As this year comes to an end and business leaders prepare for 2019, it’s time to start thinking about the trends and issues impacting the world of talent development.  The world of talent and development ranges from the C-Suite setting and executing strategy to the Talent Development departments creating and executing the talent strategy... to the new manager who needs new skills to manage a team of people who don’t report to her.  It has never been more exciting to be in this space and I believe we are on the cusp of several major breakthroughs that will arm organizations with the talent they need to effectively compete in disrupted global marketplaces.

This is the time of year when many organizations are coming down the home stretch and working  diligently to optimize their financial performance for the 4^th quarter and the end-of-year.  After the “close”, leaders will share with their investors and employees the “final” financials sometime during January.  The big indicators of success include revenue, revenue growth, profit, margin growth, cost reductions, and cash positions.  And all of that is good…

In the pursuit of perpetual learning and development about the important topic of Business Acumen, a question from one of our Software as a Service (SaaS) clients recently came our way: “Are there any patterns or observations we can make from a strategy perspective that we can learn from to make our business and skills better?”

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.