Jim Lukaszewski has been a crisis management strategist and strategic advisor for nearly 30 years. He runs the Lukaszewski Group and has been called one of the “28 experts to call when all hell breaks loose.” Jim’s new book, Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor
Jim was interviewed in November exclusively for The Good, The Bad, The Spin.
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What can you tell me about your book?
Jim Lukaszewski: The book is called Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor
It’s often talked about as if most organizations usually are divided into two parts—the operations part and the staff part, and the staff part’s job is to help those who actually run the company, business or organization do their jobs better. So this is a book for staff people, for people in communications, human resources, IT, security, strategic planning, finance—all those staff functions whose job it is to help those who actually run the place, do a better job.
So it’s not a public relations book?
JL: It is a business book in the sense that anybody in any staff function, any staff position, will benefit from this book. It’s very much a public relations book because it’s about what both of us think we do, and that is to assist people that run things do a better job.
I wanted to structure the book so it applied to all of those people who had staff responsibilities, because fundamentally, this is what this is about. When talking to some public relations audiences about it, I think this is one of the revelations in the book. It is that the book has really two major propositions.
The first one is that every management problem or question is a management problem, issue or question before it’s any other kind of problem. Most staff functions look at every management situation through their own lens—through the lens of human resources or communications—so, by golly, everything that’s happening is a human resources or communications problem.
That’s one of the reasons why we have great difficulty becoming trusted advisors. It’s like the old deal if you’re a carpenter and all you’ve got is a hammer, then everybody looks like a nail.
There are other aspects of this. The book actually begins by talking about how managers think and what they do. It’s how leaders think, how they operate, the pressures they’re under and the obstacles they face.
What I find is this is a revelation to people. You would think that if you want to be a trusted advisor, you’d want to know something about what managers do every day. One of the main lessons of the book is you need to put yourself in their shoes first and look at the world from their perspective before you begin prescribing things for them to do to solve problems.
One thing about communications is, for example, and I don’t know what your background is, but if you’ve been in any kind of a business, what you learn quite frequently is that the moment somebody becomes a manager or supervisor, they tend to think they’re a pretty good communicator.
The higher they go in the organization, the better they think they are. If all you have to offer is communications advice, then that’s why they call you at the last minute and tell you what to say because they think they know how to do it (already).
The thing I’m pointing out is that you have to approach this business of advising people from a much broader perspective than just communications or, they’re not going to call you until they think they know what they’re going to say—then they call you and tell you how to do it and in effect what to do.
The first part of the book really has to do with three things: how leaders can operate under pressure and the environment they’re in; secondly, what they expect from those who advise them; and third, how to really achieve maximum impact.
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Jim’s new book, Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor
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