Category: Savvy

Part Four

What Bosses Expect

Lesson One: The better you are organized, prepared, and rehearsed, the better your advice will be remembered.

Lesson Two: Reduce the flow of “new ideas.” New ideas often delay settled processes and approaches. It might be better to help the boss get things done that should have been done yesterday or last week.

Lesson Three: Edit mindfully rather than mindlessly. Think before you edit. Editing should first and foremost preserve and protect the truth. Too often editing obscures the truth. 

This Is What Bosses Expect.

  1. Real-time advice (on the spot): Rehearse your option suggestions.
  2. Candor… “The truth is”….
    Candor is truth with an attitude delivered right now.
    Candor shortens all discussions.
    Candor is the way up and the way out of trouble.
    Candor saves the day, and maybe you.
    Candor avoids saying things that can’t be taken back.
    Candor is the most powerful strategy.
  3. Coaching at every encounter
  4. Consequence analysis, “This said or done will lead to that”
  5. What matters
  6. Early warning of critical or adverse events
  7. What to do next
  8. Pitfalls and potholes to avoid
  9. How to help colleagues improve
  10. Option selection, remember The Three Minute Drill

©2025, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

Part Three

Why the Boss Doesn’t Listen to PR Advice

Self-Imposed Barriers to Entering or Staying in the Circle of Influence

Ten reasons why bosses ignore public relations people and often listen to others first, or more frequently than their PR advisors:

  1. Our first inclination is to teach public relations. Most bosses think they are great communicators.
  2. We constantly seem to be seeking approval for our behaviors and confirmation of the value we bring to everything we do.
  3. We fail to demonstrate that we understand either the business or the critical issues the business faces.
  4. We speak a language the boss neither needs nor cares to learn.
  5. We focus on the unimportant.
  6. We take up management’s time, telling them things they already know.
  7. We’d rather alienate a boss than alienate a reporter.
  8. We may write well, but our verbal skills are undisciplined, unfocused, and fall short of providing information management can act upon.
  9. Our loyalty is suspect. They know we talk about and criticize management behind their back.
  10. We want facetime but often seem unprepared; we rarely ask what management is really concerned about or what they’d like to do.

We whine a lot.

We tend to offer whiny excuses rather than better options.

Whiney Excuse #1:  They don’t understand the power of public relations.

Whiney Excuse #2:  They don’t appreciate the function.

Whiney Excuse #3:  They always consult the lawyers and management consultants before they talk to PR, so PR gets stuck cleaning up even bigger messes.

Whiney Excuse #4:  The CEO’s pretty bright, but has blind spots and prejudices that get us into trouble.

Whiney Excuse #5:  We could have told them this was going to happen, but we couldn’t break through the silos and the arrogant mentality that, “management is smart enough to handle anything.”

Whiney Excuse #6:  If I got more facetime, things would be different.

Whiney Excuse #7:  Why do they still blame PR, but avoid talking to PR or allowing PR to have input?

Whiney Excuse #8:  Everything is so last minute. Does management follow its own plan (or even have a plan)?

©2025, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

Part Two

How to Seek, Find, and Join the Inner Circle

Become an Optioneer*

The price of credible admission to “the inner circle” is a management perspective that drives your attitudes, actions, and advice.  Developing a management perspective begins with four actions:

  1. Putting yourself in the manager’s shoes operationally and non-operationally.
  2. Asking better questions in place of the media-related questions you normally raise.
  3. Providing sound managerially relevant reasons for communicating or not communicating.
  4. Avoiding many of the usual pro-press arguments that have no credibility with management, make little sense from an operating perspective, and are generally irrelevant to leadership.

The required changes in your practices for entering the Inner Circle are higher than you think. It is worth it; you can do it. You will have to completely revise your philosophy and the focus of your work.

Your New Focus and Guiding Principles

Principle One: All problems are management and organizational problems before they are any other kind of problem, including communications issues and questions.

Principle Two: All management problems are leadership challenges.

