Data-driven Leadership — what’s different?
As they say “Data is the new oil”, and it is now a well-known fact that data is going to play a key role in driving our future. So, here is my take on data-driven leadership based on what I have studied, researched and experienced so far.
Let’s set the context first. What is the definition of a good leader? Yeah yeah yeah, I know you know all about it already but here are some key qualities of a good leader to jog your memory:
- Self-awareness
- Respect
- Compassion
- Vision
- Communication
- Learning agility
- Collaboration
- Influence
- Integrity
- Courage
- Gratitude
- Resilience
Woof! Sounds a lot right? But if you ask the leaders, they would say it’s not. It comes naturally as you step into the role and you become more confident as you gain experience. So, that’s what a good leader sounds like. But the big perks are paid to them just for these but mainly for their decision-making ability.
Now, let’s understand the definition of data-driven leadership. It means leaders use data as an important source of information to make decisions irrespective of whether it is big or strategic or small or routine. As leaders are realising the usefulness of data, it is becoming a well-known fact that data will make a massive impact on almost all the future decisions taken by leaders of any field. As Derek Steer rightly said in his blog, “Intuition and personal experience are no longer enough; leaders are now expected to seek additional evidence to support their direction.”
We all know how the competitive nature of businesses has increased significantly in a decade or so. Therefore, to stay ahead of the game successful leaders are using data as their superpower to take bold and risky decisions to back their instincts. It’s like Dr Strange who can jump from verses to see the future and come back to fix the problem before it happens, if you know what I mean. Sorry, got sidetracked there, let’s get back on data. So, data, also helps leaders to make sure they are not confirmation-biased so that your instinct doesn’t mislead you by showing factual projections and patterns.
Having said all that, how obvious data-driven decision-making sounds, the fact is we still cannot fully rely on data being the sole source information to make a decision. It shows us patterns about what happened in the past and what is happening now. Data also gives us predictions about what “might” happen in the future. In the end, data will not tell you what to do. Decision-making still relies on the human mind to understand the data and take decisions accordingly where understanding is the key word. There are many other parameters a successful data-driven leader considers along with data rather than just data one of them being the back story. Data will tell you the hard truth which is a fact but a lot of times it doesn’t tell you the whole reasoning or story behind the behaviour or pattern of the data. This is probably why AI/ML still can’t match the human brain as we have far more sensors and data points to analyse for making a decision. This is the reason I mentioned the 12 key characteristics of a good leader at the beginning which remains very much true for data-driven leaders as well. Otherwise, nothing against Data Scientists, all Data Scientists could be considered leaders.
In the end, the takeaway for me was, as they say, to work with the data not just the data. Data-driven leaders don’t rely on data only rather they use it as additional information to back their decision-making along with all the other stories and contexts around it. Hope this blog gives you a bit of introduction to data-driven leadership and encourages you to discover more about it.
About the author
Sourish Banerjee is an AWS Team Lead here at Version 1.
