An organization's ability to successfully navigate through the complexities of an ever-evolving business landscape including global and micro-competition, regulatory requirements, technological innovations, and workforce changes, to name only a few, will rest heavily on the management team's business acumen and strategic thinking skills. Business acumen is a cognitive thinking skill whereby we merge experiences, knowledge, education, and perspective into a reliable process for making quality decisions. Organizations that offer managers business acumen development opportunities, in the form of business simulation and financial acumen workshops ensure their company's future.
Effective business and financial acumen training programs build employees that are better equipped to strategically contribute, effectively plan, mindfully monitor, and adapt processes to deliberately meet the ever-changing needs of the changing marketplace.
Seeking a strategic planning consultant to facilitate your strategic planning retreat? Our evidence-based strategic alignment workshop facilitates business acumen and a growth strategy your team can get excited about. Call us at 281-469-4244 or visit our strategic planning consultants page to learn more.
TurnKey Coaching & Development Solutions’ customized Business Acumen & Strategic Thinking for Managers programs combine learning with real work projects to produce strategic solutions while developing your team’s business and commercial acumen. The training focuses upon developing strategic thinking and planning competency, strategic agility, financial and business acumen and more through a customized, business simulation competition experience.
Alternatively, our data-driven strategic alignment program builds business acumen while fostering alignment and commitment to a common vision. We also have a unique strategic alignment (similar to strategic planning) workshop that uses research-backed tools to drive out leadership’s priorities and the path forward, while cultivating a unified vision and business acumen. For more on our Strategic Growth Consulting and X-Ray program, please visit here.
As the cohort works collaboratively, through real business problems, the program improves your managers and/or HiPos’ leadership, collaboration, and teamwork skills. We believe it’s better than business simulation competition for your team, as all of the projects are selected to specifically solve company identified challenges.
An effective leadership development program includes competency development opportunities in three areas - Leading Self, Leading Others, and Leading in Business.
Our business strategy simulation and business acumen program can be optioned alone, or as part of a more comprehensive approach to leadership development. When optioned as part of a builds upon foundational competency development including interpersonal effectiveness and managing and motivating a team, for example. Our comprehensive leadership development program builds over time through phase 1 (leading self), phase 2 (leading others) and finally, phase 3 (leading in business).
Our Leading in Business Training focuses on Business Acumen Skills through experiential learning opportunities (better than business simulation training), customized cohort work projects, the collaboration between peers and mentors, business case development and capstone project presentations (a la Shark Tank presentations).
Note: Our programs are facilitated on or off-site for organizations. We do not offer public seminars at this time. While we have speakers and trainers that are available to facilitate and speak at public engagements, we do not offer public seminars.
The learning objectives for the program include:
The program delivers a business simulation experience with real-work projects for a holistic and immersive, active-learning program. Participant learning objectives include:
Overall, the research shows that CEOs and the majority of leaders are underperforming. According to recent research conducted by the Perth Leadership Institute, the majority of leaders are currently operating below the business acumen competency line and are more likely to be outperformed by their close competitors. Yet, most leaders rate themselves highly competent in the areas of business savvy and understanding the factors that impact the business, while simultaneously rating their peers and subordinates as lacking business acumen skills.
But, what exactly is business acumen? Is it a single competency, like time management, that can simply be developed with a little awareness and practice? The answer is no. Business acumen is a multi-faceted, knowledge-and-experience based competency that highly-skilled leaders use to quickly evaluate all aspects of a situation and determine the right course of action, reliably and with predictably positive results.
By deliberating providing business and financial acumen development opportunities, an organization improves its leaders' analytical capabilities, enhances their logical thinking capacities, and enabling them to remain disciplined and strategic in the face of challenges.
In John Maxwell’s best-seller, The 12 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, he explains the law of the lid. This law states that an organization will only rise to the level of competency of its’ leadership. High-performing leadership teams master the soft-skills of interpersonal effectiveness, the hard skills of analytics and finance, and the nuanced intricacies of business acumen. Organizations that provide development opportunities in all three areas, raise the lid!
What are the logistics and delivery formats of the program?