Principle Three: Always start where management and leadership are or you will never catch or meet up. Please read the Trusted Strategic Advisor’s Manifesto.

The journey will be inspiring and truly fulfilling; frustrating and complicated; irritating but crucial to the success of others from their perspective and success from your perspective as well.

Ask managerially relevant questions first. Some examples are:

  • How does the current situation affect strategy?
  • Are management mistakes changing the strategy they’ve laid out?
  • Can we gain employee commitment to the changing circumstances that are causing the problems we’re now facing?
  • What strategies are available to us to keep shareholder interest aligned with our goals?
  • Can management make the tough decisions and act quickly enough to turn a problem situation into an opportunity, or at least into a mitigative circumstance?
  • What resources can management allocate to deal with the issue at hand or to resolve matters in ways that move us toward or into our strategic direction?
  • What is our strategy?

Additional managerially relevant questions:

  • What have peer companies, or organizations in similar circumstances, done?
  • How will the present circumstances affect our ability to research and develop new products, services, and ideas?
  • Is this a situation that requires adaptation or dramatic shifts and changes?
  • What non-financial factors are of greatest concern?  What about the direct financial factors?
  • Will customer satisfaction be adversely affected?
  • What are the compliance implications of the current situation and what remedial steps will be necessary?

Clues

  1. Watch who the boss asks to stay after the “table meeting,” or who was meeting with the boss before the “table meeting.” That’s the inner circle forming or reconvening.
  2. Determine what pattern you want to establish with the boss. You will need to suggest and discuss this with the boss.

    Early calls, often first.
    Have your Three Minute Drill options rehearsed and ready.
    Be the last person the boss talks to before he/she steps into the limelight.
  3. Read You Are the Table, the concluding discussion from my book, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor.”
  4. * Become an Optioneer… someone who is always thinking about three options to suggest for every executive decision opportunity.

Become a savvy thinker. Savvy thinking leads to savvy actions.

You are the table.

Be it. Believe in it. Live it. Succeed because of it.

Good luck.

P.S. Part three of this series will be about:

  • Why the boss doesn’t listen better to public relations advice.
  • Self-imposed barriers to entering or staying in the circle of influence.

©2025, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

The 8 Key Personal Aspirations of a Trusted Strategic Advisor

Part One

Your Search for “The Table” Is Over

Act Like It. Be It. Believe In It. Live It. Succeed Because of It.

In 2006 I wrote, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You? The Seven Disciplines of The Trusted Strategic Advisor.” Discussions with many trusted strategic advisors over the years have revealed deeper insights into what those who follow my advice hope to achieve beyond the seven disciplines.

Time to abandon the “getting to the table” concept altogether. It’s a myth, it’s a time waster, it’s technically unachievable because such a table doesn’t really exist in real life. Few leaders and managers have any use for “the table.” There is a better destination, “Seeking to Be in the Inner Circle.” Click here to read more about this concept.

Those discussions also yielded a collection of eight personal aspirations, which I think about as the real “why’s” of being a Trusted Strategic Advisor. From those discussions and subsequent writings, the Eight Key Personal Aspirations of the Trusted Strategic Advisor have emerged. It is these aspirations that the Trusted Strategic Advisor is truly seeking to achieve.

Here are my key aspiration explanations:

  1. Acceptance: The automatic acknowledgement of your expertise and the value of having you involved in most conversations.
  2. Access: Be able to go knock on the door rather than waiting for the phone to ring.
  3. Having impact: Talking, thinking, writing, behaving in ways that are more memorable and are retained and repeated by those we counsel.
  4. Importance: Use power language. Say things that matter and be intentionally important. See Power Words.
  5. Inclusion: Condition those you advise to mention and suggest that you be included in other circles of influence because of the inherent value of the work you’re currently doing, and have done.
  6. Interaction and engagement in bigger ideas: To be thought of as a go-to person when the ideas get big and more meaningful.
  7. Relevance: We belong to a profession that has to constantly validate its relevance. My advice: Avoid all things that aren’t relevant. These eight aspirations are the definition of relevance.
  8. Respect: Trust based on truth. Being known as the person to go to for the ultimate advice and counsel, the truth needed on any given issue or topic, and to find out and tell the rest of that truth.

