Data Literacy for Leaders

One of the key process blockages in undertaking digital transformation is data literacy. A particular challenge is understanding the needs of data literacy for leaders.  

Recently, I was invited to participate in a brainstorming session hosted by the Canadian School of Public Service to articulate an approach to promoting data literacy for leaders.  Our target group is senior managers and above.  It is an interesting target audience.  Many of these individuals have been promoted because of their experience and domain knowledge.  In policy and service areas, much of that may not have much in the way of data requirements.  These folks rely on their experience and knowledge to inform their decisions.  It has been a process that works for them.  

These are busy people, with a lot of distractions and responsibility.  They are often data reluctant both because they often don't have the time or the training to assess data and the insights it gives and because they don't trust data analysis.  They recognize the value of data, but the time and seeming complexity of understanding data can be a barrier. 

In my work to understand organizational data culture and data skills, we desperately need leaders who understand the strategic value of data, understand how data can have a positive impact on results and transform the organization.  We don't need leaders who are data scientists, we need leaders who are informed data consumers and data advocates.  

So what can we do to become better informed data advocates and leaders?  I believe we can become better data advocates and leaders if we take three or four hours and do the following activities:

1.  Begin to understand the true strategic value of data in your organization.  Go talk to your data people who work with your organization's data every day.  Go have coffee with them and get them to show you what they are doing, what they can do for you and the impact it can have on your business.  By understanding what they do, a bit about how they do it and the strategic value it can bring to your organization, you will begin a really fruitful conversation. 

2.  Create and launch a  Data Values Statement.  See an example here: https://www.datadrivenimpact.com/2021/12/a-data-culture-values-statement.html

3. Begin your own data literacy journey. Tableau has a free online course called Data Literacy for All that is software agnostic to promote individual data literacy.  You can find it here: https://elearning-samples.tableau.com/page/data-literacy

4. Become a data leader/advocate.  Whatever your most pressing business challenge - define the data that underscores that challenge and find out what the data is telling you.  Start insisting on data being presented in decision meetings.  Defined the three or four Key Performance Indicators that drive your results and get a dashboard built on those KPIs.  Then use, share and rely on the insights those dashboards give you. 

Finally, understand that data is at the heart of everything we do in managing people, processes and technology.  Knowledge and experience are important and when linked to the relevant data and insights can create amazing impact on your results.  Isn't that part of what being a great leader is?