"They don't have a clue."

Chances are you've heard this comment at work. Maybe it's managers talking about a group of workers, or employees venting about their leaders, or one department talking dismissively about another. Maybe no one actually says it out loud; it's muttered in hallways or implied via facial expressions. But most of us have at least had this thought at one time or another.

Sure, it's unkind. But it's also natural. After all, you and your closest colleagues in your field of expertise have a certain depth of knowledge, while others have a different set of perspectives, ones based on their area of expertise.

The trick in any organization is to find common ground, a lingua franca that helps everyone put those different points of view into a larger context. The IT department may use technological lingo that others can barely grasp, and the finance department may glibly expound about spreadsheets dense with data. Ultimately, though, everyone should speak the same language when communicating about the underlying well-being of the business.

Big problems occur, however, when members of an organization – especially its managers - don't have the business acumen they need to grasp the larger business context, finds a recent i4cp study of 394 business professionals.

Participants were asked, "How does a lack of business acumen among managers (and above) impact the business?...

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