You may wish to add others to this list, but I would caution that this is a pretty powerful list of expectations and targeted behaviors on your part. It’s a very management-oriented set of expectations.

You Are the Table. Be It. Believe in It. Live It.
Succeed Because of It.

These eight aspirations are the deeper reasons to be a Trusted Strategic Advisor. In many respects, these eight concepts represent barriers to overcome or the mountains that need to be scaled as you progress in your skills and in your being a Trusted Strategic Advisor.

I would encourage you to write a paragraph of your own about what these aspirations mean as you climb the ladder of importance and scale the mountains of resistance you’ll encounter. These aspirations will require explanations. It’s helpful if you can comfortably talk about them. I think you’ll find that these aspirations also match many of the issues faced by people who themselves are rising in the hierarchy of importance and value.

You’ll find that putting these concepts into words helps the people you advise apply them to their own goals, aspirations, and questions.

Some Closing Thoughts

In the conclusion of my book, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You,” I declare that “YOU ARE THE TABLE!” Being at the table is a self-limiting idea. “Let’s think bigger,” as my old boss Chester Burger used to say. “Think up. Tacticians are a dime a dozen… or less.” Read the full conclusion here.

©2025, James E. Lukaszewski. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting is forbidden.

It is extraordinary how the process of establishing trust is similar in situations and relationships between individuals, between individuals and organizations, between organizations themselves, between organizations and society, and even between cultures. It has been my experience that establishing and maintaining trust is a process, one carried out with directness and simplicity. Trust is the result of taking sensible, simple, constructive, and practical steps. There are six crucial elements in establishing and maintaining trust:

  1. Provide Advance Information – a “Heads Up” – Whenever You Can
    Proving advance information is the first and most important ingredient because its absence has one of the most toxic impacts on relationships. You trust another individual above all else because of his or her willingness to anticipate those situations that could be negative or threatening. In the context of senior leaders, providing advance information means making certain they have, from you, the information they need to achieve their objectives or to defend or deflect actions or perceptions that could be detrimental to their success or progress. They expect to be warned of danger, damaging decisions or threats, potential disasters, and disloyalty.
  2. Seeking the Leader’s Input
    Asking for input is the second most powerful ingredient of trust. Those being asked are also receiving a signal of their value to you. Taking action without asking for or seeking input is considered to be arrogant and unempathetic.
  3. Listen Carefully
    Careful listening is driven by the conversation or information that is exchanged, by the constructive and open nature of the questions that the listener asks for clarification, and by a real sense that each individual or organization is engaged in the conversations that take place during the relationship. Trust depends on the careful listening, from every side.
  4. Change Your Approach Based on What You Hear
    When you change or modify your plans or expectations as a result of listening and input, you further demonstrate that you can be trusted. Changing previously announced actions, planned behaviors, and outcomes evidences active engagement, paying attention, and reflecting what is heard.
  5. Staying Engaged
    Maintaining trust is an ongoing, interactive process. Rather than waiting for others to contact you or maintain the relationship, you call, on your own behalf and in the other’s best interests to keep the relationship moving, alive, and essential.
  6. Engage Others
    The most powerful gesture you can make to build trust is to invite those affected by your decisions and authority into the decision-making process. At the very least, inviting them to “look over your shoulder” while important decisions are made is enormously reassuring and fear reducing.

The wise advisor helps leaders recognize that their own ability to establish, maintain, and restore trust rests on these same six approaches.

*©2006-2025, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, page 60,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

Almost all CEOs and leading managers want evaluations of those around them, insiders as well as outsiders, and they will ask you as their advisor to provide candid assessments. Be ready with productive, constructive comments. Too often, I see internal advisors, especially PR practitioners, step back from this responsibility and, though often eager to criticize those who are outside of the organization, speak only with great reluctance about those inside. Remember the number two responsibility of all people in leadership positions: have in place the people and skills necessary to achieve the goals and objectives the boss promised to accomplish.

