New Business School Graduates - How to Get the Boss to Listen to You

Jim Lukaszewski is an accomplished strategic advisor and the author of Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor. Jim recently took time to answer a few questions on how new business school graduates can get the boss' attention and respect.

In your new book, Why Should the Boss Listen to You?, you outline seven disciplines strategic advisors need to succeed. Can you tell us more about these disciplines?

The disciplines refer to attitudes and behaviors that, if rigorously applied, will contribute to helping you become a trusted advisor.

Be trustworthy refers to the selfless commitment required of strategic advisors. It means managing your ego, recognizing what the senior people truly need, and putting that perspective and necessity ahead of your own pet ideas. It is also about keeping confidences and recognizing your role as both a conduit and an observer for the benefit of senior management. Trust has its limits. Some bosses are unethical, overbearing, and even maniacal. Trust has to be a two-way street. When it becomes only one way, it's time to get out.

Being a verbal visionary recognizes the fact that the leaders most powerful tool is verbal skill. Individuals and organizations rarely follow memos, notebooks or handbooks. People follow and act on what they hear from leaders, and how their leadership explains things. Another reason for exceptional verbal skill is the nature of decision-making at the top of organizations. Business schools still teach that the best ideas, solutions and forward thinking are the result of the clash of ideas and the verbal confrontation between leaders and their advisors. Jack Welsch, retired CEO of General Electric, called it "The Pitch." The advisor needs an extra thick stomach lining and a sense of ego management to survive in this environment.

Develop a management perspective acknowledges that if the advisor acts only from their own point of reference, their own knowledge base, or their staff bias, they will rarely be able to give effective advice and counsel. All management problems and questions are management problems and questions, first. Most advisors have some area of special knowledge and make the mistake of interpreting every management problem through the lens of that special expertise. That's a mistake. The strategic advisor always approaches problems and issues from the manager's perspective and priorities. This is probably the single most prevalent reason why younger advisors fail. They come across so convinced that their approach is correct, often based on how they feel, rather than what the numbers say, the pattern dictates, what's actually achievable, or the manager has the tolerance to absorb. Learn to use the language of operations. It's the only way you and the boss will speak the same language at the same time.

Think strategically means the habit and discipline to constantly question all assumptions, challenge the perspective of others, look at things from a different perspective intentionally and constantly, and strive to be inconsistent. Inconsistency in strategy is a virtue. The strategist is always looking for the unexpected result, the unusual perspective, even the lessons that the obvious can teach us. The leader is the organization's chief strategist, and those around him or her need to have a strategic perspective. The goal for the strategist is to provide interesting, unusual, hopefully viable options from which the leader can choose rather than traditional, consistency bound, staff driven recommendation.

Be a window to the future requires that the advisor look for, understand, and value the information and insight provided by the patterns, issues, decisions, questions, and circumstances present. Begin now to collect information on various business issues, problems, controversies, and scenarios that could occur in the future, based on what is happening today. I refer to these often as "war story files". Collecting information systematically on a wide variety of business, and societal scenarios prepares the advisor in advance, to better understand how these events come about, and most importantly, how they will play out. This strategy enables the advisor to be a forecaster of the future with a surprising level of accuracy (around 50 percent.) Anyone who can forecast anything with this level of clarity will be kept close to the boss.

Advised constructively most advisors suffer from the "face time fallacy," the notion that the time they spend either directly with or in the proximity of top managers is indication of their value and their position. This is foolish. What really matters is the value of each minute you spend directly giving valuable, crucial advice to those who lead. The rest of it is either wasted time, or delusions of grandeur. The truly valuable advisor always talks to time, and writes to time. In English-speaking cultures we speak approximately 150 words per minute. Every document, every script, every memo should be headed by a word count to give the reader or listener a specific time estimate necessary to deal with a document and the information it contains. Chapter 9 provides a very specific, three-minute drill for giving advice. It's powerful, it's purposeful, it maximizes the use of executive time, and it will be the most important tool for getting an advisor asked back again, and asked in earlier.