Category: Snap Wisdom

The More Of These Attributes You Have The Larger Your Influence.

  1. Meetings are held up, waiting for you to arrive to make important contributions or interpretations of current events or questions.
  2. People remember what you say and quote you in other places.
  3. People remember what you say and quote you in your presence.
  4. People tell your stories and share your lessons as though those stories and lessons come from them.
  5. People learn things from you that they acknowledge are yours and use them to convince others.
  6.  Others share their agendas and beliefs with you in the hope of influencing you to change the behavior or decisions of others more senior or powerful than them.
  7. Bosses listen, hear and react to what you observe and advise.
  8. Bosses often select the action options you suggest, but also often use your insight to go in a different direction. Doing something is usually better than doing nothing.
  9. Just your presence will influence outcomes.
  10. (Bonus) You use the three-minute drill to give advice.

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

How to Stay a Vital Leadership Partner

Ten Relationship Competencies the Trusted Strategic Advisor Must Master to Stay a Vital Leadership Partner

Over the years, through conversations, observation and coaching with trusted strategic advisors and their clients, a list of powerful competencies emerged that clearly help to build the effectiveness, reliability and trustworthiness of the trusted strategic advisor.  Early in my career as I observed these key advisors doing their jobs, it struck me that there was a pattern of competencies the trusted strategic advisors should strive to achieve.

The purpose of the competency list is to establish successful patterns of achievement. To be more successful requires providing crucial strategic assistance to senior people, leaders and to up and coming employees. 

The Ten Ingredients of Operational Excellence for a trusted strategic advisor are really a series of questions that the TSA asks themselves as they go about giving advice, being helpful and providing other strategically important services. The question TSA’s are asking themselves are very simple, “Is what I’m doing right now and how I’m doing it going to address important issues and questions for my client and in the process improve my access to this particular individual, organization or business unit?”  “Or, is what I’m doing right now going to improve my acceptance going forward and helping me gain even more access to be helpful to other important people?”  So, the technique is to consciously apply usable questions to each of these ten very desirable attributes so they become second nature to the TSA’s daily activities.

  1. Access: success often depends on easy access to those you are serving.  Sounds simple, but we often feel that we are at risk working on especially difficult or challenging subjects.  Deal with it. What are the response options to each scenario encountered?
  2. Acceptance: The key here is remembering that you do what you do to help these people achieve their objectives from their own perspectives.  Expect gratitude to come slowly at first.  Your acceptance and your value increase as these people you are helping begin to recognize that you are helpful, reliable and trustable. 
  3. Engagement: often this is the toughest task because it requires that you speak up.  I often recommend “laggership.” Be the second person or more importantly the last person to speak, to enable the perspective that the person you are advising needs  as they leave the room. 
  4. First call: people in trouble or in need will come to you sooner.  Train your clients to always call you sooner rather than later.  
  5. Impact: impact is about being memorable.  We often are put in the position of routinely providing and reporting data and other information.  Your responsibility is to promptly report the information required, but do it in memorable ways, be a storyteller, find out some specific useful angle of what you are describing so you will know that they will leave the room with something fresh and useful in their brain.
  6. Inclusion: you might find that occasionally you have to keep tabs on what the people you are supposed to be leading or guiding are doing.  Perhaps from time to time you need to invite yourself or see that you are invited.  Step up rather than wait (yes, this seems to be the opposite of laggership). Be flexible.  Look for opportunities to help leaders lead. Step up.
  7. Influence: keep in mind the real value of your presence is as a source of important information, ideas, inspiration, interpretation, and feedback. My guiding principle here is to say less, make it more important, write less but make it essential, memorable reading, and as always make it interesting, useful or surprising. 
  8. Interaction: the more familiar people become with you and the work you do the more places you will be invited to add to your itinerary of places to be or things to think about.  Time to be a little forward here and if there are places you think that need attention, mention it and ask to be assigned or permitted or invited. 
  9. Last call: generally speaking the goal of the trusted strategic advisor is to be consulted early and to be perhaps the last person spoken to by your principle before he or she steps out into the limelight and puts their career on the line. 
  10. Respect: respect is earned predominantly through demonstrating with your every interaction that your advice shows that you are in it for them, for their goals and objectives. Remember, the successful ideas you provide will be attributed to your clients rather than to you. Get used to it, encourage it, and be comfortable with it.

