. You have to look at the whole board constantly as you plan and make your moves, assessing, analyzing, and forecasting the other moves that could result. As you have probably observed, some people are so skilled at this that they can actually analyze the board and predict how many moves are required to finish the game. Being a trusted advisor is very much like this concept of seeing the whole board.
Another way to think of seeing the whole board is to recognize the power of patterns. It is important to recognize that so many things in relationships, business, politics, and human endeavors fit patterns of past events, in other venues or perhaps even in your own. Understanding the patterns of human behavior, the patterns of thinking, the patterns of events, the patterns of leadership, and the collateral issues these events trigger is another way to bring insight and understanding to leaders in ways far different from those they can achieve by themselves.
Your job as the trusted advisor is to look over the entire field of interest—the barriers, threats, constraints, options, and opportunities—and keep them in mind as you provide advice and recommendations to those you coach and counsel. You are consciously building the discipline of maintaining distance and altitude from everything that you talk about and recommend. Dispassion is a significant ingredient in establishing management trust, respect, and credibility in those with senior-level responsibilities. They need to feel that your advice comes with reliable objectivity, experience, and insight.
One metaphor to keep in mind here is always operate at fifty thousand feet. Altitude changes attitudes. Altitude gives you an important perspective on every aspect of those areas that are in sight. It also builds dispassion and fosters objectivity. Some of the greatest insights you will have as a trusted strategic advisor are those driven by your ability to see a larger view, the more strategic view. The leader’s principal assignment is to look over the horizon and see what is there, to pick new destinations and purposes. They are people of tomorrow.
Are You a Person of Tomorrow?
When you too can see from a significant altitude, you can see over the horizon to explore the environment that surrounds where the leader is looking and, perhaps, even beyond where the leader is looking. It is essential to maintain this sense of perspective.
Tolerate Constructive Ambiguity, Strive for Certainty
Consultants and advisors are fundamentally option and alternative finders rather than solution finders. This is because leaders recognize that having a solution is oftentimes the least of their worries. What really matters is finding a process to get to something that works—almost anything that works. This is another area where the trusted advisor plays a crucial role.
Sometimes your role with a leader will be ambiguous, often because the leader’s behavior is ambiguous. You do need to have a methodology for seeking clarification and for generating clarity. The more important point is that a leader’s life is ambiguous and difficult. Solutions and answers seem easy for consultants, so it can be frustrating, irritating, and sometimes even embarrassing when leaders fail to grasp or intentionally ignore what is excellent, even achievable advice. Develop a tolerance for what leaders instinctively know will keep them successful. The leader’s ability to manage and turn strategies into processes will lengthen the time required to achieve results, but ultimately will productively move the organization. Resist the common advisor frustration with getting the process part done.
Maximize Your Prerogatives
Being influential means having power. Getting things to happen today, when you want to or need to, is about more immediate, visible impact through actions or decisions by the boss. You can also choose to be influential over longer time frames—whichever strategy best fits the objective you seek to achieve. A longer-term approach may mean less immediate impact. Some bosses are more comfortable with this style of counseling because they permit only limited visibility and credit sharing when workable ideas and decision options come from the suggestions of others. The ongoing clash of egos and ideas at the top often submerges the authorship of ideas. The benefit of this approach is that things that come out of top management are in the category of “being invented here.” Though this can be frustrating for the advisor, this is the reality of working and advising at this altitude. The boss always gets the credit.
Actually seeing your recommendations become marching orders in real time is something amazing to behold and to achieve. Having impact tends to mean that the executive being advised or the group being counseled “does what you tell them.”
The satisfaction of having immediate impact is often a central motivation for becoming a trusted strategic advisor. Leaders at every level constantly need special thinking, advice, commentary, and analysis in the achievement-focused environment that is today’s “high performance” organization. There is the added reality that whatever you recommend must be doable using methods and approaches that operations can directly implement, and must produce constructive results promptly. The issue for the trusted strategic advisor is that his or her advice is always modified, adapted, and frequently used in fragments, with someone else taking or getting the credit.
It helps to be realistic about what leaders and their organizations can actually accomplish in a short period of time. Achieving operational impact can be difficult because the staff person is focused too far away from operations. The resulting lack of knowledge inhibits the ability to make powerful recommendations. This situation is buffered by the knowledge that many breakthrough ideas and solutions are extremely simple in nature and only require limited influence rather than an in-depth knowledge of operations or even finance.
