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Using Data to Your Advantage
Feelings are vital in forming your personal and professional brand, and even in fueling your burgeoning sense of confidence. But when it comes to delivering results, the use of data—i.e., cold, hard facts—is crucial in the all-important realms of decision making and, ultimately, influence.
I Second That Emotion
When we’re beginning our careers or are new to an organization, conversations are less formal; risks are lower and outcomes less dependent on—and vital to—the organization’s overarching success. For this reason, emotions, hunches, and instincts tend to play a bigger role in our decision-making process.
It’s easier to sit around a room, informally, and make quick decisions based on gut feelings and work through problems on the fly. As we progress through our careers, however, risks are greater, rewards are on the line, and our decisions begin to impact the company in bigger—and better—ways. Gone are the days when you can just raise your hand and with little or no evidence say, “I think this is the right thing to do,” and expect everyone to agree.
Naturally, your opinion is valid and it becomes increasingly valid the more experience and expertise you accumulate during your career. But at higher levels in a company, there is always an extra, added layer of assurance required to make decisions. People still want you to say, “I think this is a good idea and we should follow this through because …” However, the “because” can no longer be “because I feel like it.”
Suddenly, your bosses, colleagues, and cochairs want you to tie those feelings to hard data that make everyone feel better about heading in that particular direction. Your feelings are good, but they are no longer quite good enough. Whatever the conversation you’re having is about, the further you go in your career, the more you need to be able to back up your thinking with firm, measurable data.
Coming up in my career, I was not someone who typically used numbers, facts, and figures to support my ideas. I worked mostly on instinct and gut feelings to forge my early career path. But the more senior my roles, the more I was required to back up my hunches and estimates with cold, hard facts.
When I was running recruiting for a Fortune 50 company, I had to learn how to speak fluently in numbers and to begin interpreting data in ways that others could understand. For instance, what was the cost to the company—in dollars and cents, as well as in time and productivity—of every new hire and of every person we moved?
Although by this point I essentially “knew” those costs by heart and could sense, deep in my gut, the true cost of hiring, firing, moving, or promoting, learning how to share that knowledge through the use of facts and figures helped me prove my point and helped others see the wisdom of such decisions.
Not everyone has the same experiences and expertise as you. That’s why translating your gut feelings into the language of business—a language everyone can understand—becomes more of a critical leadership skill the higher you climb.
Indeed, the more senior you become, the more costly your decisions—and the more challenging it can be to talk about those decisions without data to support you. After all, we’re not talking about justifying a client lunch or filling out purchase orders for office supplies anymore. We’re talking about the ROI of key projects, about influencing people. Arguing passionately about the resources you and your team need to meet objectives becomes more critical as you move up in an organization. Emotion is no longer enough to sway the opinions of decision makers.
We all tend to seek our own comfort levels. In my work, I’ve observed many women in senior roles, myself included, who feel more comfortable arguing emotionally rather than from a purely numbers point of view. They shy away from the metrics and don’t want to talk about numbers at all, leaving them at a distinct disadvantage when everyone else comes prepared to do just that. Instinct and emotion are a vital part of how we do our jobs, but it’s only one part.
As a result of their preference for instinct and emotion, some women tend to shy away from the metrics. They don’t want to talk about numbers at all, leaving them at a distinct disadvantage when everyone else comes prepared to do just that.
Eventually, I learned that talking about metrics is a necessity. But even then, I didn’t jettison my gut feelings or instincts; I simply made sure I was framing the conversation around metrics that supported my decision or request.
Once I learned to speak that language of cold, hard facts, I realized they were a valuable tool and not some indecipherable code I had to crack in order to do my job. In fact, learning to find the right numbers, decipher, interpret, and then manipulate them is a critical skill set that certainly helped me make a point faster and more effectively.
If I could go back and change something about my career, it would be to have learned that skill earlier so I could have been more confident and competent in it sooner. Not that I couldn’t do it when I needed to, but it was like writing with my left hand instead of my right. I had just never developed that muscle. And I don’t think I’m alone. Learning to find the “story in the numbers” and then using the data to influence outcomes is a powerful skill. And it’s an area that more women need to pay attention to earlier in their careers.
Our instincts are what make us unique and, what’s more, uniquely qualified to lead. Trust your gut instinct. But be able to back it up.
The Power of Emotions
We need facts, figures, and data to make tough decisions. But math is just math; anyone can learn it and use it to her advantage. Our instincts are what help us stand out from the crowd and, eventually, lead the crowd. Facts and figures help us support those instincts in a way that makes others see them as ironclad.