Finding, Learning, and Remembering Life’s Lessons

by Applying Daily Learning Audit Questions
Your Personal Daily Incremental Learning Audit

One benefit of growing older is that every month brings a handful of messages from former clients, students, colleagues, friends, relatives, even strangers. They want to share some episode from their lives where something I said, wrote, discussed, or taught powerfully affected their life’s trajectory.

These notes are always inspiring. I respond in two ways, grateful appreciation and asking these correspondents to please answer several of the following questions, or as many as they care to:

  1.     What’s the most important thing you learned from me?
  2.    What is the most surprising thing you learned from me?
  3.   What’s the most interesting thing you learned from me?
  4.   What’s the most unusual thing you learned from me?
  5.   What’s the most useful thing or idea that you learned from me?
  6. What do you know now that you didn’t know before you heard, saw, talked, or something read from me?
  7. What new questions were raised for which you need answers or deeper questions?
  8. What will/did you do differently based on what you learned from me?
  9. Why did you come to me? 

How I learned to organize my daily learnings, every day

From the earliest days of my career, there was so much to learn every day. I was having trouble retaining and recalling it all. Then I met this amazing young, new CEO I was to be coaching. He asked me to visit him every Tuesday at 5:30pm for an hour. Well, ok. He’s the client and the requests were unusual but reasonable.

After a month of Tuesday meetings, I asked him why he set our weekly meeting the way he did. I will always remember his response and so will you.

He said,” I spend every Tuesday afternoon evaluating what those who work for me have learned from me.” And then he said,” “and, I from them.” “Jim, you come at the end of my learning day to help me truly and powerfully understand and integrate my thinking and their thinking into what we do every day.”

His technique was to ask a handful of important questions, then lean forward and listen carefully. His questions were business related, some technical, some emotional, some calling for judgmental responses.

At that moment I knew I should have been paying him.

Getting Started

I immediately established a set of my own Learning Audit Questions. Everyone took the questions very seriously.

Here’s a set of answers from an assistant who worked for me for one year:

Learning Audit Example #1
Former Assistant (with me 18 months)

Jim, here are my answers to those questions. I hope this is helpful to you.

  1. The most important thing I learned is a quote from your book where you speak about how helping someone else achieve their goal will in turn help you achieve your own goals. 
  2. The most interesting thing I’ve learned is to focus on what can be
    accomplished to look for solutions, always be mindful of the way I’m speaking or writing in correspondence, and to not default to what “cannot be done”. 
  3. The most surprising thing I learned is about myself and how, even though I love writing, I wouldn’t want to write for a living, which is why I’ve enjoyed my work and time as an admin.
  4. The most useful thing I’ve learned is just the importance of tracking, maintaining, and creating a process and system for organization not just of material and content, but also of life things.
Learning Audit Example #2 Former client in mid-career, years ago with me 2.5 years

Jim, In terms of your questions:

  1. What is/was the most important thing you learned from me?
    a. The importance of being a verbal visionary and how to achieve that
    b. Use of power words, especially for women
    c. Know your client’s/leader’s business and their concerns and perspectives
    d. Don’t be afraid to raise tough questions
  2. What is/was the most surprising thing you learned from me?
    a.    The critical need to identify and care for victims – and they aren’t always who you think they are.
    b.   The importance of face-to-face comms – with internal and external audiences. The power of this became crystal clear when I helped implement your strategy for the Venice Hospital sale.
  3. What is/was the most interesting thing you learned from me?
    What leaders need and want – options, candor, straight talk.
  4. What is/was the most memorable thing you learned or observed about me?
    How you communicated with leaders and held their attention!
  5. What are/were some important questions that you needed answers following our work together?

    How can I continue to improve?
  6. What do you do differently now because of our working together?
    Many things!
    a. Stopped preparing long documents of strategies and options.
    b. Learned to think more on my feet and respond verbally, immediately.
    c. You made me a much better strategist and counselor.

