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:
- Putting yourself in the manager’s shoes operationally and non-operationally.
- Asking better questions in place of the media-related questions you normally raise.
- Providing sound managerially relevant reasons for communicating or not communicating.
- 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
- 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.
- 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. - 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.”
- * 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.