As a trusted strategic advisor, you want to be in a position to make appropriate comments about everyone else on the team. Having a management perspective requires that you pay attention to what everyone contributes, the nature of what is contributed, and how those contributions can be improved. Be prepared to judge the capabilities and competencies of those in the leader’s vicinity. All outside advisors can count on being asked to evaluate inside experts and advisors. Reluctance will affect your relationship with senior people. Be ready.

*©2006-2025, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, page 43,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

Trust involves at least five crucial ingredients. As I define them, you’ll note that many of these ingredients are also a part of leadership, followership, and relationships in general.

  1. Candor. “Truth with an attitude, delivered immediately”. Truth plus insightful and honest perspective; for example, there may be other perspectives on the same set of circumstances even though the facts seem to apply across the board. Candor’s focus on starting with the truth takes others perspectives into account.
  2. Credibility. Always conferred by others on those whose past behavior, track record, and accomplishments warrant it. You deliver what you promise.
  3. Competence. The ability to apply special knowledge, experience, and insight to resolve the issues, questions, and problems of others; putting the power of your intellect and expertise to work, clearly for the goals of others.
  4. Integrity. The personal, organizational, or institutional inclination to do the right or most appropriate thing at the first opportunity or whenever there is a choice or dilemma. A person with integrity is someone you can count on to steer you in the right direction or help you make the morally correct decision, often on the spot, every time.
  5. The Loyalty Exception.

    Loyalty has limits.

    Senior executive staff ranks are full of strong-willed people who choose or learn how to be loyal to a CEO. That loyalty may be situational (by choice or pathological- sucking up).

    In the case of the trusted strategic advisor, the relationship with a senior leader is less about blind loyalty and more about a higher level of objectivity and perspective. By keeping perspective, I mean always remaining at some altitude, some constructive distance to ensure that the advice given or taken is truly the most valuable, objective and helpful.

    The key question for you as the Trusted Strategic Advisor is, what are the indicators that should cause you to question your loyalty, or at a minimum, raise serious questions of those to whom you have provided advice? There are patterns of suspect organizational leadership behavior to look for that, Ironically, generally begin at the top executive ranks.

    The presence of even one or two of these indicators in your working environment is a very serious matter. The Federal Sentencing guidelines of 1991 list fifty of what are called Predicate Behaviors, inappropriate activities to look for that signal, serious potential trouble. Here’s a sample:
  1. Lack of tough, appropriate, centralized compliance within areas of the company.
  2. Leadership that allows supervisors to overlook bad behavior.
  3.  Structuring incentives in such a way that they can compromise the ethical behavior toward the quality of products and services.
  4. Permitting shortcuts.
  5. Doing “whatever it takes” to achieve inappropriate business and financial goals.

    Establish a personal integrity barrier, your own loyalty limits. Write them down and be prepared on the moment’s notice to explain those limits. This exercise alone will prepare you to provide a service of extraordinary value to those you advise. If it prevents, helps detect, or deter activities or plans that will be regretted later. Or that would cause harm to others.

    Copyright 2006

*©2006-2025, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, page 59,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.



Talk and Write to Time

“Face-Time Fantasy”. Too often, staff people estimate their value on the basis of the number of minutes and hours they spend in the presence of, or interacting with, senior executives. The face time that truly matters is the time the staff person spends giving useful advice to an organizational leader. Yes, leaders often ask personal and personable questions. They appear to have a genuine interest in the individual who is advising them, and they really may. Nevertheless, for the most senior executives, face time is far less about getting personal than about gaining key information to stay in or get ahead of the game.

            Always talk to time rather than filling time with talk. Find ways to limit what you talk about so that whatever your topic, you are ready to provide information in a format and fashion that is direct, helpful, and instructive. Talking to time means remembering that in English-speaking cultures, we say about 150 words per minute. Every document, every script, every piece of written information should be screened for its time requirement. Post that number on the document. This can be done very easily by putting a word count (using your computer’s word count function) at the top of each page or document. Divide that word count by 150, and you have the approximate number of minutes it will take people to read the document or to present it. The operative rule is to write less but make it more significant and important. Say less but make it more powerful.

