Regardless of your political beliefs we can all agree that we have seen and heard things in this election season (and the past for years) that most people never expected or imagined they would see in their lifetimes. The vitriol and nastiness were unprecedented and the lack of civility extremely discouraging. But this blog isn’t about politics or the outcome of the election. It is about how this competitiveness and deterioration of decorum has impacted business and the skills of Business Acumen.

The R&D leader was genuinely perplexed and astonished. “Wait, let me get this straight. Our company spends as much money on Marketing and Sales as we do on R&D? I don’t believe it. My team works on developing the most innovative products on the world. They should sell themselves. Why do we need to waste all that money on “Commercial” when everyone knows that we need more money for product development!

As the world continues to grapple with the realities of the global pandemic, which is spiking again, there is a quiet battle brewing in the executive ZOOM meetings of many organizations. The battle is going to be about what to do with Travel budgets that were allocated in 2020 to functional use but were used for other business purposes.

The combatants of this battle will be the Finance department versus functional departments including big spenders of travel including Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Human Resources. The IT departments are somewhere in the middle of that battle and preparing for their own battles related to digital security which might be the topic of a different blog on a different day.

We will all remember 2020 for the rest of our lives for many things including quarantines, home food deliveries, social distancing, political unrest, and new ways of working.

When thinking about new ways of working, one of the recent trends that I have observed is an entirely different approach to leadership development. Because of the disruption of COVID-19, everything about the way we work and lead has been disrupted. As a result, the way we are developing leaders has also change… and we are just starting to recognize some of the interesting differences and impacts.

As we continue to work with business and talent leaders around the globe on finding new ways of developing leaders in 2020 and beyond, a statement one of our dearest clients recently shared resonates well and summarizes one of the most significant changes that is going to impact us all, “The most important thing that we are working on is teaching our leaders to be more human.”

Part of the fun of being on the cutting-edge of leveraging digital technology in training and talent development is listening to client organizations share their insights and perspectives on things that many of us may take for granted.

Over the past 8 months, I have had the privilege of introducing professionals participating in corporate learning programs to the joys of learning through games. Leadership and business games to be specific. Many of the new organizations that I’ve had the chance to work with during the pandemic have used digital simulations because their previous methods of learning, most notably classroom based “talking head” types of programs, do not translate very well to the virtual learning world. Faced with the reality of doing nothing, having some trainer talk at their participants for 8 hours, or try something new, many organizations opted to try something new and the results have been spectacular.