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| Business Intelligence Series |
Continuing the idea from the previous post on Brent Dykes’ article on data culture and Generative AI [1], it’s worth discussing about the relationship between data culture and leadership. Leadership belongs to a list of select words everybody knows about but fails to define them precisely, especially when many traits are associated with leadership, respectively when most of the issues existing in organizations ca be associated with it directly or indirectly.
Take for example McKinsey’s definition: "Leadership is a set
of behaviors used to help people align their collective direction, to execute
strategic plans, and to continually renew an organization." [2] It gives an
idea of what leadership is about, though it lacks precision, which frankly is
difficult to accomplish. Using modifiers like strong or weak with the word
leadership doesn’t increase the precision of its usage. Several words stand out
though: direction, strategy, behavior, alignment, renewal.
Leadership is about identifying and challenging the status
quo, defining how the future will or could look like for the organization in terms
of a vision, a mission and a destination, translating them into a set of goals and
objectives. Then, it’s about defining a set of strategies, focusing on
transformation and what it takes to execute it, adjusting the strategic bridge
between goals and objectives, or, reading between the lines, identifying and
doing the right things, being able to introduce a new order of things, reinventing
the organization, adapting the organization to circumstances.
Aligning resumes in aligning the various strategies, aligning
people with the vision and mission, while renewal is about changing course in
response to new information or business context, identifying and transforming
weaknesses into strengths, risks into opportunities, respectively opportunities
into certitudes, seeing possibilities and multiplying them.
Leadership is also about working on the system, addressing
the systemic failure, addressing structural and organizational issues, making
sure that the preconditions and enablers for organizational change are in
place, that no barriers exist or other factors impact negatively the change,
that the positive aspects of complex systems like emergence or exponential
growth do happen in time.
And leadership is about much more - interpersonal influence,
inspiring people, Inspiring change, changing mindsets, assisting, motivating,
mobilizing, connecting, knocking people out of their comfort zones, conviction,
consistency, authority, competence, wisdom, etc. Leadership seems to be an
idealistic concept where too many traits are considered, traits that ideally
should apply to the average knowledge worker as well.
An organization’s culture is created, managed, nourished,
and destroyed through leadership, and that’s a strong statement and constraint.
By extension this statement applies to the data culture as well. It’s about
leading by example and not by words or preaching, and many love to preach, even
when no quire is around. It’s about demanding the same from the managers as
managers demand from their subalterns, it’s about pushing the edges of culture.
As Dykes mentions, it should be about participating in the data culture
initiatives, making expectations explicit, and sharing mental models.
Leadership is a condition necessary but not sufficient for an
organizations culture to mature. Financial and other type of resources are needed,
though once a set of behaviors is seeded, they have the potential to grow and multiply
when the proper conditions are met. Growth occurs also by being aware of what needs
to be done and doing it day by day consciously, through self-mastery. Nowadays there
are so many ways to learn and search for support, one just needs a bit of curiosity
and drive to learn anything. Blaming in general the lack of leadership is just
a way of passing the blame one level above on the command chain.
Resources:
[1] Forbes (2024) Why AI Isn’t Going To Solve All Your Data Culture Problems, by Brent Dykes (link)
[2] McKinsey (2022) What is leadership? (link)
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