Elea’s Future Fit Leader series, part 5: Can you see the bigger picture?
The fifth session in Elea’s Future Fit Leader series, hosted online by MD Juliette Fourie, shifted the focus from leadership in theory to leadership in action. Titled “Can you see the bigger picture?”, the session explored business acumen as a systems skill, not just a financial one, and showed how Elea reveals business as a living system made up of multiple, interconnected disciplines.
Juliette opened by reminding participants that Elea is more than a diagnostic.
“Elea is a developmental ecosystem that connects leadership capability to measurable business performance by mapping competencies across three dimensions: thought, task and people leadership,” she said.
Part 5 zoomed in on how Elea integrates business acumen into this picture, showing how intelligence, insight and innovation come together in effective decision making.
One of the core ideas was business intelligence as the bridge between data and action.
“Business intelligence is the ability to turn information into insight, and insight into intelligent decisions that drive growth, efficiency and sustainability,” explained Juliette. “It is not about collecting dashboards for their own sake, but using them to answer practical questions: what is working, what is not, and where should we focus next?”
She used the example of a logistics business tracking delivery times, complaints and fuel consumption across routes.
“Instead of waiting for a month-end pack, leaders can see in near real time which routes are efficient, where delays occur, and which customers may be at risk. That visibility allows for quick, grounded decisions that improve both service and profitability. In this way business intelligence supports strategic foresight: it does not only describe what happened, it explains why, and helps predict what is likely to happen next.”
The session then turned to Elea’s “pyramid of behaviours”, or artefacts, that shows how different competencies appear at different organisational levels.
“At the base, in junior management, sit frequent, distributed behaviours that keep the business running day to day: clarifying issues, referencing information, driving tasks, proposing actions,” said Juliette. “These are essential for execution, but mostly transactional.”
As you move up into middle management, the language shifts.
“Leaders begin to talk in the language of finance, customer service, operations, HR and technical constructs. This is where business acumen takes shape and people start to manage systems rather than tasks.”
At the top of the pyramid sit the rare and exclusive behaviours of executive leadership.
“Here leaders converse with business models, markets and strategy, advance decisions rather than simply follow them, and bring in creativity, humility and an awareness of emotion. This is where they move from managing outputs to managing value through hindsight, insight, integration and foresight. “
Juliette drew on the Harvard Business Publishing article “Level Up Your Leaders: The Three Critical Business Acumen Skills They Need Now” to anchor the discussion. The piece argues that in a fast changing environment, organisations cannot wait years for business acumen to emerge at the top. Everyone needs at least three foundations: a grasp of strategy as a set of choices rather than slogans, an understanding of markets and customers, and the ability to “speak finance” well enough to contribute to conversations about performance.
“When employees at all levels can connect their work to strategy, market realities and financial drivers, decision making improves across the system,” said Juliette.
From there the lens widened to what Juliette called “interconnected acumen in thought leadership”. Digital, financial, HR, marketing and operational acumen were presented as five lenses on the same business, not five separate silos. Short case examples brought each one to life: Tesla as an example of digital acumen, treating every car as a software-enabled ecosystem; Apple as financial acumen in action through disciplined, diversified revenue; Unilever as HR acumen, showing how purpose-led people practices drive performance; Coca-Cola as a master of marketing acumen through consistent yet adaptive storytelling; and Amazon as operational acumen with its relentless focus on supply chain and fulfilment excellence.
The point was not to admire famous brands but to highlight patterns.
“Leaders with digital acumen understand how technology changes what is possible. Leaders with financial acumen know how to anchor bold ideas in economic reality. Those with HR acumen recognise that culture and talent are strategic assets. Marketing acumen keeps the organisation tuned to customers. Operational acumen ensures everything can scale and repeat.
“Thought leadership sits at the intersection of all of these.”
A significant part of the session focused on systems thinking. Borrowing from Elea’s framing that “business acumen is a systems thinking approach”, Juliette encouraged participants to view their organisations through three lenses:
- “As is” – the current system, with its real patterns and feedback loops, not the ideal on paper
- “Could be” – emerging possibilities if constraints shift or new technologies and partnerships are used
- “Should be” – the desired future state that aligns purpose, performance and people
A Business Acumen Systems Thinking Matrix was introduced as a practical tool. By mapping Digital, Operational, HR, Marketing and Financial acumen across these three states, teams can see where they are strong, where there are gaps, and where isolated change in one area might create imbalance rather than progress. The matrix encourages leaders to think in terms of interdependence rather than isolated projects.
By analysing leadership behaviour across its competency framework, Elea can show how often leaders demonstrate strategic thinking, financial insight, digital fluency or systems awareness, and at what level. That evidence then feeds back into development conversations so that business acumen is not treated as an abstract trait, but as a set of observable skills that can be strengthened over time.
Part 5 closed with a reflection prompt: are you leading only your function, or are you leading value across the system. The invitation was for leaders to move from intuition alone to a blend of intelligence and insight, and to use tools like Elea to turn that into consistent, growth driven decisions.
To learn more about Elea’s business acumen insights, email Juliette at [email protected]. To access the full Future Fit Webinar series, click here.