How Does Data-Driven Decision Making Make You a Great Leader?
Agustin Lebron is an experienced technical consultant and leader who is passionate about finding solutions to difficult problems across a variety of domains. He teaches organizations modern decision-making approaches while helping them integrate these approaches into existing processes and helping them work through tough decisions.
Agustin is an #EverydayLeader
Decision-making involves the act of making a choice among a variety of available options. Each option has its own set of advantages and disadvantages — but how does a leader work through these variables?
We all know that indecision can lead to devastating results, which is why most successful and great leaders are also great decision makers. In fact, data-driven decision-making and leadership go hand-in-hand — but how?
What are you passionate about? And what are you doing to deliver on this passion?
The defining difference between success and failure in the modern, highly-competitive economy comes down to decision-making. The organizations which learn to make the best decisions end up reaping the benefits of those good decisions. My mission is to help organizations improve their decision-making skills both at an individual and at a collective level. Incremental improvements, compounded over time, can and do make the difference.
I’ve found a great appetite among young and growing tech companies looking for help in building and improving the decision-making skills of their employees. Our approach to teaching these skills also puts a system in place which makes excellent decision-making a core component of a company’s processes and culture.
How do you go about being a great leader? And how do you use your passion to align people to your vision?
The best way to lead is to lead by example. Essilen Research, the company I founded, has dedicated itself to studying the world’s best decision-makers across various fields by finding out what they have in common and how they adapt to their varying constraints. Studying how they adapt to these constraints shows us how we can improve decision-making processes.
The results of our study have given us a broader, deeper understanding of the common failure modes that lead to suboptimal decision-making.
Experience is the best teacher. Our flexible curriculum is designed to show clients how to improve their decision-making skills. The thought leadership around decision-making that Essilen Research has shown, and the practical and experience-based curriculum we provide our clients, ends up aligning people to this new way of thinking about how to make good decisions.
Is there anything in your background not directly related to leadership that has had an outsized impact on the way you lead?
I started my career in technology as a design engineer, where I gained a deep and intimate understanding of what it actually feels like — in the trenches — to make hard technical and business decisions under pressure, and without all the information you’d like to have.
My next career step, as a Wall Street trader and quant researcher, was a powerful education in decision-making in the most competitive arena on Earth. Learning next to some of the world’s greatest traders and researchers, I saw how the ideas that underpin financial markets can be used much more broadly. Trading is distilled decision-making, and the unique perspective I gained there is a perspective which should be shared with everyone who wants to know the secret to success.
What’s your philosophy on building a team? What do you search for? How do you go about selection? And how to do you approach managing performance?
The most important attribute any team-member and decision maker should have is motivation. The word “passion” is tossed around by everyone these days, but in my experience this term is overused. The most interesting jobs and experiences I’ve had have rarely derived from a pre-existing passion. There is always a motivation to learn and experience new things — and in that spirit of openness and curiosity, wonderful things can happen.
As a result, I look not for passion, but for motivation, openness, and curiosity above all.
The way people manifest these qualities is when they are faced with unfamiliar and confusing problems outside of their comfort zone. Do they find these situations an enjoyable challenge or do they recoil from them? Being comfortable, being uncomfortable, and being able to make practical, pragmatic progress in those situations is a great predictor of a valuable team-member over the long term.
Managing the performance of such a team, motivated by exploration and discovery, can be a challenge. Heavily top-down approaches usually end up being less useful compared to more consensus-driven and collaborative approaches. The cornerstone, as always, is communication.
What data do you use to ensure you are leading effectively?
As I mentioned, communication is critical when managing high-performance teams. This communication runs in both directions. A standard failure mode for leaders happens when their subordinates report what they think leaders want to hear, not the reality.
Insisting on honest feedback from subordinates, even if it’s uncomfortable, is critical to being an effective and great leader. Great leaders, therefore, reward — explicitly and in the culture of the group — people who raise difficult issues in the spirit of always trying to improve. A small nugget of honest data is worth more than reams of rosy or sugar-coated information.
What are some of the biggest mistakes today’s leaders are making? And how would you go about fixing it?
Many leaders, even in modern and nimble organizations, cling to the vision of a great leader as an infallible oracle of decisiveness and insight. By trying to put themselves on a pedestal, they increase the distance between themselves and the people they manage, with the resulting miscommunications and misaligned incentives hindering the team’s potential.
Strong and confident leaders are open about the fact that they don’t have all the answers. The future is difficult to predict, and the best we can do is be clear about the uncertainties to which we believe we’re subject. This is at the core of how to make good decisions, since this recognition of uncertainty pushes us to keep learning, to keep improving our understanding of the world in which we live and operate.
What do you see as the 2 or 3 greatest opportunities for great leaders over the next several years?
The rise of machine learning and data-based approaches to nearly all modern problems is both a challenge and an opportunity. For a decision-maker, it’s tempting to go to one extreme or the other:
either
(a) Continue with the tried-and-true approaches of instinct and experience,
or
(b) Go all-in by relying almost exclusively on data to inform decisions.
The fact is, both extremes lead to suboptimal decision-making. The greatest opportunities for great leaders in the next several years come from recognizing and exploring the middle ground.
Well-trained, experienced leaders have intuition and knowledge that cannot be replaced by mere data: in any interesting domain, gathering enough data to do so would take so long as to guarantee failure.
And making decisions without data is suicide.
A system of humans and machines, properly structured, leverages the unique skills of each. The merger of human intuition, with our ability to understand and to lead, with the developments of modern data-driven decision making approaches: this is the true frontier of opportunity for decision-makers everywhere.
Do you have any final words of wisdom for Everyday Leaders?
Surveying a wide cross-section of great leaders, some less well-known and famous, is important and valuable work. There are great ideas tucked away in the most unlikely places. Shining a light more broadly will bring these ideas out in the open to be shared by everyone. I’m glad to have been invited to be part of that process.
I profile the extraordinary work being done by #EverydayLeaders.
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