It is the hardest questions that participants ask during a Business Acumen learning journey where we teach strategic thinking and financial management skills. “We just created our winning aspiration and strategy for our simulated company, but how do we know what financial metrics to choose and follow so we know if we are achieving success?”

The first and most obvious response is that it depends on the winning aspiration you are choosing to execute. In business, there are only three different aspirations or value propositions a company can choose and all the research shows that the most successful companies are the ones that choose one value proposition, stick with it, and execute it flawlessly.

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It’s August.

Where did the time go? Seriously. How is it August?

As we move into the heart of the 2^nd half of 2021, there is no playbook for what we just went through and where we are about to go. It is literally changing every day, every week, every month.

With this constant, chaotic, and intensive change, the skills of change leaders are being depleted and change leaders are desperate to gain new skills and tools to be effective.

Over the past few months, I have been privileged to be working on several new change leadership simulations including our new, Practical Change Leadership business simulation being created in conjunction with Dr. Elizabeth Moran who is writing a great new book on the topic.

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Business leaders, mangers of people and processes, and HR Business Partners have heard all the excuses millions of times about how employees in need of critical skills like Business Acumen can’t make it to the stand-up training session:

• “I’m too busy”
• “It’s going to be boring”
• “How can they teach business acumen in a couple of days when it takes years in a university program?
• “Finance is too complicated”
• “What do I need to know that stuff for, I’m just a {fill in the blank}, I don’t make business decisions”
• “I can’t be away from home”

Whether you care to admit it or not, the hard truth is that training and development is more important than ever. Not only is training employees a great retention tool, but in these highly volatile times, having new skills can help create strategic advantage and drive business results.

Up until the pandemic, self-paced learning was mainly libraries of eLearning that was generally hit or miss. But now, as we come out of the pandemic (hopefully), there are new tools and applications that go far beyond traditional eLearning.

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Going through a Business Acumen skill building workshop is hard work. Going through a Business Acumen skill building workshop if you have a limited background in business is even harder work.

This week, I am conducting a virtual Business Acumen session for a global audience of high potential leaders, all of whom have strong technical and engineering backgrounds but little to no business backgrounds.

In the session, where participants are running their own simulated companies, they set strategy and then execute the strategy through a series of interrelated operational decisions. As I was facilitating, one of the groups asked about inflation and whether they should consider it as an important impact on their decision making. The reason behind the question is that a lot of companies are talking about inflation, seem to be worried about inflation, but may not fully understand all the impacts of inflation. The purpose of this blog is to share some of the thoughts and insights discussed in today’s Business Acumen program with our readers.

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Take a quick tour of LinkedIn and you will see many well-intentioned leaders and companies proudly showing off their “welcome back” packages and sharing their plans for helping employees “re-adjust to coming back to work.”

As a recent participant of a Fundamentals of Business Leadership simulation workshop shared during a discussion of best leadership practices, “What the [expletive deleted] is wrong with these people? Back to work? What do they think we’ve been doing for the past 16 months? They are treating us like we are summer campers and it’s insulting.”

This awkward idea of “welcoming employees back to work” has been one of the most startling and surprising parts of the pandemic and it’s a step backward for good leadership best practices. I am currently in the process of writing a portfolio of micro-simulation leadership scenarios for a lead client and they wholeheartedly agree that we need to make sure that leaders have the right skills and tools to help the transition to a hybrid work environment and stay focused on the most important thing: business results.

Based on our initial research and work with leading clients, I am happy to share the top three best practices that leaders should be utilizing in the new hybrid environment and none of them includes the words, “welcome back to work.”

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