Tip Sheet: Want the CEO’s Ear? Learn What Makes Her Tick

As key staff people, communicators tend to take their positions with great seriousness and demand, or feel they deserve, the right to both sit at “the table” and to advise management directly on a variety of fronts and issues.

For many years I’ve watched hundreds of practitioners give advice to leaders and managers. I began asking each of them what they knew about leaders and leadership, as well as those leading the organization, to whom their advice was being offered. One startling reality is how little communicators, and most staff people, actually know about leaders and leadership, and about how the scope of the top leadership has changed over the years. Here are some of those changes:

1. Shorter tenures. Various consulting firms provide differing numbers, but the average tenure of a new chief executive in the U.S. and Europe is 41 months. That’s 164 weeks, 1,148 days, 27,552 hours. Hardly enough time to find the bathroom, plan some successful actions, establish their legacy and leave.

2 . Soft, non-operating intrusions occupy 40% of their time. In the past, CEOs could buck all angry people down to the lower levels. Generally, not anymore. When Congress wants to talk to a company, they want to talk to the CEO. When a legislature, angry neighbors or groups feeling threatened want to communicate with a company, they want to talk with the person at the top. Thus, 40% of a CEO’s time these days is spent on non-operating activities—sometimes highly emotional, extraordinarily difficult and often protracted negative problems.

3. Greater personal risk. More CEOs are being fired or replaced faster than ever before. We are indicting and attempting to prosecute ever larger numbers of business leaders. Sarbanes-Oxley still strikes terror, fear and anger in the hearts of corporate leadership.

4. Corporate leaders and managers operate in continuously contentious, aggressively negative atmospheres. In the “good old days,” becoming the CEO of an organization was a career capstone. After budget issues were resolved, CEOs represented the company in various forums; gave checks away; got their names and pictures in the paper; and generally had a pretty relaxing, interesting time. That’s no longer the case.

So on a daily basis, corporate leadership can be faced with the following scenarios:

• More constituents are asking more questions, making the decision and damage control processes longer.

• Small forces, even emotionalized individuals, can put a stop to very big ideas.

• Public debate is focused more on embarrassment, humiliation and blame-shifting than on progress, the future and positive outcomes.

• Anti-corporate activism and activists are more proactive, with much greater success.

Given these changes in the corporate leadership landscape, it seems awfully arrogant to me that one could walk into the office of a top executive and offer them advice on business solutions when so few have never studied leaders of the past and present, to determine what the patterns of behavior are, what the thinking strategies and patterns can be and what makes these people tick.

Even when it comes to modern management, I ask almost every audience I speak to how many read the Harvard Business Review or some other major business publication regularly. I would say about 5% raise their hands. Is it any wonder that management has trouble listening to us, hearing us and acting on what we suggest? Make no mistake, managers and leaders want to make decisions based on the advice they receive from trusted strategic advisers, especially when the issues at stake are powerful. Thus we need to know not only what makes leaders tick, but also what leaders want in their trusted advisers. As a coach to many CEOs over the years, here are seven things that I believe leaders demand from their advisers:

1. Advance warning.

2. Advice on the spot (rather than leaving the room to think something up and to bring it back later).

3. Advice, counsel and confidence.

4. Candid relationships.

5. Something beyond what they already know.

6. Strategic help and pragmatism.

7. What to do next, including options for action.

So the next time you walk into the boss’ office full of bright, shiny new ideas, take a more sobering approach, understanding the enormous pressures, contention and emotional issues that leaders now bear every single day.

CONTACT:

Jim Lukaszewski is president of The Lukaszewski Group, a crisis communications agency based in Minneapolis. He can be reached at [email protected].