    7. Question 9

    Quite often, Question # 9 triggers a conversation. “Why did you come to me?” Here is an answer from a senior practitioner and tends to reflect similar answers to this question.

    She said, “I reached out to you because when I think of who has made an impression on my career, you are among a handful. I’ve appreciated your direct and invaluable approach to counseling executives. It’s straight as in forward, considerate, decisive, and anchored in doing the right thing…while being prepared if that doesn’t happen.

    My Recommendations for you

    Whatever the stage of your career, you can begin using this technique to teach yourself about yourself, a handful of real questions in every evaluation situation. Keep it simple.

    If I’m seeking evaluation of a presentation, meeting, coaching session, or similar setting, I’m interested in learning what other people learned from spending time with me, from their perspective. If I am going to take some participant’s time with a survey it should be:

    1. Brief, 5 questions is the ideal length. You can always follow up with more.
    2. Help them learn about what they learned during their program or experience with you, while also helping you learn about yourself. 
    3. What to avoid.

    Avoid #1. Surveys that just collect data mindlessly and without purpose. It’s irritating. Stop participating. Focus on fact and truth-gathering approaches as advocated here.

    Avoid #2. Forced answer polls/surveys. Forced answers corrode and contaminate survey results. Forced answering is forced lying that produces mis or disinformation. STOP It. Avoid any data gathering using forced answers. Survey Monkey always uses forced answers. All Monkey Surveys and surveys requiring forced answers are garbage.

    Avoid #3 Lying. Expose lying. The more lies you or others you know fabricate and compound, the deeper the truth gets hidden and harder to find.

    • Allegories
    • Analogies
    • Euphemism
    • Lies
    • Metaphors
    • “Nuanced Descriptions”
    • Obfuscation
    • Stories – are never the truth.
    • Translations, “in other words…”

      Look familiar?  Yes, we use some of these tools and techniques when trying to avoid the truth. In the end it’s a lot easier to be simple, sensible, positive, declarative and plainly truthful.
       
      Truth avoidance is the greatest contributor to confusion, doubt, suspicion and needless usually permanent trust damage.
       
      To be continued.

What is the Manifesto* for Your Practice?

What are the Ethical, Practical Principles and Behaviors That Guide and Drive Your Practice?

The Seventh Discipline of the Trusted Strategic Advisor

My career has been more than forty years of refining what I stand for, always searching for the truth first and helping others do the same. I share this list with anyone interested, but especially those I’m advising. In order to be a truly successful Trusted Strategic Advisor, you need to teach what you coach in ways that help CEO’s absorb what you are talking about and do, in many cases, what you advise. You need to teach you right along with the advice you give.

This list keeps growing and so will yours. Start building your own practice manifesto now.

What will your practice manifesto look like? Here’s mine to get you started.

*A public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives. – dictionary.com

Jim’s Practice Manifesto

  1. Seek the truth first, find ethical, civil, and decent pathways, promptly and urgently.
  2. Truth is generally best expressed in positive declarative language and consists of 15% facts and data and 85% emotion and point of reference.

    There is a mistaken notion (from business schools) that the more facts presented the more likely the truth will emerge. The exact opposite is true. The more facts and data are released, the more confused people get, but more importantly, burying people, especially victims, in facts and data makes them feel stupid or foolish, and they get angrier and more powerful. The challenge of truth is understanding the emotionality of truth and especially the fact that there are different points of reference on every issue or question. In fact, there is a different point of reference for every witness, every victim, and everyone affected. Each of those points of reference is valid and true from the perspective of the person involved.

    The challenge of truth is always finding significant and important factual information but understanding, interpreting, and sometimes negotiating with people whose point of reference is very different from others involved in the same issue, situation, or problem.

