Not all boardroom business talk is led by management accountants and the finance team. The business owners - sales and account leaders - also make their presence felt as the sales cadence takes precedence in the monthly or weekly business reviews. If you really want to move up into key management positions you need to master key terminology inside out.
The classic example is using the basic terms. It's amazing how often I encounter people using the term 'margin' in pricing discussions only to realize their calculations were referring to 'mark-up'. People mis-use a lot. The ones who don't show that they know the difference and even the formulae for both (neither are wrong but it's a matter of consistent application). Another is 'percentage' versus 'percentage points'. Seems straightforward doesn't it? Not quite so,
Getting up-to-speed isn't as easy and it's not about googling a new term each time. Here are three ways we recommend that requires a time investment.
Knowledge Gathering
So you might have been a law grad and you've self-taught yourself most business terms on picked things up and google them. That's not good enough. Invest in basic financial glossaries. When you've mastered them, get yourself a set of the more advanced HBR or FT Publishing Guides that explain management and financial models.
Software Skills
We've all taken those introductory courses of Excel at university and then jumped right into them in our first job. Surprisingly, most people end up really learning Excel on-the-job and never really learn how to master it's skills. They're complacent with simple data arrays but not actual tables or even pivot tables. Get your line manager behind you and enrol in the online courses. If your company offers them through an internal development library, jump at them.
Analytical Skills
It's one thing to master Excel but the ability to conduct statistical analysis in Excel is incredibly useful for utilising data effectively. It is one thing to store and manage huge amounts of data, but it is another to discover the relationships between them and draw workable conclusions from such analyses. We recommend good books on business performance and we reviewed one right here.