Data-driven leadership is a concept we’ve all been talking about for a while now. The term has been popular in management jargon for at least a decade. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it’s mostly self-explanatory, but I’ll expound briefly.

Many leaders (myself included) have a tendency to lead from experience, training, expertise, instinct, and relationships. These sources often serve us well, further reinforcing their continued use. These sources also work pretty well in the absence of data. You go with your gut, and you are usually right.

Data-driven leadership has a different starting point. You need to set aside everything you think you know and start with a blank slate. Then, you look at the data and listen to what it tells you. You can bolster that with analysis and eventually consider other sources, but to be data-driven, means you start with data.

Why we are bad at this

Specifically, I’m bad a this because of my personality. I’ve written previously that my MBTI personality type is INFJ, which means I naturally make decisions with my values and intuitions instead of with data and facts. This doesn’t mean I can’t adapt, but it’s helpful to understand my natural and default inclination. I generally compensate for this by seeking diversity on my team.

A reason why we are all bad at this is the accessibility of actionable data. We all have data. Lots of it. We have more data than we know what to do with. I relate to the term, “data mining.” As enterprise organizations, we sit on a massive natural deposit of data, but we cannot make use of it. The act of data mining is digging into that data in search of actionable information and intelligence. Just like real mining, data mining is labor-intensive, requiring specialized tools and skills.

Something in the world has changed

The conditions I’ve described, and our ability to do something about it have existed for some time now, but we’ve all made marginal progress. Our world has been turned upside down by COVID-19, and we are all desperately trying to make sense of it.

We look to our past experiences, education, and instincts, then come up empty. We all use the word “unprecedented” a lot, but this time, this really is uncharted territory. No one in this generation of leaders has led through something like this before.

If all else fails, look at the data

To all of the data-driven professionals out there, I’d like to apologize. We’ve not engaged you as much as we should. It’s not personal. We’ve just had a myriad of methods at our disposal to make sense of the world. Now, we have one. Sorry about that. But hey, now’s your time to shine!

COVID-19 data

I curiously examine the raw data and analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic multiple times per day. It’s become my new hobby. With all of the opinions flying around me, I need to ground to something solid. For one-stop shopping for real-time and historical data, I look to World-o-Meter.

The best predictive models are often region-specific, but for an amateur like me, I find the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to be comprehensive and user-friendly for my purposes.

Check them both out and feel free to post your favorite data source in the comments below.

COVID-19 data-driven leadership

I’ve paid close attention to government action to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in my home state of Minnesota. It was remarkable how much Minnesota Governor Tim Walz referenced statistical models to support his decision, timing, and rationale for the Stay at Home order. As he explained his decision, he sounded more like a data scientist than a politician. It’s quite obvious that he didn’t just make a loose reference to someone else’s work. He spent a lot of time thinking about the data.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my team’s efforts to enable our company’s workforce to be productive remotely. This was a big challenge. Like nearly every other organization, we had never done something like this before at-scale.

We were fielding all sorts of questions early on, like “will our systems scale?” and “will our systems perform?” We even wondered, “will our employees adapt, engage, and be productive?”

We couldn’t look to past experiences to answer these questions. We had to dig up the data.

Finally, data-driven

I’ve been wanting to serve-up meaningful executive metrics for my platforms and services for many years. The data has always been there. The desire for it has been there, but the desperate need for it was missing.

Now that we are desperate for actionable data analysis, we do the work to figure it out. We measure global VPN capacity, call volumes, call quality, online meeting volumes, VDI latency, and many other metrics.

We measure what we need to measure so we can make data-driven decisions. That enables our employees to fulfill our purpose: Creating connections to empower agriculture.

Now that we are here, we are never going back. Data has always been important. Now that we are faced with unprecedented uncertainty and volatility, data is mission critical.

How have you adapted to become more data-driven in your leadership in these uncertain times? Please share your stories in the comments below.

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