    Management often uses facts and data as a defense against having to interpret, explore, and explain emotions. The more facts are used as weapons, the bigger your loss will be when you finally settle the issue.
  3. Use truth-hiding and truth-confusing techniques very carefully. Storytelling, metaphors, allegories, euphemisms, “ . . .in other words”, similes, and analogies rarely reveal, explore, or produce truth. Remember, these techniques are frequently used by liars. If something is a half-truth, it is a whole lie.
  4. Avoid known patterns of failure: silence: stalling: denial: victim-confusion: testosterosis: arrogance: searching for the guilty: fear of the media: whining. All of these behaviors build suspicion and anger.
  5. Ask better, tougher, more constructive questions than anyone else.
  6. Be 15 minutes early, or first.
  7.  Avoid surprises, forecast trouble (have a readiness plan in hand).
  8. Think before you edit, put your pencil down. Question all edits. Resist mindless editing. Seek simple, sensible, constructive explanations and information. Effective editing makes the truth easier to see, often in fewer words.
  9. Constantly challenge the standard assumptions and practices of our profession; build its importance, enhance the ability of all practitioners to better serve others from their perspective. Raise your hand. Speak up. Break the silence. Reveal the truth.
  10. Be productive, do the doable; know the knowable; get the getable; arrange the arrangeable, avoid the dumb and troublesome decisions and actions you know you should. Make a list. Remember. If you make a bad decision, never repeat it.
  11. Say things others fear to say, voice them first. Start with what is obvious and likely true. All crises ripen badly. In crises, things will always get worse before they can get better.
  12. Say less but make it more important. Write less but make it more meaningful and memorable.
  13. Go beyond what those you advise and those you work with already know or believe.
  14. Intend to make constructive, positive ethical differences every day. Keep a log.
  15. Intentionally look at every situation and circumstance from different, constructive, and surprising perspectives.
  16. Look out for the real victims. Always put victim interests first. Fail to do this and the victims will bury you.
  17. Remember, it’s your boss’s “bus.” They get to drive it wherever they want. Your role on “the bus” is to help the driver drive better. If you don’t like it, or them, can’t change it, or them, hop off, find another bus, or find and drive your own.
  18. Stop trying to save the day. The biggest staff mistake is to hang around in the vain belief that you can redeem yourself or, change how someone powerful does things, believes, and behaves. When they are done asking you and listening to you, find a new bus. When they have an opportunity to look a new direction, they surprise you by hiring an outsider and then you’re gone.
  19. Remember the loyalty exception: If whatever is happening on your bus is illegal, immoral, monumentally stupid, what are you doing there anyway? Leave that bus today and find a better one!
  20. Be aware that every issue, question, concern, or problem is a management/leadership issue, question, concern or problem (rather than a crisis) before it is any other kind of issue, question, concern or problem (including public relations).
  21. Start where leadership or management IS or you will end up in different places and fail.
  22. Strive for simple, sensible, sensitive, positive, constructive, compassionate, helpful, honorable, and ethical action options. All other approaches lead to trouble.
  23. The most usable advice format for leaders and managers to choose from is options. Always provide your advice as 3 options: doing nothing (0% option), doing something (100% option), doing something more (125% option). Let the person whose career is on the line choose the options and make the key decisions. That’s their job. Your job is to identify plausible, ethical, sensible, doable options from which managers and leaders can choose.
  24. Be Inconsistent. Inconsistency is the greatest virtue of strategy. The strategist’s greatest value is intentional inconsistency. If all you can provide are things the people around you already know, why are you there?
  25. Avoid, prevent, or stop Evil, the increasingly intentional harming of innocents and people without power. Innocents include vulnerable populations, animals and living creatures, and living systems (forests, bodies of water, the earth). (See V. below.)

My Fundamental Beliefs

  1. All questionable, inappropriate, unethical, unconscionable, immoral, predatory, improper, victim-producing, and criminal behaviors are intentional. Adults chose specifically to do wrong.
  1. All ethical, moral, compassionate, decent, civil, and lawful behaviors are also intentional.
  1. The choice is always clear and always yours.
  1. Those who lead with genuine integrity, civility, respect, decency, humility, and compassion are likely to be more ethical, and trustworthy.
  1. Unconscionable intentions, behaviors, actions, and decisions that vilify, demean, dismiss, diminish, humiliate, cause needless but intentional pain, express anger and irritation, demand or bully, are mean, negative, insulting, disrespectful, disparaging, tone-deaf, without empathy, that intentionally injure, accuse, overbear, are punitive, restrictive, exceed the boundaries of decency, civility, and integrity, are, in my judgement, all unethical.
  1. Teaching what I can do, how I can help, the perspectives I bring, this is the substance of the seventh discipline, teaching the CEO how to best utilize my skills and services. If it doesn’t work or only works for a limited time, be prepared to move on, because they may have for any number of reasons.

