Parts 3, 4, and 5 of 10 Areas for Serious Personal and Professional Consideration and Reflection

Start by changing your mindset and your entire philosophy of work.

3). Leadership resides with those who can maintain more supporters than detractors.

• Help management and leadership stay focused.
• Help the leaders preserve and develop new followers

4). Remember whose “bus” it is and who’s driving.

• It is their bus and they get to drive it wherever they want.
• Staff functions exist and are funded by leadership to help leaders do their jobs better.
• Staff functions have limitations.
• Change the changeable; do the doable; know the knowable.

5). Managers and leaders want to make the decisions…and problem solve often based on the advice they receive from trusted strategic advisors.

• Stop trying to find solutions (staff people rarely know enough about a business to find them.) Many staff people cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide reliably. 100% of the people we work for can.
• Focus on recommending smaller, more doable options for immediate, incremental implementation that can lead to bigger, more important decisions and breakthroughs.
• Rather than seek a single big recommendation, shoot for three smaller action options every time. Option one: do nothing and see what happens is always an option bosses and lawyers are thinking about. Option two: do something that meets a reasonable number of expectations for resolution. Option three: do something more than is expected.
• Train yourself to use this option recommendation strategy and you will be called back, earlier, faster and listened to ahead of the counselor who always has the perfect single solution.

Author’s Note: Read The Trusted Strategic Advisor’s Manifesto Parts 1 and 2 HERE and Part 6 HERE

Parts 7-10 will appear in future blogs posts and newsletters. If you’d like to see the remainder of this document sooner, as well as the materials connected with its presentation at the 2017 PRSA Corporate Communications Section Conference: Strategic Collaboration, held in Chicago on November 9^th please click HERE.

By: James E. Lukaszewski, ABC, Fellow IABC, APR, Fellow PRSA, BEPS Emeritus, America’s Crisis Guru