            The more important the decision or the bigger the question or issue, the more likely it is that action will be pushed off until it has to be dealt with on an urgent or even panicky basis. The challenge, then, is to structure advice in a potent verbal or written format that makes more strategic decisions faster and helps managers make more strategic decisions. The Three-Minute Drill is such a format. If you can commit to using it, it will change your relationship with your boss dramatically and help you have a much higher level of personal self-confidence, influence, acceptance, and respect.

*©2006-2025, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, pages 39-40,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

In my discussions with chief executives and leaders, specifically about advice they get both internally and externally, a pattern of frustration emerges relatively quickly. These are the most frequently mentioned frustration-inducing behaviors.

  1. Suggesting more ideas and concepts than can possibly be achieved or even considered. Remember that the most important reason CEOs lose jobs relates to failing to prepare adequately. If your methodology is to suggest new ways of doing things or simply new things to do, you would be well advised to focus more on what needs to get done and what is yet to be completed rather than putting even one or two new ideas on the boss’s desk.
  2. Engaging in time-wasting and nonspecific (purposeless) conversations. Even if it is the boss who brings up vacations, the family, or other chitchat topics, your role as the Trusted Strategic Advisor is to keep these encounters focused on what truly matters and get things done. Yes, it is true that over time you will develop a relationship where a lot of personal information is known and seems appropriate to discuss, but my advice remains in force: keep these meetings and encounters as directed and professional as possible. Keep your actual role very clear at all times.
  3. Offering information that is late or incomplete, with some key facts and data or interpretations apparently being purposely withheld. Senior executives already know that the information they get is filtered, detoxified, and often pretty harmless. One of your most important currencies is candor, the important, concise, prompt disclosure of things you know that the boss should know. Information withheld or that is late for whatever reason reflects on the trust in your relationship. If there are even two or three incidents where your boss is left with the feeling that you are failing to be forthcoming, you will see your invitations decline.
  4. Offering information that is already known or that could be thought up independently. Stick to what matters. If you know that your boss already knows, move on. Count on it: you are wasting his or her time. Avoid doing that or risk losing a good part of your relationship.
  5. Giving only partial input, apparently on the assumption that the boss knows more, or should know more, than he or she does. There is a way to structure giving advice using options. This was designed to prevent providing only partial information. To avoid leaving out key information, talk in terms of timelines or priorities; state what should be done first, second, third, or apply a calendar or a clock to the information you have to share. This way, even things the boss already knows are put in a useful, more strategic context.
  6. Being less than candid. This behavior is a relationship killer. Whether a product of fear, lack of preparation, or simply timidity, lack of candor is the fastest way to become disemployed as an advisor. Better to succeed at less than fail unforgettably and live another day.
  7. If you want to be there, be ready, be actively engaged, and tell the whole truth promptly. It’s always that nagging, bothersome question that gets you in the end. It’s when the boss looks up at you and asks, “Did you know this was going to happen?” and you know you did.

    The problem with all of these behaviors is that they irritate top executives and erect barriers to their taking your advice or taking you seriously.

*©2006-2025, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, pages 38-39,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.

Now, let’s talk about whether or not you fit in the leadership environment. Here are some serious questions for you to ask yourself:

  1. Do I study leadership and the process of leadership?
  2. Do I care about these senior people?
  3. Do I have or can I develop a real interest and some expertise in the fields of interest of those you intend to advise?
  4. Do I care about what the CEO needs to have or to get done?
  5. Can I manage to set aside my problems and issues long enough to deal with senior leaders’ problems, goals and questions?
  6. Can I manage my own ego involvement in an environment where even bigger egos than mine?
  7. Can I make the Counselor’s Commitment?

*©2006-2025, James E. Lukaszewski, “Why Should the Boss Listen to You, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, pages 31-32,” Josey Bass. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.