What About You?

What are the principles that guide your practice, your thinking, your actions? What does your practice manifesto look like? I am always open to conversations about all these ideas. Contact me at jel@e911.com, subject line: “Ethical and Practical Principles”. If you do write or call me, I will send you my powerful one-page “Model Personal Profile, The purposes and passions of my life”.

Marshall Goldsmith: ‘You Can Be More’

by– Dan Bigman, editor, Chief Executive. dbigman@ChiefExecutiveGroup.com

Many people consider Marshall Goldsmith the best CEO coach in the world. And in his most recent column for Chief Executive, written with co-author Kelly Goldsmith, he shares one of the best coaching tips he’s ever received—and how you can deploy it successfully while leading your company.

What is it? Simple. Use four challenging words: “‘You can be more!” As the Goldsmiths write: “The greatest return on training and development can come from coaching top performers and encouraging them to be even better, as opposed to ‘fixing’ problem employees who are performing poorly.”

For chief executive officers, “it can be tempting to spend most of your coaching time working with people who have problems. There is nothing wrong with this, but you may be missing a much bigger opportunity.” Instead, they write, try this simple change in your leadership SOP:

  • Change your focus. Make a list of the highest potential leaders in your organization. People who are already doing a great job. They are “on a roll,” hitting the numbers and doing great work. They are not only comfortable; they are feeling great about their performance.
  • Challenge the best. For each one, think how you can deliver a “you can be more” message that might change their life in a positive way. Communicating that “you can be more” to a top performer is the ultimate form of positive recognition. You are recognizing how great they are doing now and communicating your belief that they have the capability of becoming even more.

Finally, they write, never stop applying “you can be more” to yourself. “Never get too comfortable,” they write. “If you want [your team] to become the leaders that they have the potential to be, let them watch you do the same thing.” Read the full column >

— Dan Bigman, editor, Chief Executive. dbigman@ChiefExecutiveGroup.com

Special Note: If you’re looking for insights into the biggest issues facing CEO’s, along with strategic ideas, solutions, and interviews. Consider subscribing to Executive: CEO Briefing.

Subscribe Free at www.chiefexecutive.net, contact@chiefexecutive.net or 203-930-2700

Your Integrity Manifesto
The Ingredients of Integrity and Trust

Credibility and Trust are built on the fundamentally acceptable behavior of an organization and its leaders. The approach advocated here comes from observing hundreds of leaders and managers over 40 years and how they achieved a reputation for trustable behavior.

In general, these managers believed in or had a mantra similar to; “Credibility is conferred on us based on our past behavior.”

Seven Trust and Credibility Beliefs and Behaviors;
 The Ingredients of Integrity

These Seven actionable tasks or assignments, when executed by leadership example and emulated by everyone in the organization fosters a reputation for trust and credibility and demonstrates extraordinary integrity.

I call this a manifesto because it contains language publicly professed to motivate, activate, energize, and inspire constructive action. It’s a public commitment to do what you say you’ll do,  proof of your integrity, and a powerful proof of leadership. Employees love to talk about concepts like these.

  1. “When problems occur, we’ll be prepared to talk openly about them and act quickly to respond to them operationally.”
  2. “If the public should know about an issue or problem which could affect them, we will voluntarily talk about it as quickly and as completely as we can.”
  3. “When problems or changes occur, we will keep the community posted on a schedule they set until the problem or changes have been thoroughly explained or resolved.”
  4. “We will answer every question the community may have and suggest and volunteer additional information on matters the community has yet asked questions about, but will.”
  5. “We will answer every question, as long as questions are being asked, no matter how many times a question is asked and answered. When people stop asking questions, we will continue to publicize questions and answers to assure that all those affected by decisions and actions have a chance to recognize the information we’re providing.”
  6. “We will be cooperative with the various news platforms and organizations, but our primary responsibility is to communicate directly with those most directly affected by our actions as soon as possible.”
  7. “We will respect and seek to work with those who oppose us.”

