How To Create Effective Business Acumen Training
How To Create Effective Business Acumen Training
Let’s say you hold a major position in a successful firm, with an entire docket under your belt. You are at the peak of your career, but you nevertheless feel there’s something missing; something that could take you and your firm to the next level. One day, during a break, you’re sipping coffee and reading a journal related to your industry. As fate would have it, you come across an interesting article on business acumen. And you realize it’s precisely what your firm needs.
Business acumen (also called business sense) is a combination of leadership skills, market orientation and knowledge of how the corporation makes money. Once you realize how vital it is for your workforce, you’ll wonder why you hadn’t known about it earlier. Business acumen is the in-demand knowledge that has helped ailing firms get back on their feet, made startups into instant hits and helped thriving corporations excel in highly competitive markets.
Development of business acumen
Investing in training is the surest way of developing business acumen in your organization. Retraining and retooling your workforce is a key step toward growth, advancement of skills, increasing productivity and preparing for the future. The training equips workers with the skills they need to make better decisions, improve the general output of the firm and serve clients well. Better leadership means a better firm, with higher quality products and services, better procurement processes, better remuneration processes and higher profits.
Effective methods of teaching business acumen
Business-acumen training can be divided into four categories:
- Leadership
- Financial acumen
- Market orientation
- Strategic perspective
Any CEO or director can benefit from training in all four spheres of business acumen. The training will furnish the managerial team with knowledge they can utilize in all key dockets of the firm, ensuring the firm runs like a well-oiled machine.
Leadership
A thorough grounding in business acumen transforms leaders from average professionals into versatile maestros, who are self-motivated to achieve. They will exceed personal and company goals, and refuse to accept mediocre results. Leadership is incorporated into business-acumen training, finessed and customized for department heads, leaders, managers, supervisors and upcoming leaders in your organization.
After the training, the leaders will be able to solve challenges, resolve disputes and amass expertise that will empower them to bridge the skill gaps in the corporation.
Financial acumen
The sooner employees get to know how their employer makes money, the better. This unlocks their hidden potential, propelling them toward proper facilitation of production, advertisement and delivery of goods and services. Investing in business-acumen training for employees is the surest way of sharpening the skills they already possess, heightening their confidence and boosting loyalty and productivity.
Your corporation will reap enormous dividends from instruction on financial acumen, especially when the instruction is offered to employees in dockets that directly fall under the finance department (as well as their supervisors, managers and departmental heads).
Market orientation
Training on market orientation, if channeled to the workforce tasked with market research and marketing of the products and services offered, yields exceptional results. Business-acumen training can be tweaked to suit marketing specialists in a corporation and their superiors, and will positively impact productivity.
Knowledge of the importance of the marketplace, client base, in-demand goods and services, and the roles these play in the creation and development of a corporation are covered in the market-orientation segment of business-acumen training.
Strategic perspective
Strategy is a key ingredient for success in the corporate world. Business acumen trains your workforce on strategic perspectives, focusing on accessibility, raw materials, markets, housing facilities and other vital issues for both the workforce and the firm.
Your corporation needs business-acumen training now more than ever. It will disseminate a priceless package of skills to the employees, from the lowest ranking and least experienced to seasoned expatriates who hold leadership positions. It is never too late to secure your workforce with this valuable training. Watch as skills get upgrades, departments perform better and productivity goes into overdrive.
Business-acumen training bridges skill gaps and allows corporations to prepare for the ever-dynamic workforces, business environments and markets. It will go a long way toward helping you realize both short- and long-term goals for your firm.
The challenge of making the training effective and applicable
One the greatest challenges of teaching business acumen is avoiding the dreaded, “oh my gosh this is boring, and I have no idea how to apply this” syndrome. Let’s not sugar coat this, business acumen training can be incredibly boring. Yes, it can be dressed up with some hands-on exercises and such. But in the end, it’s still a bone-dry topic.
Of course I’m biased, but we’ve had amazing success with using business training simulations to effectively teach business acumen in a far more natural and exciting manner. Best of all using business simulations for business acumen training makes the content very natural to apply back to participant’s work. Adults simply like learning this way. It’s exciting, applicable, fun, and highly educational. Just something to think about to help with the challenge of making business acumen training effective and applicable.