Everyone in business has of course heard of the performance conversation where you schedule  regular one-on-ones with direct reports and teammates to give coaching and feedback.  Learning about it, training on it, and practicing it probably accounts for 15-20% of all money spent on leadership development.  There are several great coaching models out there such as Coaching Essentials from The Marcus Buckingham Company (a division of ADP) and the GROW coaching model.

The cohort participating in the Business Acumen for Emerging Leaders learning journey was  paralyzed. They didn’t know where to begin, what to do, or what was going to happen to them. As they read through their materials and analyzed the P&L statements and Market Reports, I heard a voice say, “I never realized how hard it was running a company.”

The email waiting in my inbox on a lazy Sunday morning from one of my close friends from a partner company made my entire weekend.  “Thank you for having the courage to fight for what you believe in and not taking the easy way out by playing ‘not to lose’.  I’m inspired by your desire to play to win and confidence that you can figure out the best solution.”

One of the easiest and most passé things a leader can say to their team is “I wish you all could act like a start-up company.”  The implication of that statement is that the team should be agile, innovative, entrepreneurial, nimble, resilient, disruptive, and every other cool buzz word that you can think of.  Besides being somewhat insulting, teams in large organizations typically push back on this approach by saying that they “don’t have the right resources”, “they will get blamed for making mistakes”, “they aren’t compensated well enough”, “the systems are old”, and “customers don’t really like change anyway.”

For many of the readers of this blog, you are probably wondering “What is Rob Brodo up to this time?”  What do these three things; Business Acumen, Networks, and Getting Things Done have in common and why are they the title of this blog?