The Ethical and Practical Principles That Guide Jim’s Practice – 2024 Version

  1. Wake up each day thinking “Today I may do the most important thing I will ever do.”
  2. Act ethically, strive to find ideal behaviors, promptly, and urgently.
  3. Be 15 minutes early, first in line, quicker than fast, smarter, sharper. Get the best choices.
  4. Consistently challenge the standard assumptions and practices of our profession, build its importance, and enhance the ability of all practitioners to better serve others from the other’s perspective. Raise your hand. Your most powerful change tool: be Inconsistent.
  5. Do the doable; know the knowable; get the getable; arrange the arrangeable.
  6. Expect to be helpful and useful. Teach Pattern recognition the source of most successes.
  7. Focus on what truly matters. Always through an ethical lens.
  8. Go beyond what those you work with believe or already think they know.
  9. Intend to make a constructive ethical difference every day. Ask better questions.
  10. Intentionally look at every situation and circumstance from different perspectives.
  11. Look out for the real victims. Act to protect them and prevent more.
  12. Remember, it’s your boss’s “bus.” They get to drive it wherever they want. If you don’t like it, or can’t deal with it, hop off and go to somebody else’s bus, or drive your own.
  13. Every issue, question, concern, or problem is a management issue, leadership question, concern, or problem before it is any other kind of issue, question, concern, or problem.
  14. Start where leadership or management is or you will arrive at different destinations.
  15. Recommend doable, sensible options. Help the boss build solutions. That’s what they do.
  16. Preserve being heard: If the boss won’t agree to or do your suggestion in 10 days, they never will. Give it up and suggest something else. New ideas get old fast.
  17. Do the Platinum Rule: help others help others achieve what matters to them from their perspective. You will reap the thanks and gratitude you almost never get acting alone. Greet enthusiastically, respond faster, suggest the ground rules, almost always win.

The Grand Crisis Response Strategy is READINESS

Five Crucial Time-Sensitive Readiness Steps
For Getting the Most Important Things Done
And describable
From the Start of a Crisis.

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

The most reputationally challenging time in crisis is at the start and very early crisis moments. So little is known and is very sketchy. The slightest awkward silence, whatever the reason, causes ripples of questions and trouble throughout your response.

Stop thinking, talking, and describing crisis…think, talk, and describe READINESS.

If your readiness preparations follow a grand strategy including speaking from the start, the danger of unexplainable and questioned silences can be avoided. Unfolding event patterns teach you what actual future responses will be required. Choosing to remain silent, whatever the reason, once discovered, is frequently a fatal management career error.

Because you will require some time to understand exactly what is going on you can immediately implement a strategic five-step first communication management response. The goal is to launch your response narrative, and your first response action intentions within the first 60-120 minutes of the crisis incident, whatever the crisis happens to be. Link to Jim’s Wisdom #47

When you don’t (and you often can’t) exactly know what’s happening you can describe and discuss the strategic, and incremental response action steps to be taken, and those already underway.

The Grand Response Readiness Strategies:

  1. Stop the production of victims. This is response goal #1. Continuous victim production and response mistakes are what drives media coverage, survivor and public interest, the emotionalization, the commentary and criticism from 1000 different sources focused on your reputation destruction.
  2. Manage the victim dimension. This is what leaders and senior managers should be overseeing rather than hanging around and second-guessing the command center. Link to Concise Advice #21.
  3. Calm and settle down employees and those directly affected. Communicate directly and frequently with employees, stakeholders, survivors, and those directly affected. Use frequent brief 50–150-word internal statements. These are more easily created, understood, approved, and released than news releases.
  4. Notify those indirectly affected, those who will have a problem or have a problem now because you have a problem; regulators, licensing authorities, neighbors, partners, collaborators, key stakeholders, those who need to know and who should hear from you very promptly.
  5. Manage the self-appointed, the self-anointed; the news media and the new media, those who opt in on their own, the critics, the bellyachers, the backbench bickerers, and the bloviators.
  6. Your message and statement content is the same information you have provided internally a bit earlier.

