A while back there was the adage, “The first step in success is just showing up.” It was true at the time because much of achieving one’s personal and organizational goals was dependent on time, effort and determination to get the job done. Businesses often succeeded because of people who were willing to work harder than their competition. Today, while there is still some truth in this, leaders and their organizations who desire to capture competitive advantage also need to know more than others, and even more importantly, they must know what to do with the information they collect. I’m currently studying a book by Thornton May, The New Know, in which he states, “Information has become the single most important asset in most organizations” and “The new scarce resource in the next economy will be the human attention needed to make sense of the information.” Just showing up isn’t good enough today. Knowledge and information is needed, but it must be the right knowledge combined with the biggest factor, how to apply the knowledge. The more efficient companies become at knowing what to do with the data they collect, the more competitive advantage they will enjoy.
I’m currently working on a project designed to help an organization go through a transformational change and turnaround. Though some in the organization had buried their proverbial heads in the sand as to the challenges they faced and the magnitude of the problems, it has now been generally accepted that a new trajectory is needed if the organization is going to return to health and be relevant in the future. The circumstances have become obvious and the practices which need to be reinvented have become easy to identify, providing that people are willing to put their personal preferences aside for the good of the organization and seek long-term solutions.
One of the things I am doing is gathering information. For turnaround to commence, we must know where we are beginning, so, I am going through tedious process of gathering and organizing data, then painstakingly cleaning it so that we have an accurate picture of the real world. Note: “Cleaning” data is the process of removing bias, wishful thinking, outliers, optimistic exaggeration, and rounding up the numbers just to make things appear better than they really are. It’s not unusual for organizations to put a positive spin on things, however, it ultimately harms the process of dealing with challenges because they are not being honest with themselves. In the worst cases, data cleaning requires the removal of inflated and altered data that threatens the integrity of the reporting process altogether. When the collection of initial data is completed and an ongoing the process of clean data collection is in place, we will have an honest and realistic set of metrics from which to work in development of strategy going forward. The organization will be in a much stronger position to plan for the future and meet the challenges ahead.
I have spent this time to explain the importance of collecting “clean” data because, as leaders, honesty is indeed the best policy. I’m not talking about personal integrity, though that is critical, too, but rather honesty with oneself. Leaders must be willing to tell themselves the truth about how well their leadership practices are doing. All too often, leaders aren’t willing to admit that their methods haven’t worked, so they talk themselves into believing that things are doing fine. Worse, they aren’t honest with those they lead and convince people in the organization that there is no reason to worry or change the way things are being done. This is a recipe for disaster. Eventually the rhetoric-supported house of cards collapses, leaving those left to pick up the pieces and figure out what went wrong. I can’t stress how important it is for leaders to be honest with themselves and their people, and then to do something about what they discover when they take a good hard look at themselves and their practices. I’m speaking in an organizational context, but this applies to personal lives as well. We all need to be honest with ourselves.
As stated earlier, turnaround starts with the collection of clean data. We need to have the knowledge that comes from the information we gather. Then we must do something with the information. We can’t just show up anymore. We must know the truth about what is going on in our organizations, our homes and our communities. We must stop convincing ourselves that things will be fine if we ignore the facts about what is really happening. Show up, know information, be honest about it, and do something. It’s that simple!
Lead well.