... Because they Don’t Have Business Acumen
As many business professionals know, there are a number of different “personality styles” that show 
up in the approaches of managers in the workplace. Great tools such as DiSC identify behavioral patterns managers and employees exhibit in the workplace that include “dominating”, “outgoing”, “influencing”, “steady”, “skeptical”, and “questioning”. By definition, skeptical and questioning people like to have all the details and aren’t comfortable until they have them.
Being skeptical, questioning, and detail oriented can be critically important in business especially if you are a leader responsible for making business decisions that have a significant impact on the results of your business. This approach can be beneficial in many instances and there is certainly nothing wrong with conducting deep analysis, understanding how things work, and doing everything possible to limit or minimize mistakes. Unfortunately, sometimes being too detail oriented can frustrate other styles who like to move quickly and make decisions on instincts and smaller data sets. We hear terms like “agility” and “disruption” being thrown around by organizations who think too much detail and too much analysis gets in the way of being innovative and agile.
But this blog isn’t about agility or the disruption. It’s about asking the question, “What if detail-oriented business people are focusing on the wrong details?”
During a recent leadership development workshop, I was training a group of high-potentials the skills of understanding styles so they could focus on strategic business execution through the people they lead. One of the most interesting dialogues we had in the session was on the issue of the “detail orientation” and a perception that without a strong understanding of Business Acumen business leaders could potentially be focused on the wrong details and priorities.
By way of example, this participant who works in Supply Chain Management shared a story of how her detail-oriented manager was hyper-focused on the types of trucks and actual driving routes their shipping vendor was using to ship products from the warehouse to customer distribution locations. The participant’s company manufactures innovative consumer products and the value proposition to customers is all about quality and functionality of the products. In the grand scheme of things, the routes to the warehouses and types of the trucks used has little to no significant impact on the value proposition. Even if for some reason there was a more “efficient” route or process, the marginal business value in terms of cost savings is insignificant. However, the participant shared that her manager “obsessed” for months over it and he called meeting after meeting to review the details and make suggestions to the vendor about their fleet and various shipping routes. It finally got to the point where the vendor started to push back and ultimately got fired only to be replaced with another vendor who experienced the same obsessiveness and also was replaced by the manager within a year.
In our discussion, the employee felt her manager lacked foundational business acumen skills to be able to understand the big picture and focus his attention-to-detail on more important issues that drive the business results desired by her company.
So, what are the right critical details to focus on? The answers can be found in the concepts and understanding of business acumen. If you or someone you know has found themselves in the same position as the manager with the wrong attention to detail, here are three quick tips to help you prioritize through the lens of business acumen:
Does the attention-to-detail orientation directly impact the value proposition to the customer?
This typically is a major issue of prioritization. All of the time, all of the effort, all of the resources that can be associated with an obsessive attention to detail are best served if the investment directly correlates to delivering the value proposition to the customer.
Does the attention-to-detail orientation directly support the execution of the value proposition?
This is where it could get tricky. The manager in this story probably thinks his obsessive attention to detail is helping the execution of the strategy by getting products to customers. Thea reality is that there is no measurable impact from a business acumen perspective.
Does the attention to detail orientation lead to a measurable success driver?
In business acumen terminology success drivers include elements such as revenue, profit, cash flow, customer retention, market share and more. If the attention to detail doesn’t directly impact any of the top metrics of success, then the effort is wasted.