This is the strategy management needs to help everyone affected inside and outside focus on what matters most and first. Far too many response plans have only legacy media public relations-driven tactics. Readiness for crisis communication response is a management responsibility driven by simple, sensible, constructive, positive, and clearly achievable communication techniques. Communication that begins externally always conflicts with what insiders know. It’s problematic.

Always remember, the technically perfect response appears to be flawed if there is a failure to promptly speak in the early going. Silence always implies doing nothing while victims are being created. There is no credible, believable, or acceptable explanation. The toxicity of silence is completely predictable and preventable.

Key Snap Readiness Wisdoms:

  1. A crisis is defined as a:
    • People-stopping, show-stopping, product-stopping.
    • Reputation redefining events that create victims and/or explosive visibility. I’ve yet to find or see a more clear and concise crisis definition.
  2. “Crisis Management” is a PR term invented to scare managers and leaders into funding communication and other crises related activities. Stop using it.
  3. “Readiness” is a management term (from 9-11-01) that drives serious and often crucial activities that directly and promptly address serious problems.
  4. All organizations have problems. That’s really what management primarily exists to remedy. Crises are extremely rare. Crises are always crucial problems that need to be prepared for.
  5. Even the most technically perfect crisis response will be remembered badly, permanently if communication fails in the beginning. Regardless of the problem itself, the blame will fall on those that failed to communicate appropriately and strategically from the beginning.
  6. Silence always implies doing nothing while victims are being created. There is no credible, believable, or acceptable explanation.
  7. The toxicity of silence is completely predictable and preventable.
  8. Silence, stalling, blame-shifting, and other diversion strategies, if discovered and revealed, are often fatal professional errors by those in charge, however competent they may be.

Destructive Language Decimates Trust

Leadership language choices in difficult situations are often early indicators of dysfunction. In fact, their adverse behaviors and language choices are often diagnostic of their dysfunction. Here are some examples to watch for:

  • Denial
  • Defensiveness
  • Deflection
  • Denigration
  • Disrespect
  • Demeaning
  • Discrediting
  • Distain

Not only do these behaviors, attitudes, and language choices destroy trust, they create victims, critics and angry people, families and organizations. These groups will work tirelessly to make leadership pay the price for unwanted behaviors.

These negative examples are enormously time-wasting, often trigger similar even more emotionally negative responses in return, foster contentiousness, confrontation, contempt, confusion and consternation. These behavior choices are corrosive to trust.

James E. Lukaszewski (loo-ka-SHEV-skee) is widely known as America’s Crisis Guru. He is a speaker, author (13 books and hundreds of articles and monographs), lecturer and ethicist (Emeritus member of the PRSA Board of Ethics and Professional Standards BEPS). His book Lukaszewski on Crisis Communication, What Your CEO Needs to Know About Reputation Risk and Crisis Management had dozens of examples of corrosive behaviors and what to do about them.

© Copyright 2023, James E. Lukaszewski. America’s Crisis Guru® Get permission to reproduce or quote. Contact the copyright holder, jel@e911.com.

Jim Lukaszewski – Snap Wisdom #4

Compassionate but with Caution

  1. Control your language and control your own emotions: Avoid taking personal criticism, inflammatory language, and emotionally charged words, such as “ashamed,” “embarrassed,” “humiliated,” “bad,” “ugly,” “weird,” “worried,” and “scum.” They are just words. Until you react. Then they become headlines.
  2. Instead, move to answer questions constructively and manage your emotional reaction by focusing on positive declarative responses.
  3. Compassion and empathy sometimes use Color (emotional) Words to emphasize that we understand the damage we’ve done, or that others have suffered, such as:
AshamedShocked
Concerned Tragic
DisappointedUnfortunate
EmbarrasedUnhappy
FailedUnintended
HumiliatedUnnecessary
MortifiedUnsatisfied
Regrettable

CAUTION: Be very careful how and whether you express empathy.
Empathetic sentiments can cause negative reactions from victims. Be
ready for that.

Do constructive, positive, helpful actions and deeds they will speak
louder than words.

Remain quiet. Let someone else speak, or simply, let your empathetic
actions and deeds do the talking.

© Copyright 2023, James E. Lukaszewski. America’s Crisis Guru®
Get permission to reproduce or quote. Contact the copyright holder, jel@e911.com.