Instincts can help us predict future trends or even problems. I have had an extremely varied career because I listen to my gut instinct and have stepped up to preempt certain situations because my intuition told me there was a problem before something happened. No matter how good the data, facts and figures can’t always do that.
Many years ago, I was sent to a remote retail location. The minute I walked in, I honestly and immediately felt that something was wrong. Everyone I met on the leadership team seemed overly friendly, but the store employees didn’t look me in the eye. Everyone seemed pleasant enough, but my gut was sending up red flags every time someone I’d just met avoided eye contact.
As soon as I could, I went out into the parking lot and called my boss. “Something is wrong here,” I told him. “You’re going to want to send the audit team out.” Sure enough, it turns out the person who was running the business had stolen close to $1 million from the company. He had been doing a lot of things that were illegal, actually, and many of the employees had been threatened that if they spoke to me about them, they would lose their jobs.
This was one example of when my instincts helped me on the spot, because I had no facts before arriving on site. Ultimately, of course, facts were what proved my theory that something was wrong, but if I had ignored my instinct, the fraud might have gone undetected for much longer.
You can’t ignore your instincts, but effective leadership requires you to add multiple layers of data to support each and every theory. In fact, you have to reverse your way of communicating to lead with the data and follow with the emotions. You have to become someone who says, “Here is the data behind why we think this is a good idea.”
For instance, you might be doing a marketing campaign and find that there’s a gap between your messaging and the demographics of the group you’re targeting in the marketplace. Perhaps you’re targeting an audience that has become more urban, sophisticated, and multicultural than previously and the marketing language you’ve been using no longer speaks effectively to those consumers. You can feel the disconnect between your message and your market and even sense that the campaign isn’t going to have the impact you want to achieve. But emotions alone won’t be enough to get your team or your boss to shift the entire marketing message. You must have data to back up your theory; you have to connect the dots and present the rationale.
The more data you can provide that supports your theory (from national statistics, focus groups, Q&As, cited sources, traditional academic research, etc.), the stronger your emotional case as you layer on the facts.
I also think it’s important to be somewhat conventional in the language of numbers. Don’t make it so complex that no one but you can understand it, and don’t take it to the degree that folks need to wade through dozens of graphs and charts to understand a key concept you could interpret simply in plain English.
Now, I’m not encouraging you to become a walking calculator who gets so bogged down by data you can no longer think for yourself, let alone trust your instincts. But I encourage you to get more familiar with using data and, beyond that, to understand the impact of your metrics on the business as a whole. This synergy between facts and instincts, and understanding how to harness both, can be an incredible asset as you progress professionally. Learning to speak the language of business and being able to hone your instincts are critical skills for advancing in your career.
Network for Success
Emotions are easier because they come from within, but facts and figures require a little more digging because you have to go outside yourself—and often outside your comfort level—to get them. Personally, I struggled in this area because I wasn’t as confident in finance and accounting as I was in managing people and leading a team.
When I realized metrics were a missing part of my leadership portfolio, I quickly leaned on my network of professional resources to help me become more proficient. I learned that in every organization there are people in finance or accounting positions whose job is to help you help the company. I know that’s a bit facetious, but at the heart of what these folks do is to provide the data that the company uses to make decisions to go forward by looking backward at last month’s, last quarter’s, or year-over-year numbers. Using these assets will not only assist you with learning the power of metrics, but they will provide you with the very facts and figures you’ll need to support your instincts.
If you need metrics on a routine basis, building a relationship with someone in the finance or accounting department can be helpful. Developing that relationship and honing that skill can become a habit that secures your own bright future.
Make it an instinct—and a habit—to seek out facts before you make a presentation or request. And try to get to the point where you can bounce ideas off that finance or accounting person to see how she can assist. She too may have a hunch about what’s happening in the numbers, and she can share that information with you—improving her own abilities in that area.
If you are fluent and strong in this area, try to help others develop their skills in this department by partnering with them on a project or two until they’re fluent. This is a great opportunity to network with others, and it will help you grow as a leader and a valuable team member.
The Takeaway
Data is crucial to your ability to make informed decisions and “sell” those decisions to invested stakeholders. Such metrics can be intimidating, but once you learn to embrace the power data holds to influence others and support your theories, passions, and interests, it will be your ally rather than your enemy.
Remember, too, that data is not a substitute for leadership. Facts and figures provide the support you need to make the decisions your instinct has already told you are the right ones. Along with procuring and curating data, you must take accountability for the data and the decisions they support.