If you are a more junior staffer, there is the nagging question, “If I’m several levels down from the big bosses, how can I get my ideas seen at the top of the organization?” The correct answer has always been to work through your current boss and your current boss’s boss. Sooner or later, they will get tired of listening to you, and will instead send you to make your own case. Or they could fire you. In either case, a promotion, enhanced personal responsibility, or a constructive change in your career is likely. Successful advisors are self-selected, self-appointed, self-energizing, self-evaluating, and relentlessly persistent.
Teach your boss what and how to teach their boss. If there is no chance of this working, then there is virtually no chance of your getting information to the top. That means it may be time to look elsewhere for a position where your talents knowledge, skills, and abilities can be better appreciated, or to grow in entirely different directions—whether within your own organization or, perhaps, somewhere else.
Develop Real Expertise Beyond Your Staff Function
If you want to gain access beyond routine staff consultations by operating executives, you must possess, perhaps above all else, some real, recognizable expertise. This expertise generally needs to move beyond your area of staff knowledge. The reasoning is that most senior operators feel fairly confident of their knowledge base in your area and assume that your competence in that area comes with the territory. If you stay within the box of your staff expertise, you will only be called when the boss thinks that staff expertise is required, usually to validate something he or she wants to do in your area, and you will be told what to do and when to do it, what to say and when to say it.
Opportunities abound for providing special expertise, both from a staff perspective and operationally. In our next essay I talk specifically about understanding bosses and boards of directors, you will learn about those special advisors who meet on a nearly daily basis about the organization they lead. You will learn about the kinds of information they seek continuously, and it may be that you can develop expertise and gather this information for the boss or other relevant senior officials. Once you have identified this special expertise and act to develop it, you will also need to develop a strategy to make certain that these special skills, areas of knowledge, or abilities are available to the senior leadership; we will talk about this topic in Chapter Ten.
Look around at those in the inner circle, those whom the bosses consult routinely, and ask yourself why these people are more sought after than you or your colleagues. One of the crucial reasons is that they bring this sense of real expertise to the boss’s territory. If you cannot figure out why someone is in the inner circle, ask the boss why. The answer will be either very enlightening or totally underwhelming.
It Takes a Disciplined Approach
The lion’s share of lessons these essays teach you is how you will need to change yourself to be more successful as a trusted advisor. The essays will discuss each of the seven disciplines you will need to develop, refine, or strengthen:
- Being trustworthy. Earn the respect and confidence of those you advise.
- Becoming a verbal visionary. Recognize that giving advice is an art and a skill that primarily depends on your verbal accomplishment.
- Developing a management perspective. Look at the world through the manager’s or leader’s eyes.
- Thinking strategically. This is perhaps the most valued quality of senior advisors—looking for methods and models to achieve different, novel, often unique solutions.
- Understanding the power of patterns. Examine similar events to extract lessons for the future; the ability to understand patterns is sometimes referred to as the source of wisdom about what is going to happen.
- Advising constructively. Provide advice using a structure, format, and context that can be both easily absorbed and acted upon by those you advice.
- Showing the boss how to use your advice. Showing the manager or boss how to put your advice into practice is essential. Most bosses learn how to work with advisors through trial and error. The best advisors always help their clients understand how to use the advice they receive from many different quarters.
Are You Ready?
One purpose of this essay is to help you assess whether or not you really have what it takes to achieve the role of trusted strategic advisor. In the assessment that follows, you will ask yourself some very serious questions to determine just how committed you are to becoming a trusted strategic advisor, or to see how far along you may already be.
Assessment: Are You Ready to Be a Trusted Advisor?
- Do I have the personal discipline to prepare myself to fulfill the five imperatives of the trusted advisor relationship?
- Do I have the stomach for the intensity, conflict-ridden, and often confrontational environment in which decisions are made at the senior levels of organizations?
- Can I dispassionately assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, options, and threats of the organization from a variety of useful perspectives?
- What is the real expertise, beyond my area of staff knowledge, that I bring to those who run your organization?
- Will I commit to mastering the seven disciplines and harness their power for my success and that of those I advise?
- How do I answer the question, “Why should the boss listen to me?”
Based on the book: Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, copyright 2008 Jossey-Bass Inc.
