The Challenge:
Employees generally have excellent functional knowledge of their own jobs - but often, they do not have the broader business skills to enable them to put that knowledge to best use for achieving the overall company goals.
Metrus' Business Acumen Workshop is designed to quickly provide employees with the strategic, financial and measurement fundamentals that will enable them to understand how to align their work with key business goals. This includes:
Knowledge -- Clearly understand how they impact on the bottom line
Focus -- Recognize opportunities for quickly driving costs out or increasing productivity
Foresight -- React to changes in the business environment that are identified through strategic leading measures
If people know what affects the bottom line, how to change it and how to measure the impact - then, and only then, can they really make a difference in the business.
- What comprises business strategy?
- Mission, Vision, Values
- Market and Competitors
- Products and Customer Focus
- Core Business Capabilities
- Strategic Goals and Business Drivers
- Why do we need a strategy?
- What distinguishes a good strategy from a poor one?
- Why do companies with good strategies fail?
- What it takes to be strategically driven?
- Implementation -- the key to success
- The three key financial tools:
- Income Statement
- Cash Flow Statement
- Balance Sheet
- For each financial tool, we will cover:
- key elements -- how they are constructedi
- importance of each -- how they are used
- differences between them
- what they can tell you -- indicators
- Drill down on expenses -- the elements and how individuals and groups can impact them
- The cost/revenue trap -- you cannot save your way to success -- the importance of strategy in financial management
- Understand your role in affecting the bottom line -- both cost and revenue!
- Drivers -- Results
- - What are they, and how are they used
- Identifying key business drivers
- Types of measures
- Lagging vs. leading -- benefits of each
- Balance -- business areas
- Creating a measures scorecard, and building good measures
- Strategic measurement concepts
- Connecting the dimensions of the business
- Setting targets -- baselines and benchmarks
- Tracking results
- - Using the measures to improve business performance
- Factex Case:
- Strategic review -- constructing the strategy map
- Financial assessment exercise
- Create measures that reflect, and drive the business strategy
- Summary
Workshop participants will be able to:
- Understand the power of strategy -- and, perhaps, for the first time how to impact the company's strategic results;
- Understand how they add value and connect to the company's financial performance;
- Establish key indicators of their value added, and use them to track performance;
- Take personal accountability for creating value.
Metrus Group offers additional business acumen workshops which explore specific topics in more depth.
Financial acumenEvery employee is a decision maker. But most employees -- even many with senior management responsibilities -- are unaware of the financial implications of the choices they make. Financial awareness, never mind acumen, is surprisingly low in even the most sophisticated organizations.
The Financial Acumen workshop series is tailored to the specific needs and financial profile of an organization, and is designed to:
- Rapidly improve cash flow by hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars
- Ensure widespread ownership of business objectives, eliminating the entitlement mentality
- Identify the most critical financial and operational results
- Provide basic knowledge of the organization's business and finances
- Deepen employees' understanding of how their jobs link to overall business objectives and how they can help to achieve them
- Click here for details.
Building good metrics is not enough. Circulating scorecard updates is not enough. Even having management reviews of your metrics is not enough. Strategic "huddling sessions:"
- Provide an effective structure for reviewing metrics
- Keep the time down and the results high
- Highlight solutions instead of dwelling on problems
- Are inclusive and pull people in because they want to be there, not because they have to
- Create value for the organization by aligning actions with objectives
- Promote accountability from an ownership point of view
- Are dynamic and "fun", yet productive and focused
High-performance leadership demands fact-based decision making and communication. Yet, many mid-level leaders do not possess the measurement skills they need to do this effectively. Too few things -- or too many -- get measured; many measures do not really capture what is strategically important; and measures are not shared effectively with employees.
The Measurement Acumen Workshop series will:
- Lead managers through a probing self-assessment of their effectiveness as measurement-managed leaders
- Provide basic knowledge of the organization's business and finances
- Rapidly improve management skills related to goal setting, strategic alignment, performance evaluation, forecasting and communication
- Deepen leaders' understanding of how their jobs link to overall business objectives and how they can help to achieve them
- Measurably improve each participant's bottom-line performance
- Help participants develop better leading indicators for their most critical financial and operational results
For more information:
- Click here for details or contact Metrus Group immediately.
- Contact us by e-mail or by phone (908) 231-1900