As part of a recent Advanced Business Leadership program, we conducted a breakout session on the challenges of providing feedback in today’s turbulent business environment.  With so many companies implementing flatter more matrixed organizations, a team, project, or process leader could have dozens of employees working together without clear and distinct lines of reporting.  In these situations, the focus is always solely on the work and rarely on people's development.

One would think that in the virtual business world we live in where capturing someone’s attention for more than 38 seconds before they are eyeball deep into their smartphones that the digital transformation would have taken care of something as trivial as building trust among leaders, peers, colleagues and direct reports. But as all effective leaders know, that hasn’t happened, and, in my opinion, it never will because of the human element of leadership and interpersonal relationships as it’s related to building or destroying trust.

The digital disruption never will find some slick app-based alternative to trust because at the end of the day, leadership is the execution of your business strategy through the people who work with you and for you.  The job of being a great leader is to understand the strategy of your business and then align the right resources to make sure the strategy and value proposition is being executed flawlessly through the team leveraging the resources of the business.

Want to meet up with friends for dinner? Start texting your group chat of friends to see who’s interested.  When you hit your goal of at least 3, announce that anyone interested should meet at 7:30 pm at the corner of 16^th at Main.  When you meet up with everyone, you will figure out what type of cuisine everyone is interested in and use the OpenTable app to make an instant reservation…

Uh-oh, your first choice has no openings? Damn, shame on them.  Go ahead and write a negative comment on their Yelp page saying how difficult it is to get in.

But by the time you are done writing the negative comment, someone else in the group has just made an online reservation at another place so let’s meet there and check it out. Nah, the avocado toast with caviar appetizer doesn’t look fresh, let’s cancel and go someplace else…

The primary objective of every Sales Professional is to close business and generate revenues by presenting customers with an irresistible value proposition.  Revenue is the lifeblood of any business and without it, there simply is no business.

This week, I am working with a group of highly skilled Sales Professionals as part of a continuing, year-long curriculum that is focused in developing their Business Acumen skills.  From an instructional design perspective, we are building their Business Acumen skills so they can help present their solutions to their customer from the business perspective and not just the product perspective.  This approach identifies smart, and profitable revenues which is critical to their success.

“What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”

In William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet argues that it does not matter that her partner Romeo is from her family’s enemy house of Montague and that his last name is Montague.  Her point is that It’s just a name and the name shouldn’t impact their desire to be together.  Unfortunately for Romeo and Juliet it really did matter and as we all know, things didn’t end up so well for them.

In today’s evolving world of Talent Development, the disruption of going digital continues to change the way people learn and apply new skills.  The term “gamification” unfortunately remains a significant part of the training and development lexicon and let’s be honest, too many companies push the concept of gamification because they believe Millennials and Gen Xers will buy into a learning process that is hip, cool, and “gamified”.  I happen to believe that is a ridiculous argument and using the term gamification as a tool to sell training is bad business.  Great content, great experiences, and great methodologies of learning are what’s important, not the name you call it.