I had a reminder of an old lesson today. While it is not a major revelation about leadership, it bears repeating since it seems to crop up over and over again. The lesson: verify the results of an analysis against common sense. If it doesn’t jibe, first check the numbers then check your “sense”.

Today, I was reviewing a study on high and low performers. According to the study, low performers reported that their people had higher alignment with their vision than did high performers. The study then provided three paragraphs of speculation on why that might be the case.

I was lucky enough to have access to the raw data. After a few quick calculations, I got the opposite result – the one that I would have expected. High performers report higher alignment with their vision.

After verifying the data and my analysis, I was pretty certain that I had not made an error. I even checked it against an interim analysis I ran which corroborated my finding. I went back and compared my findings for each question with the findings in the report I received. There were seven other areas of discrepancy. Then it hit me. All seven questions were worded in the negative.

It turned out that the analysts had recoded the responses for those seven questions. However, they forgot to reverse the language of the question. As a result, their finding was exactly opposite of what was expected (and what was more likely).

I see this happen a lot. Managers present numbers from reports that defy common sense (e.g., profits that exceed sales, per capita costs for something that when multiplied out are higher than the company’s total expenses, etc.). When I ask people how that could happen, I typically get the same response. They didn’t apply their knowledge of the business to the analysis. They took the number at face value and simply passed it along.

As a leader, your role is to more than simply passing information along.