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?
The Case for Business Acumen – Thrive or Survive
Just because employees come to work and are busy doesn’t mean they understand the ‘business of your business.’ This is no indictment of employees. As work has become more specialized and technical, employees are often judged by their functional skills alone. Accountants are judged for their accounting skills and technology employees' knowledge of technology. That sounds reasonable, right? That might be fine in businesses not living in a hyper-competitive world. But if you think this is the current work environment, you live in a time warp of denial.
The Case for High-Level Business Acumen
For businesses to survive and thrive today, organizations need employees who are not just doers but thinkers. Business challenges are complex and driven by external pressures. How can businesses expect to remain competitive if employees don’t understand the business issues driving the business?
Today, all employees need to be outwardly focused and both internally and externally responsive. They need to understand and work within matrix organizations, where they deeply understand other functional groups with whom they need to interact. Gone are the days of just coming to work, doing a job, and leaving for the day. The need for employees to have high levels of business acumen has descended deep into the organization. Knowledge workers are delivering products and services that often have a direct impact on business viability. Customer-facing employees represent the company brand to the public and can impact company sustainability, value creation, and growth. Everyone today is operating at more sophisticated levels that require higher degrees of business acumen than ever before.
The Current Dilemma
In our transformative world of complex ambiguity, we know the following:
It’s not surprising that employees come to work, put their heads down and get through their tasks with the hope of surviving another day. There isn’t the time or often the inclination for people to go beyond their practical work to ask the following broad business questions:
Every business lives and thrives in a broad macro context. These questions represent the intellectual curiosity needed to understand the ‘business of the business. Provide the Business Environment Where Business Acumen Can Flourish and Expect All Employees to Understand the Business Significance of their Work.
We invite you to learn more about how your company's people, potential, and performance all translate into growth, profits, and sustainability. See how you can engage your employees and ultimately have more satisfied clients and customers. Schedule a complimentary organizational benchmark assessment with our team. Learn how you can further motivate your people to their full potential to drive enhanced performance results that will bring your company to the next level.