Managers seem to accept the The Three Minute Drill well, as it’s a simple, direct practice for giving those you help focused, accurate, and complete information from which to choose a course of action. Think of it as a three-minute strategy drill where you are both quarterback and coach. You are only going to get three minutes, and you want to stay in the game, win or lose.
One crucial reality of being a trusted advisor is that the best and most useful advice is often needed in a brief period of time (on-the-spot) under the pressure of events. The Three Minute Drill is a compact, direct process for giving those you help focused, accurate, and complete information – framed in a strategic way – from which to choose a course of action.
Your discipline is to use this highly focused, structured, time-sensitive approach to get your recommendations promptly put forward. This allows the balance of discussion time, meeting time, or face time with those you advise to be productive and directed toward helping them make better decisions.
One special tip: explain to management, and those you advise, what you are doing and what the process is before you go ahead and use it. It is presented in a series of numbered steps. The numbers are very important because numbers in instructions gain attention and especially a sequence of numbers help people retain what it is you are talking about. This concept is based on a speaking word count of approximately 150 words per minute in English (other languages have different per minute word counts.) Word counts matter so, in explaining this process, as you walk through each step, be sure and mention the word count in each step. This helps people better understand why you have such economy of language and such positive, important and focused information in each step. If you practice this and work on it, it will improve your advisory relationship on three levels: impact, accessibility and influence. Good luck.
Six Steps to a New and More Powerful Relationship with Managers and Leaders
Step 1: Situation description (60 words): Briefly describe the nature of the issue, problem, or situation. This is the factual basis for “what we know now,” “why we need to take your time, now, to discuss this,” or “This is a new and important topic we need to talk about, now.”
Step 2. Analysis (60 words): Briefly describe what the situation means, its implications, and perhaps, how it threatens or presents opportunities. Include one or two key assumptions that validate the analysis. Managers always need to know why, but not in great detail. They’re also interested in the intelligence you’ve gathered or know about that supports your analysis, assumptions, and recommendations.
Step 3: The goal (60 words): The clear, concise statement of the task to be accomplished. Goals keep everyone focused forward. The goal should be stated as the behavioral, emotional, or intellectual change in your target constituencies. Useful goals are understandable, brief, achievable, positive, and time/deadline sensitive.
Step 4. Options (150 words): Always present at least three options for action. You can suggest more, but three is optimal for management to choose from. The goals you suggest are to “do something,” “do something more,” or “do nothing.” Having multiple options keeps you at the table and avoids the “death by question” syndrome that often strikes should you have only one recommendation. Lose that single recommendation through a crucial unanticipated question, and you’ll be out of the discussion for the duration.
Step 5. Recommendation (60 words): Be prepared to say what you would do if you were in your boss’ shoes, and why. The recommendation is usually selected on the basis of which option will cause the least number of negative unintended consequences. This is where you earn your paycheck and a place at the table. The boss always wants to know what you would do if you were in his/her shoes. Be prepared to walk through a similar sort of analysis for each of the options proposed.
Step 6. Justification (60 words): **Identify the negative unintended – but fully predictable – consequences of each option, including the option to do nothing. These are the reactions or circumstances that could arise resulting from the options you suggest (including to do nothing). Every management decision or action has consequences that can be forecast. Each also has unintended consequences that can also be forecast. Inadequate provision for consequences is what can sabotage an otherwise useful strategy.
Striving to provide advice in this 450-word format (three minutes) is powerful, conserves management time, and coupled with the discipline of suggesting three action options every time, will get you invited back to the table again and again.
This approach has value to management. If you simply make suggestions with no format or self-evident structure, what you suggest will be analyzed haphazardly: does your recommendation make money, or does it save money? Public relations can virtually never definitively demonstrate either of these unless the boss approves of the methodology. Public relations, to be of strategic value to management, must make a powerful, self-evident management contributions to decision-making processes.
What management needs most are sensible, relevant, constructive and positive options from which to choose the elements of their solution. Afterall, they’re the ones whose reputations are on the line in making these decisions. Yours is on the line for making significant, although small but strategic suggestions.
In Part 3, “What Table?,” we will discuss important business knowledge, how to assess whether you can bring in understanding beyond that which is known, and how to focus on the ultimate outcome.