Building an Enterprise Mindset

Manika Gandhi

January 24, 2022

Whether you call it business acumen, knowing the business, developing an enterprise mindset, or thinking like an owner, there are few things more fundamental to the success of a business than having leaders who have an in-depth understanding of how their business works. Your leaders need to know what makes their business tick: where it excels (and where it may have weaknesses), how it outflanks the competition (and how it gets beaten), how it makes its money, what’s going on in the external environment, and what’s the connection between its strategy and its results.

A timeless and critical requirement

Knowing the business inside out is a timeless requirement. As noted business thinker Ram Charan wrote back in 2006, “linking an insightful assessment of the external business landscape with the keen awareness of how money can be made — and then executing the strategy to deliver the desired results” is an art. “No single aspect of managerial skill,” he wrote, “is more important.”

While having this degree of business understanding has long been regarded as essential at the highest executive levels in an organization, it’s made its way over time into becoming a requirement for leaders at all levels.

Why is this type of thinking so critical? Why is it so important to have throughout an organization and not just at the top? The business environment has become so complex, fast-moving, and perpetually changing that decision making is increasingly being dispersed to lower levels in the organization. There’s no time to wait for decisions to be made at the top and wind their way down; organizations can’t afford to have decision making at any level that’s occurring in a vacuum.

Those making the decisions at both the highest strategic plane and at the everyday tactical level need to be fully versed in strategy, grounded in market realties, and conversant in financial matters. And, research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that over 65% of leaders surveyed agreed that insufficient business acumen was a primary factor in limiting their organization’s ability to realize strategic goals.

The fundamentals of knowing the business

Knowing the business rests on three broad fundamental elements: understanding the organization’s strategy, market orientation, and financial literacy. The first element—understanding strategy—means making sure that your leaders have an understanding of how your company plans to create and capture value and use this insight to inform their day-to-day decision making. That’s an important way in which they can support your organization’s goals. A market orientation requires awareness of why your customers make the choices they do. It also requires future thinking: keeping a close eye on the business environment you’re operating in, looking for new opportunities and contributing to the organization’s strategy. Financial literacy enables your leaders to make decisions that make sense from a financial point of view. (Is winning that big deal much of a win if the costs of delivering on it exceed the revenue?)

Answering three key questions

Knowing the business provides leaders the grounding they need to answer three key questions:

1. What makes a company thrive?

Ram Charan has identified four essential building blocks that help an organization thrive: doing a better job than the competition when it comes to satisfying customer needs; generating cash; producing an adequate return on investment; and growing profitably. Your leaders must understand not only how these building blocks work stand-alone, but how they are related to each other. There may be times when your organization is able to temporarily sacrifice one of the building blocks to achieve a long-term goal. But long run viability requires that all four building blocks stay standing.

2. How can you tell if your company’s thriving?

Every leader should be able to read and interpret basic financial statements: profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow. This may seem intimidating at first, but it doesn’t actually require any wizardry. It just requires an openness to delving into the numbers, developing basic familiarity with key financial terms, and paying attention to the key metrics for your organization—and what the implications are if these metrics are “off.”

3. How does your company run—and how can it operate successfully?

Equipping your leaders with an understanding of how the business works and how it will succeed will enable them to make better decisions. This means being able to answer important questions such as: Who’s the customer? What’s important to them? How can we increase the total value our organization creates and captures? What’s the strategy that will enable our company to do this better than the competition?

A win for the organization—and for the individual

Having leaders at all levels who are more knowledgeable about the business and more adept at decision making is a clear win for an organization. It’s also a win for the individual leader. Knowing how the organization really works and using this knowledge to help make better decisions increases connection and job satisfaction. And speaking the universal language of business—strategy, market orientation, and financial literacy—is every bit as much of a career booster as having solid domain expertise.

Whatever term you use for it, knowing the business is a capability that’s an essential element for every leader’s portfolio.

The post Building an Enterprise Mindset appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

Powerful and effective presentation skills: more in demand now than ever

Manika Gandhi

When we talk with our L&D colleagues from around the globe, we often hear that presentation skills training is one of the top opportunities they’re looking to provide their learners. And this holds true whether their learners are individual contributors, people managers, or senior leaders. This is not surprising.

Effective communications skills are a powerful career activator, and most of us are called upon to communicate in some type of formal presentation mode at some point along the way.