Our programs are infinitely flexible. We custom-design each program to be the right fit for your organization, goals, and budget. For some organizations, that means a “lunch and learn” or virtual, instructor-led training to introduce the concepts of business acumen. For other companies, the need to build their team’s business acumen skills is more urgent and a more comprehensive, skill development approach is available.
Our premiere program includes:

In light of the ever-changing global challenges and market complexities that enterprises face today, business acumen has become an essential commodity for every employee, and especially for managers. Today, the right dose of business acumen becomes the most important tool for ensuring effective business strategy and enabling the organizations' viability and profitability.
Business acumen is the building block of a strong enterprise. The ability to think strategically, and consider carefully the market, industry, people resources, and process challenges quickly and efficiently, in order to properly assess and make informed decisions is an important skillset. A highly competent leader is able to have both near and far-sighted perspective, and juxtapose those perspectives with the most critical priorities of the day. This means efficacious managers are not only effectively managing and motivating their team to get things done today, but they are also constantly on the lookout for process breakdowns and opportunities for improvement. They have an acute sense of the cost of inefficiencies and an appropriate sense of urgency. They feel compelled to challenge the status quo and improve costs, and improve the abilities of their subordinates to do their job effectively. Employees with stronger business sense are able to juggle big-picture thinking and communicate how each subordinate's role contributes to the success of the organization; ever mindful of how current actions or inactions predict the company's future.
A comprehensive learning and development strategy includes three foundational learning courses, including understanding self, understanding others, and understanding business. A productive leadership development program includes understanding self and how an employee's style tendencies influence how they lead; understanding others which focuses upon enabling leaders to comprehend what makes others tick and how to adapt their style for greater productivity; and, leading in business which includes strategic and critical thinking, and business and financial acumen.
The most compelling strategy will no doubt begin with the learning and development of the business basics. The development and application of business strategy is a combination of the acumen that you gain through knowledge in sync with the variety of information tools at your disposal. Different methodologies, many unique elements of strategic thinking and detailed planning help you to completely grasp the nuances of running a business effectively.
Strategic thinking, for example, is not an innate skill set. Unfortunately, it's often left to chance and sub-par, misaligned and poor execution is the result. Financial Acumen is also a crucial skill and yet, rarely do companies take the time to properly develop their manager's ability to read proformas. Imagine for a moment that you didn't quite understand what the numbers on the P&L really meant but you believe all of your peers do. Are you going to raise your hand and risk humiliation and your credibility and ask how these numbers inform the strategy? No way. We've met countless executives that fail to consider the financial data and none of them would ever admit it's because they were never really taught to be more skilled in the analysis side of their roles. Instead, most believe they have the chops to make decisions without understanding the numbers!
All training isn't the same; one size doesn't fit all. This is especially true for Business Acumen training. While the wisdom of training and coaching isn't disputed, for a business acumen training program to have a lasting impact, there are important attributes to consider including:
Our business acumen training program is designed specifically to be a strategic fit; meaning our proven curriculum serves as the foundational content that is customized to be relevant for your business, industry and strategic priorities.
Depending upon the goals and budget, we have programs that will meet almost any logistical requirements including:
Each program is designed to actively engage participants in rich learning experiences and adult-learning best practices.
NOTE: We do not have public training events. While our programs are available for groups only, we do have individual, one-on-one coaching programs for individuals seeking business acumen coaching. Please inquire.
See also our Strategic and Critical Thinking and Business/Commercial Acumen Training FAQ’s here.
Business acumen can and must be developed, despite the complexity of teaching it, for a business to thrive. Luckily, business acumen does not have to be an innate characteristic but instead is a skillset that can be learned. Remember, managers with strong business acumen are better equipped to lead their company to sustainable growth and drive meaningful results.
Make sure to also check out TurnKey's other services in the city: executive coaching programs, corporate leadership development, leadership team development, programs for emerging leaders and high potentials, Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team programs, business retreats, and strategic planning consultations.
Disclaimer:
* Shark-Tank-Like: we are not associated in any way with the television show. We think it’s an awesome show and use the verbiage “shark-tank-like” because it accurately describes how our final capstone, business simulation competition, and business strategy simulation presentations are experienced by our clients. SHARK TANK is a trademark of Sony Pictures Television Inc. and is not associated in any way with this company or program.