The Trusted Advisor Initiative: Leadership Is About Tomorrow
What does it mean to advise a leader who is always thinking about what comes next? That’s one of the questions at the heart of The Trusted Advisor Initiative on CommPRO.Over the next several months, we’re sharing ideas and insights from Helio Fred Garcia, James E. Lukaszewski and Katie Garcia about leadership, trust, influence and what it really means to become a trusted strategic advisor.
We began with the idea that “the table” is a myth. Our second excerpt explored the advice itself, what leaders need from their counselors and how they measure its value.
In this third excerpt from Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, Jim Lukaszewski and Fred Garcia turn to tomorrow. Leaders, they argue, operate in the future tense. For the trusted strategic advisor, that means understanding where the leader is going, what lies ahead and whether your counsel is helping move the organization forward rather than keeping it anchored in yesterday.
James E. Lukaszewski, America’s Crisis Guru®, and Helio Fred Garcia are co-authors of Influencing Leaders: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, released in August 2026 by Wiley.
Excerpt from Influencing Leaders
Leadership is About Tomorrow
Why is it that when the boss walks in the room, people’s voices drop, everybody looks in that direction, and a sense of anticipation tends to build? It is because the only one in the room who knows where we are going, in other words, about tomorrow, is the leader or CEO who just walked in.
We all want to know where we will be tomorrow. In fact, whenever a boss or leader enters the room, the first obligation is to share some of the latest news that only the boss gets to know or would happen to have. This is, in fact, one of the most powerful reasons why being a Trusted Strategic Advisor is such an interesting position to hold.
You can only get that future view of where we are headed when standing next to and being around the person at the head of the line, the person who is making the decisions and choosing the future.
Leaders work in a future tense. The CEO is the chief strategist, and strategy is always about tomorrow’s goals. This is because leadership is truly about tomorrow and what lies ahead. Contrast this with much of staff activity in your own experience. Some are busy defending yesterday and making excuses for things that have not yet happened, while still trying to leverage their way forward without the kind of forward-thinking and extraordinary insight leaders tend to expect.
Leaders avoid yesterday’s thinking because it can be very confusing and unproductive. Besides, yesterday is already owned by everybody else from their own perspective. The past is owned by others intellectually, sometimes physically, perhaps financially, and certainly emotionally. And everyone’s perception of yesterday is unique and almost always at odds with the perception of others, especially the victims.
The fascination of leadership and leaders is that most of their work is in territory yet to be owned or occupied by anyone. This is the definition of tomorrow. It is an intellectual area where people can come together and where engineering solutions and ideas are still possible because tomorrow is where most people want to be in some positive, constructive way.
The Trusted Strategic Advisor constantly needs to decide whether to be a force for yesterday or a force for tomorrow. The closer you are in tune with tomorrow, the more likely your compatibility will be with the leader you are advising.
