Authors Note: This and all blogs that I share are 100% written by me and do not include any content generated by an AI search engine. In our blog posts, I try to share real-world practical insights that are based on the unique experiences and intellectual property of our organization.

I had a fascinating discussion with a session leader this week while interviewing him for a custom business leadership simulation. The business leadership simulation is going to help build advanced leadership capabilities and one of the competencies it focuses on is creating an environment of psychological safety. My question was fairly straightforward; “Will you share with me a story or an experience where you or another leader did a great job of creating a culture of psychological safety.”

The leader paused for a moment and asked if I wouldn’t be offended if he slightly changed the wording of my question to include “equitable psychological safety.” I thought for a moment, because over the past few years while we have all been learning about psychological safety we’ve been taught that it is an important foundation for creating and maintaining equity and inclusion on teams and within organizations. But I think this leader was saying something different so I asked him if equitable psychology safety is different from psychology safety that supports equity and inclusion.

Something dramatic has happened to sales professionals around the world. Over the past six months, I have been working on several large global sales training engagements and I have noticed that a significant number of business-to-business sales professionals who once managed a portfolio of accounts and had the responsibility of growing those accounts through maintaining them and then looking for new opportunities have given up on new sales development.

I’ve been told by their managers and the sales professionals themselves that they simply are refusing to do new business development. What was once a hybrid of both farming and hunting has now evolved into an either/or role. Either you are a farmer and take orders from existing relationships, or you are a lone wolf hunter going after new business, bringing it on, and handing it off to a service team. The middle has gone away and in my opinion, that is a shame for everyone involved but most specifically the customer who can benefit from the experience and value that a true sales professional can add to an account.

It seems like a simple question until you try to answer it.

Last week, a client and I were working on the design for a custom business simulation to teach Business Acumen skills to the top 150 leaders and one of the issues she was struggling with was how to share with the executive leadership team the way we are going to train the participants on the topic of quality.

This blog is an interesting summary of the findings and hopefully is of interest to you as you continue to build your business acumen capabilities.

Quality vs. The Perception of Quality

One of the first things I shared is that we must start the definition process by collectively establishing an understanding that there is a significant difference between intrinsic and benchmarked quality and the perception of quality. In its purest technical form, an organization can measure quality to some sort of defined benchmark. But that benchmark is going to be arbitrary and at best based on a combination of science and objectivity.

I have had the opportunity to reflect on a very successful and interesting experience during my time at the recent #ATD23 conference in San Diego, California.

A few of my observations include:

In-person meetings and conferences are back – There were over 9,000 attendees at #ATD23 and you could feel the energy and appreciation for the freedom to explore and learn about leadership and talent development.

There is a lot of pent-up demand – Between the pandemic and the uncertain economic environment, many organizations have been treading water in terms of bold, new innovative ways of building capabilities. Now, many key decision makers are actively and aggressively looking for new solutions.

There are many industries where times are very tough right now. Core markets have slowed down and demand has been cut by up to 20% year over year in too many industries that drive the global economy. Some places like central Europe and Eastern Europe have been hit even harder because of the ongoing Russian war and the impact it is having on energy prices and other goods. Even industries like high tech which have been fairly recession proof are also feeling the effect as consumer confidence and demand continue to erode. The impact of these tough times transcends the organization and has an impact on every employee.