Every business needs skilled leaders who can make effective decisions. By upskilling your leadership team through simulation training, you can bring in ideas and challenges in a safe, risk-free environment.
By working in teams in a competitive but risk-free environment, your team can start to understand how business decisions have repercussions in the real world. What exactly does simulation training do to embed business acumen?
To answer the question, let’s take a look at:
- What simulation games are for businesses
- The way you can expect your simulation training to work
- How simulation games work to develop business acumen
How do simulation business games work?
With plenty of training options available, you need to be sure you choose the option that will give you the outcomes you want. Business simulation training gives your leaders a chance to experience making decisions and watch outcomes unfold in real time.
Your leaders can be split into teams across different levels and departments. Each team is presented with a virtual business and a set of financial and strategic indicators. Following discussion of real-world situations with industry experts, your team can be presented with scenarios to make tough decisions.
This process brings a raft of benefits to your team. The way the training is delivered plus the hands-on experience all go towards building the skills required for business acumen.
What should I expect in terms of delivery of business simulation games?
To ensure that the training you offer your team yields a return on the investment, you need to make sure they learn practical and soft skills. Rather than being highly conceptual or focussed on general team building, business simulations directly train important skills.
- Your team needs to learn skills that they can take back to the office and implement – clear actions need to be laid out.
- The training must be centred on your industry, anything generic won’t have powerful actions at the end.
- Every leader in the business needs to be involved, even your HR or resource planning leaders so everyone can see how their work effects profits.
- Follow up needs to happen, it’s not a one-and-done process. Ensure that your leaders use their new skills every day and discuss training learnings.
- Diversity is key to bring in different types of thinking and fresh logic, it’ll also challenge leaders to step out their comfort zone.
How do business simulation games work to build business acumen?
Business acumen requires a leader to really understand the fundamentals of your business and make decisions in the best interests of everyone. These decisions can be about product pricing decisions, right up to whether a multimillion-dollar deal should go through. Simulation games allow your leaders to develop logic and processes to give the best outcomes, for your business.
Market awareness
Taking part in business simulators allows everyone involved to become more aware of the wider market and the relevant competitors, particularly through the discussion and feedback sessions throughout the training.
Analytical thinking
True to life, simulation games won’t have complete data available to make business decisions. Analytical skills and the ability to think through a process is an important element of business acumen.
Strategic awareness
Being aware of your business strategy is one thing; you also want your leaders to make choices in line with this strategy. A simulation pushes strategic decisions because the outcomes of choices are clear and delivered in real time.
Increased efficiency
Your leaders will learn about efficiency during their training. Decisions will need to be made about cost efficiencies within the game and working with others effectively and efficiently will help deliver the best results.
Financial acumen
A major focus of simulator training is familiarity with industry terminology. Your leaders will learn how to talk about your business with confidence and know how measures such as return on investment and shareholder returns are calculated.
Conclusion
Business simulator training offers the chance for your team to develop business acumen. There’s a clear line to be drawn between the characteristics of business acumen and the skills learned during a session with business games.
This type of training is a powerful tool for the leaders across your business. Introducing business simulations as part of your training mix will show results across KPIs such as holistic business outcomes, better employee retention, and lower risk incidents.
