Chapter One
- Strategists, Advisors and Leaders are Constantly Searching for Unique Skills
- The 11 Action Principles of The Trusted Strategic Advisor
- Eight Tests That Prove You are a TSA
- Do You Really Have the Stomach to be a TSA?
Welcome
Welcome to the first chapter of the first edition of the Trusted Strategic Advisor Fieldbook. I’ve been meaning to develop this document for many years. This Fieldbook is meant to be just that, things that work in the field. I will publish soon the table of contents for this Fieldbook and ask you to critique it and make additional topic suggestions. Here we go.
The Constant Search for Unique Skills
The higher one rises in management and leadership the more difficult it is to locate and be helped by people committed to your interests, needs and goals. Lots of competing agendas at the top.
Senior people and leaders are constantly in search of:
- Individuals with common sense.
- Individuals with a sense of humor.
- Individuals with their ears to the ground.
- Individuals who can tell which way the wind will blow.
- People who can spot the stinkers, fakers, and charlatans.
- People who are iconoclasts, rule breakers, and productive mistake makers.
- Pragmatists to help manage the inherent over-optimism of leadership.
- True strategists, inconsistent thinkers who ask the toughest questions.
- People who can find and tell the truth, first, fast, always.
Where do you fit among these categories? Few people have all of these attributes but most all these traits can be learned. Plus, an even bigger question for you: Are you willing to change yourself for the benefit of others, from their perspective?
One of the most intriguing aspects of being a Trusted Strategic Advisor is developing the habit and the skill of looking at the world through your boss’s eyes. Then, helping the boss see their world more clearly. The lessons are:
- Whatever your area of special expertise, chances are the boss needs more from you, beyond your knowledge base.
- The boss may ignore your advice, meaning seeking different advice or advisors, or just the notion that other kinds of advice are needed.
- Will you expand your vision and thinking beyond what you came with?
- Are you willing to find the help needed, even if that reduces your presence in the C suite? If you do this your time in the C suite will expand.
Among the greatest skills of a Trusted Strategic Advisor is the ability to anticipate the direction of leadership thinking and be ready to walk down whatever road is chosen very quickly or block the new direction with a better direction.
The TSA’s Working Principles
- Always say things that matter.
- Say less but make your messages more important.
- Talk to time; Three-minute bursts, 450 words
- Write less but make your words powerful, compelling, and memorable.
- Write to time; one page, one side; beginning to end, 450 words, 3 minutes.
- Suggest less. New ideas are less valuable than getting yesterday’s lingering problems solved.
- Be worth hearing because you are memorable, sensible, and say what needs to be said, when it needs to be said.
- Being memorable means suggesting crucial, incremental, achievable options from which leaders will choose . . .or reject.
- Provide three options every time: do nothing, do something, do something more. Use the three-minute drill.
- Remember, they choose the option, unless they choose to do something else. Be the first to support their initiative, or to constructively challenge.
- It’s their bus. You are a valued guest until you’re not.
Eight Tests You’ll Have to Pass that Demonstrate
You Have Become a Trusted Strategic Advisor:
- People remember what you say and quote you when you’re not in the room.
- People quote you in your presence.
- People tell your stories and share the lessons, giving you the credit.
- People tell your stories and share your lessons as though those stories and lessons belonged to them.
- Others seek your opinions and ideas, then share their agendas and beliefs with you in the hope of influencing you to influence the behaviors and decisions of others more senior than either of you.
- The boss asks others to run their stuff by you before running it by them.
- You are among the first called and the last consulted for important decisions.
- Meetings are held up waiting for you to arrive to make important contributions or interpretations of current events.
