Strategic Human Capital Insights

We are excited to announce that we have launched a strategic partnership with Phoenix Group International (PGI), an executive recruiting firm with over 30 years of experience, to help companies around the globe.

We work with clients to assess the strategic alignment of human capital with business initiatives focused on value creation, and help determine focused performance benchmarks to include role definition and associated competencies. In our proprietary assessment process and human capital gap analysis, we will often see the need for additional professionals to fill key strategic roles. At that point, we will work together with PGI on these professional placements. This collaboration works so well because, holistically, we understand not only the position, but the culture of the client organization, and we can then evaluate the cultural ‘fit’ of the professional for the position.

In the past, I have written extensively about How to Make a Great Presentation.  There are many do’s and don’ts on the topic.  Recently, I attended a 3-day conference, (or attempted to try to make it through a 3-day conference).  Sitting in the audience, I was continually reminded about everything that went wrong with the presentation process I was witnessing.  So, I felt compelled to share the experience and some of my observations, hoping you don’t make any of these mistakes in your presentation.  Always remember that humans are sitting in the audience.  Don’t make them think twice about staying for your presentation.

1. Plan the Conference Daily Agenda with People in Mind: Each day ran for 12 hours – yes, you’re reading this correctly – 12 hours!  What were they thinking?  Who can keep 300 people engaged for that long?  You have to think highly of yourself to think you can be that interesting for 12 hours! 
   
   

Our world, at every level, WILL BE disrupted. The McKinsey Global Institute defines disruptive technologies as new emerging technologies that unexpectedly displace established ones and shake up the industry. Some disruptors will be easy to spot. Others will come from the most unexpected places. Organizations must consciously and continually focus on the outside horizon to anticipate disruption and deal with it as quickly as possible.

1. Disruption and Disruptive Technologies – The New Normal

• Living with Disruption as the Norm. BAU and the Steady State are a Thing of the Past: Change has become the norm, and business as usual (BAU), formally the goal, will become a subset of Change, Transformation, and Transition Management. Prepare to accept the fact that as soon as the steady state of BAU is achieved, disruption will shake things up again.  
  
  
• Welcome to the VUCA World (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity): This disruptive state will require new skills that have yet to be part of mainstream learning and development.   At every level of the organization, these skills will need significant investment capital to ''upskill'' current employees to function effectively in the VUCA world. We are facing a workforce talent crisis of epic proportions, and VUCA skills are leading the talent deficit. 
  
  

To truly embrace the new VUCA work reality, it's time to rethink all the old organizational structures, roles, and competencies. To help you rethink and re-evaluate your organization, we have compiled a checklist to see if your structures, functions, and competencies have expired in the VUCA work reality related to sales and business development.

Are we clinging to the old ways of doing things, hoping they will be relevant for the present and future work demands? Please read through our 2-part VUCA and business development checklist to understand your team or organization's strengths and potential weaknesses so you can accurately prepare to speed up your growth this year.

How do you maximize every sales effort? How do you ensure that every sales activity – starting right now – has rigorous analysis, thought, and planning behind it? The sales function is the growth engine that will make strategic initiatives a reality, or not! Business strategy is determined for the business year. You don’t have the luxury of waiting a month or quarter to start generating sales results. So, what can sales managers do to ensure that every salesperson hits the ground running with the right equipment and the right roadmap? That roadmap is the operating guide to the year ahead, and the basis of that operating guide is The Client Business Plan. Let's review the four pillars of the complex selling process.

Business Acumen can create a business synergy that can and does drive efficiency and profits.

How many employees are encouraged and/or motivated to take the time, or are guided by their manager, to learn the business beyond their own function?  With everyone so busy doing their ‘day jobs,’ that mentality is more often the exception rather than the rule. 

The Need for Business Acumen Is Critical

It’s Time to Take the Business Acumen Leadership Challenge
Rate your employees on their business acumen. And you can’t say that their job isn’t important enough. Every employee, in every position, should understand the business of your business. Your employees come to work every day. They sit at their desks or workstations and look busy. That’s the way it should be, right? Has ‘busyness’ become the new performance metric?

Given the pandemic/endemic and the disruption resulting from it, we can no longer hide from the change that is swirling around us. If you’re still wondering if the world of work is changing, just look at our current situation. You can’t escape reality.

Prior to the pandemic, we were experiencing unprecedented change while dealing with VUCA realities that were already here to stay. The pandemic has introduced an additional element of hyper-change that is fundamentally challenging our known operating patterns. This hyper-change has catapulted us into a completely new reality with the high probability that we will not return to our old normal state. For the foreseeable future, we will be in a constant VUCA state of confronting Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity as part of our new normal.

Today, we are right in the vortex of a VUCA world. We are living in a perfect storm where the tensions and demands of our changing external environment on many levels are creating real pressures on our internal ecosystems and the people working in our organizations. Old structures and roles have expired and are "past their sell-by-date." To truly embrace the new VUCA work reality, it’s time to rethink all the old organizational structures and roles. It’s easy to see when our food has expired, but are we quite as rigorous when evaluating if our structures and roles have expired as well? Are we clinging to the past, hoping our structures and roles will somehow be relevant for the present and future work demands? Let's examine the four critical skills required to excel in the new VUCA world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

1. Business Acumen: Understanding the Business of the Business 
   
   Your employees need to fully understand your business as it performs in the marketplace. If they do not, you cannot expect them to stay relevant and deliver forward-focused, value-added services and productivity.