For instance, you might be asked to brief management on market research results, walk your team through a new process, lay out the new budget, or explain a new product to a client or prospect. Or you may want to build support for a new idea, bring a new employee into the fold, or even just present your achievements to your manager during your performance review.

And now, with so many employees working from home or in hybrid mode, and business travel in decline, there’s a growing need to find new ways to make effective presentations when the audience may be fully virtual or a combination of in person and remote attendees.

Whether you’re making a standup presentation to a large live audience, or a sit-down one-on-one, whether you’re delivering your presentation face to face or virtually, solid presentation skills matter.

Even the most seasoned and accomplished presenters may need to fine-tune or update their skills. Expectations have changed over the last decade or so. Yesterday’s PowerPoint which primarily relied on bulleted points, broken up by the occasional clip-art image, won’t cut it with today’s audience.

The digital revolution has revolutionized the way people want to receive information. People expect presentations that are more visually interesting. They expect to see data, metrics that support assertions. And now, with so many previously in-person meetings occurring virtually, there’s an entirely new level of technical preparedness required.

The leadership development tools and the individual learning opportunities you’re providing should include presentation skills training that covers both the evergreen fundamentals and the up-to-date capabilities that can make or break a presentation.

So, just what should be included in solid presentation skills training? Here’s what I think.

The fundamentals will always apply

When it comes to making a powerful and effective presentation, the fundamentals will always apply. You need to understand your objective. Is it strictly to convey information, so that your audience’s knowledge is increased? Is it to persuade your audience to take some action? Is it to convince people to support your idea? Once you understand what your objective is, you need to define your central message. There may be a lot of things you want to share with your audience during your presentation, but find – and stick with – the core, the most important point you want them to walk away with. And make sure that your message is clear and compelling.

You also need to tailor your presentation to your audience. Who are they and what might they be expecting? Say you’re giving a product pitch to a client. A technical team may be interested in a lot of nitty-gritty product detail. The business side will no doubt be more interested in what returns they can expect on their investment.

Another consideration is the setting: is this a formal presentation to a large audience with questions reserved for the end, or a presentation in a smaller setting where there’s the possibility for conversation throughout? Is your presentation virtual or in-person? To be delivered individually or as a group? What time of the day will you be speaking? Will there be others speaking before you and might that impact how your message will be received?

Once these fundamentals are established, you’re in building mode. What are the specific points you want to share that will help you best meet your objective and get across your core message? Now figure out how to convey those points in the clearest, most straightforward, and succinct way. This doesn’t mean that your presentation has to be a series of clipped bullet points. No one wants to sit through a presentation in which the presenter reads through what’s on the slide. You can get your points across using stories, fact, diagrams, videos, props, and other types of media.

Visual design matters

While you don’t want to clutter up your presentation with too many visual elements that don’t serve your objective and can be distracting, using a variety of visual formats to convey your core message will make your presentation more memorable than slides filled with text. A couple of tips: avoid images that are cliched and overdone. Be careful not to mix up too many different types of images. If you’re using photos, stick with photos. If you’re using drawn images, keep the style consistent. When data are presented, stay consistent with colors and fonts from one type of chart to the next. Keep things clear and simple, using data to support key points without overwhelming your audience with too much information. And don’t assume that your audience is composed of statisticians (unless, of course, it is).

When presenting qualitative data, brief videos provide a way to engage your audience and create emotional connection and impact. Word clouds are another way to get qualitative data across.

Practice makes perfect

You’ve pulled together a perfect presentation. But it likely won’t be perfect unless it’s well delivered. So don’t forget to practice your presentation ahead of time. Pro tip: record yourself as you practice out loud. This will force you to think through what you’re going to say for each element of your presentation. And watching your recording will help you identify your mistakes—such as fidgeting, using too many fillers (such as “umm,” or “like”), or speaking too fast.

A key element of your preparation should involve anticipating any technical difficulties. If you’ve embedded videos, make sure they work. If you’re presenting virtually, make sure that the lighting is good, and that your speaker and camera are working. Whether presenting in person or virtually, get there early enough to work out any technical glitches before your presentation is scheduled to begin. Few things are a bigger audience turn-off than sitting there watching the presenter struggle with the delivery mechanisms!

Finally, be kind to yourself. Despite thorough preparation and practice, sometimes, things go wrong, and you need to recover in the moment, adapt, and carry on. It’s unlikely that you’ll have caused any lasting damage and the important thing is to learn from your experience, so your next presentation is stronger.

How are you providing presentation skills training for your learners?

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