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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It’s Sunday afternoon and instead of relaxing with friends or reading a great book, you are terrified for the week ahead. You have a presentation to pitch a new internal idea on Monday, you are giving performance reviews for the first time as a new manager on Tuesday, and the sales team as asked you to join them to develop and present a proposal to a huge new prospective customer on Thursday. Plus, you still have all your other work!

One of the reasons that you are not looking forward to the week ahead is that you feel you are lacking financial literacy skills. Financial literacy being defined as ability to understand at a detailed level how your company makes money, how your customers make money, and how your competitors make money.

To help the readers of this blog, I’ve taken some of the content and business simulation data from our award-winning Business Acumen programs and consolidated the key points as a useful learning tool. Here are five things you need to know about financial literacy to avoid the Sunday Scaries:

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“Hey Rob, what is this thing called Sunsetting?” It is a question that I hear at least two times every time I run a Business simulation workshop. I will admit, each time someone asks me the question, I pause for a moment and think how could someone not know what “Sunsetting” is and then I remind myself that many of the participants running the simulated company in a foundational Business Acumen program do not have a business background and they are in the program to learn it!

What is “Sunsetting?

The concept of Sunsetting in business is the strategic and intentional phasing out or retiring something—a product, service, brand, partnership, agreement, policy, hardware, or software. Products and services are sunset when they are no longer profitable or when a company decides to change its strategy or focus. A recent example of sunsetting that impacted many people was Adobe’s decision to sunset their Flash Player. Other examples are various versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple’s iPhones. Apple typically sunsets a version 2-3 years after a new version comes out.

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