Leadership Development Series

Hello, my name is Dr. Arieana Thompson, and I’m a senior consultant at SIGMA Assessment Systems. My background is in industrial organizational psychology, and I have years of experience consulting in the area of leadership development, organizational culture, and succession planning. Today I’m here to talk to you about SIGMA’s resource, the Leadership Development Series, which can be found on our Resources tab of our website. If you come over here, look at our Resources tab, you can see it in the Leadership Development Series tab right here.

Once you get here, you can scroll down to learn a bit a little bit more around this series and immediately jump to our available handouts. This covers 50 competencies in SIGMA’s competency model for leadership and personality. This competency model was developed for our LSP-R assessment, which stands for our Leadership Skills Profile-Revised.

Overview of the LSP-R

The LSP-R is a personality-based, self-assessment of leadership skills. It measures 50 competencies and provides a comprehensive report with tips and templates for creating a leadership development plan. So, if you’ve already gotten some of your leadership feedback, or just interested today, you can scroll down to look at the available competencies for your perusal. These include things like achievement and motivation, ambition, attracting staff, business acumen, communication, creativity, decisiveness, and beyond.

Business Acumen

Today for the purposes of this demonstration, we’re going to be looking at business acumen. So, if you are interested in developing the leadership competency of business acumen, you could click on this PDF guide, “Great Leaders Have Business Acumen,” and it would open up to you in another tab. So, again, this is entitled, “Great Leaders Have Business Acumen.” If you scroll down, you can learn a little bit more about the competency and why it’s important in a business context.

Assessing Your Level of Business Acumen

After you’ve read that content, you can move on to asking yourself a few questions to assess your level of the given competency, in this case, business acumen. So, for example, for business acumen, you may ask yourself:

• Do I have a good grasp of the company’s business operations and strategic plan?
• Do I recognize industry or market trends that may be beneficial to the company?
• Or do I have support from others in building my business literacy and acumen?

These questions are helpful for assessing your current state, and also areas of opportunity. You can also leverage these competency guides working with other people on your team who may be struggling at these competencies, and you could ask them these questions to help have a collaborative conversation around their areas of strength and areas of development.

Tips for Improving Your Business Acumen

Next, we have specific instructions and recommendations on how you might improve your business acumen, such as starting by on-the-job learning where you might attend operations meetings, work on staying up to date on industry trends, or even get involved in company task forces. You could seek out coaching and mentoring in order to learn from those who are more experienced and would be willing to show you what they’ve learned over their years.

Or you could embed yourself in professional communities, such as participating in online discussions or volunteering with organizations that focus on business priorities. We have three more tips for you in the space of business acumen if you’re looking to start now, such as improving your business literacy by taking a business course or reading a book that covers basic principles of business. We also have recommendations on how you might improve your perceptual and decision-making skills, or recognize opportunities to apply business acumen, taking knowledge to application.

Enhance Your Leadership Skills with SIGMA

If you want even further resources, we have an additional section down here where you can access further resources to develop the competency, in this case, business acumen. For example, you could watch the business acumen keynote by Kevin Cope or read, “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement.” Lastly, you could even take advantage of SIGMA’s coaching services to have one-on-one tailored support in developing this leadership competency.

I hope this video has been helpful in helping you to understand the Leadership Development Series that is available to you and free on our website. Thanks for your time today and have a wonderful day.