Metrics That Matter
Key Insights, Driven by Research, to Help Leaders Plot Their Futures, Adapt & Pivot When Necessary A VAST LIGHT SHOW
ANTICIPATING THE NEW UN-NORMAL
LEADERSHIP LESSONS
Big data has become the culture whisperer of business, telling us everything we want to know and much more. Through algorithms, AI, and new tools, CEOs have made numbers talk in the same old-fashioned way as picking petals off a daisy.
Who was responsible? Was it safe to fly? What was next?
Data is great, but what you do with that data matters more. Key insights, driven by research, to help leaders plot their futures, adapt, and pivot when necessary are the currency of a modern, analyticsdriven organization.
Employees love me, employees love me not. Selectivity is your sanity. We collect a lot of data designed to give us deeper insights and context. In reality, what ends up happening in a predictive model is you’re trying to forecast behavior X or behavior Y, and you’ve got X-one, X-two, and X-three.
Stock markets plunged by more than 7 percent on the first day of trading after 9/11.
And X-three is your error term more often than not. Collecting more data is not going to add to the predictability. It’ll add to the error term, which is just noise in the system, right?
In business, we reacted with urgency and creativity, with steadfast belief and resolve to recover, and did so quickly.
Too much data becomes a vast light show when all you send are some signals. The right insights are more important than ever. If we are to learn from upheaval, we have to reassess what matters. In life. In business. We must dig deep into four essential areas that will help you measure culture, the important underpinning of your organization: net promoter scores, inclusion factors, curiosity indicators, and employer brand. These add up to a Culture Score. We need a way to put up scaffolding around our guiding principles and do some work on developing a way to quantify the core culture of our organizations, because it is the underpinning of everything we do, from hiring to strategy, from productivity to policy, from vision to mission. We are all entering an uncharted economic and societal landscape, given the unknowns of a never-imagined pandemic. But we have been faced with uncertainty throughout history. We’ve discussed the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis, but let’s also recall 9/11, when no one knew what to expect after such an un thinkable terrorist attack on our own soil.
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The emotional shock and Ground Zero grief were immeasurable. As a nation, we were in pain on every front. When we looked up, we witnessed a work world convulsion.
Businesses were hit with uncertainty, especially the airline and hospitality industries, as well as the insurance and financial sectors.
As we move ahead now, we once again must face these challenges as opportunities to conquer the uncertainty with bold action. Hesitancy is a losing proposition. As McKinsey noted in December of 2020: “The strongest companies are also reinventing themselves through nextnormal operating models, capitalizing on this malleable moment and the resulting spread of agile processes, nimbler ways of working, and increased speed and productivity.” Next normal is actually the un-normal. Because we’re not going to be the same again after 2020. Our workplaces have changed, our workforces view life differently, our volatile politics are still roiling. How are we going to answer the bell to our future? As an opportunity or as an obstacle?
Nobody ever talks about the other side of the equation, though: the decision maker. Using data is as much art as it is science, and driving good decisions from that data is the harder part. As leaders, your lesson here is to develop not so much your analytics skills but rather your interpretation and decisionmaking competencies. These will make you more successful, especially when engaging in a reset where decisions seem counter to the publicly available data with incomplete context for your organization. Here are some key questions you should consider making part of your reset repertoire: • How should I evaluate sustainability? • Why should I care about big data? • Why should I care about people analytics? • What kind of ROI should I be expecting from talentdriven initiatives? • What is the most important metric for tracking my organization’s future? Adapted from Chapter 10 of Reset: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval (PublicAffairs), by Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., President and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
