Business Acumen – The words reverberate with the precise confidence of success. This manager seems to have a business compass to hone in on the directional decisions that are right for the organization.

Acumen, conveys a confidence and knowledge for efficient and effective business. Although these words convey a natural ability, the truth is that business acumen is more a verb in practice than a noun. You need to develop acumen as an active search for business skills and to applying that knowledge over time. Great concept…but now you’re thinking what does that mean to me in my career?

Business acumen is about focus so let’s think about a Ready – Aim – Fire approach for your success.

Business Acumen is a foundational competency for all leaders. You will lose credibility quickly if people perceive that you are weak at “knowing your stuff”. As with other skills and/or competencies, business acumen is an on-going process. Surprisingly, leaders can fall into a business acumen gap. They get so busy in the day to day activities of “taking care of business” that they fail to grow in business acumen. Or, worse, they have the belief they “know it all”. This is not just detrimental to that leader; it can have major repercussions for the organization, employees and the customers.

Why is it there are some people that easily draw crowds at parties and other social gatherings while others struggle to make connections? There are a number of reasons this occurs but surely, the “people magnet” in the crowd has what we define on the MSBCoach Leadership Maturity Model (LMM) as “Advanced People Skills.” Advanced People Skills are not only valuable in daily social interactions but they are essential to good leadership. After all, projects are managed and people are led. And good leaders must be equipped with the appropriate level of job knowledge as well as the people skills necessary to optimize the team’s production and job satisfaction. Advanced People Skills include the ability to motivate and influence others. Someone with this competency is also approachable, open minded, able to read people, and is collaborative. 

We live in a fast-paced, ever changing, complex world. As leaders we are constantly looking for more effective, efficient, and productive ways to do our work and that of those we lead. You probably have read the statistics that the Gallup organization published about the percentage of non-engaged and actively disengaged employees (http://www.gallup.com/consulting/52/Employee-Engagement.aspx). The cost is staggering. Even with jobs in jeopardy during tough economic times, employee engagement has not significantly increased and the reasons for the lack of engagement have not changed. Leadership is still the key but a specific style of leading is needed.

Today’s guest post is by Mike Figliuolo, co-author of Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results (you can get your copy by clicking here). You can learn more about Mike and the book at the end of the post.

Here’s Mike:

Alan leads a team of highly-intelligent scientists. While most of their time is spent on scientific work, a portion of their roles is administrative. Before Alan took over the team, many of these scientists hadn’t been trained on these responsibilities because their previous leader tended to do all this administrative work himself. Alan fell into that same habit when he took over the team.

During a hectic period, Alan and I spoke about how stressed out he was. “I don’t have enough hours in the day to get all this stuff done.”