Mastering the Art of Senior Advisory: The Trifecta of Trust

And we Still Don’t Have good enough Use Cases for AI in business. Also, should executives listen to their gut?

One way or another, I’ve been advising or mentoring senior people most of my career. I spent my twenties officially as an advisor, cutting my teeth at the world’s then-largest advisory business. How to identify and analyse problems, how to present possible solutions to clients who were inevitably senior people, how to keep a professional tone and so on have been deeply ingrained in me from the get-go.

Later, when I moved to operational, strategic, general management and executive roles, these deep advisory skills served me well, whatever sector I was operating in. However, as my professional relationship with the people who sought my advice was now different to an advisor vs client relationship, and as I matured as an executive and gained serious first-hand experience in general management, my mentoring and advisory skills deepened too.

I see many people in mid-career adjustments or when they leave their startup, position themselves as advisors. However, many lack the basic skills and understanding that make someone not just a good advisor that people keep coming back to, but a trusted one that senior executives seek out.

There are, of course, many different aspects to giving good advice in your particular domain, and beyond being good at the technical aspects and keeping up to date with changes in your field, there are different ways industries and sectors approach problem-solving.

But there are three core attributes of trusted senior advisors that are universal across the board. These are a trifecta of non-negotiables if you want to provide value to senior executives.

And, on the other side of the table, if you are a senior exec working with advisors, and we all need to really, I would urge you to pay attention to these attributes that separate great advisors you can trust from the others.

The Trifecta for Trusted Senior Advisors:

1. Keep confidences

2. Ask good questions that make them think deeply and consider different perspectives

3. Give thoughtful opinions that not only reflect your own experience but also those of their unique circumstances

That’s it. But these are non-negotiable.

In my experience, where a lot of aspiring senior advisors fall down is that last little bit: they don’t pay enough attention to the unique circumstances their client finds themselves in. At senior levels, general advisory based on fixed playbooks doesn’t work.

Why? Because the main job of senior executives is to make good decisions.

Making good strategic decisions is hard because these decisions have to produce positive outcomes under the particular circumstances that the business and the executive are in. Playbooks need to be adjusted. Innovative solutions are often needed.

And as an advisor, you shouldn’t forget that the only person who truly understands the particularities of the situation is the senior exec. And they are the ones who ultimately have to make the decision.

Before I move on to gut instinct and intuition and whether they have a role in decision making, I wanted to share something from a very good survey of top US CEOs produced by Oliver Wyman Forum. Without going into the details of the findings, one thing really stood out to me.

As much as CEOs are alert to AI and want to use it for value creation, and nearly all those surveyed view it as an opportunity, actual use cases are few and far