How do you spend time prepping for a meeting?
If you are like many of the leaders with whom I speak, you probably pour over your reports trying to memorize every data point. You know that is not particularly useful, but you’ve been burned in the past (or saw a co-worker burned). Someone asked for an obscure piece of data, and you could not provide it off the top of your head.
There is a serious problem in the business world. Leaders have equated quoting business statistics with understanding the business. Memorizing numbers requires absolutely no understanding of the business.
Equating the ability to quote business statistics with the effectiveness of a leader is misguided. You would not assume that someone who can quote the statistics of a football team would be an effective coach. Is a high school student who can recite the periodic table from memory an expert chemist?
Statistics, facts, and data are important. However, understanding what they mean makes a leader effective.
No business succeeds or fails based upon on one detailed, drill-down metric. The increase in sales in one SKU, in one city, in one week hardly tells you how your company is doing. It’s an important number. If those sales are poor, someone must act.
A high-level executive shouldn’t be consuming his or her time with discussions over discrete pieces of data. They should be leading discussions on the health of the business and the decisions and actions needed to maintain or improve that health.
Our conscious minds are limited when it comes to keeping track of information. We can only process a handful of things at a time. So why are we filling that limited space with information that can be easily looked up?
Why don’t we use that scarce resource to process and store patterns, recommendations, and conclusions? That’s where the real value of data can be found. It’s also where decisions and actions are made.
Being good at memorizing facts is great if you are making your career in the game show or trivia business.
Understanding and finding meaning in data is what you need to make a name for yourself as a leader.
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Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and trainer with Avail Advisors. Avail helps leaders simplify their problems, decisions, data, and communication. Contact Brad at brad.kolar@availadvisors.com.
