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Unlocking Leadership, previously Leadership 2020, is a podcast helping leadership lead in a world that is changing ever quickly. Join us as we interview even more inspiring people who provide information and skills on how to tackle the big questions affecting today’s leaders.
We blend real-life leadership experiences of our guests with the latest management theory to provide practical, relevant tips for anyone in a leadership position.
Unlocking Leadership asks the big questions about being a better leader in the modern workplace. Hosted by Clare Carpenter.
[00:00:00] Clare Carpenter: Welcome to Unlocking Leadership, a podcast about leading in a changing world, brought to you by Corndell, your strategic skills partner. I'm your host, Clare Carpenter. I'm joined today by David Reed. David is the Chief Knowledge Officer and Evangelist at DataIQ. Hello, you!
[00:00:27] David Reed: Clare, hello. Thank you for inviting me in!
[00:00:31] Clare Carpenter: Wow. I've never spoken to an evangelist on this podcast before. Met many of them in life probably, but never on the podcast. So thank you. I'm excited to have a rummage about in your brain and see what comes out of it. I wonder as a starting point, maybe you would like to arrive, tell us who you are, how did you get to this incredible role that you've given that title to?
[00:00:56] David Reed: Absolutely, and evangelist is a bit of a transfer in of a term from the world of software, where often they employ someone to go and shout about how wonderful their solution is. So I'm using that term to try and do the same thing about what we do here at DataIQ.
But very briefly, how did I end up here? My career started essentially as a journalist, writing about initially advertising. I worked on the Industry Bible of the 80s campaign and at that point, direct marketing started to emerge as the new thing where you could actually target people specifically and also track their responses to things that you couldn't do so well in advertising.
So, I spent 20 to 25 years editing, writing for direct marketing journals and titles domestically and internationally and over that time, the thing that really intrigued me about it was looking back, the data piece, the understanding that you could derive about. Individuals, especially consumers, they're buying behaviors, their propensities, and therefore the ability to forecast what was likely to appeal to them and of course, in the early noughties, we got the arrival of the digital realm. Everything suddenly became a dot com. So in about 2005, I persuaded a publisher to launch a monthly called Data Strategy, and then about seven or eight years later, DataIQ was created by our CEO, Adrian Gregory, and he recruited me as employee number one.
We started out as really a classic media business. We had our own magazine conference and award scheme and a power list, we still do three of those things, the content is now digital, but alongside that we also have a membership service where we talk to and work with senior data leaders and their teams to develop their skills and their confidence and their ability to increase the data literacy within their organisations. So as part of that, a couple of years back, I wrote a book called Becoming Data Literate and really that's the point at which I guess I became an evangelist to go out and shout about why data literacy matters in organisations and how the people who are responsible for that.
Need to operate both professionally and personally, and I think that's what we're going to dig into today.
[00:03:30] Clare Carpenter: This notion of data literacy is fascinating, isn't it? I've really only heard that phrase in the last few years, and in particular in discussion around how data illiterate many of our senior leaders in particular, in fact, are.
[00:03:46] David Reed: Well, look, it's Interesting because in a very short space of time. Yes, the term data literacy has come into common currency It wasn't the initial title for the book. I conceived the book as being about the new data natives, this tribe of data practitioners and the people who lead them. Only I discovered there actually weren't that many of them.
So I figured the book would have a relatively limited appeal. But the term data literacy started democratization had begun. Data became a thing, and that's really all about trying to put some access to data, or at least. Insights into data into the hands of people during their everyday jobs, and that can be everybody from, you know, the CEO having the absolute latest financial data at his or her fingertips, right through to, you know, on the shop floor or, you know, in the police service or the border force, people having information about people to the Keep their eyes open for all of that is data.
It requires using pieces of technology. It requires some skills to interact with that. And the challenge is that levels of both literacy and especially numeracy. Both here in the UK and globally are not as high as you might imagine. So we are perhaps fortunate in having very good communication skills and understanding skills and a level of numeracy.
But for a lot of people... Both of those things aren't necessarily true. And so the, the idea that you can just push out these tools and the data and the insights into your organisation and it'll be adopted and used has to go hand in hand with developing the confidence and the skills that people, you want to use them and then enabling them to do positive things off of the back of that, because it's one thing to say, great, here is your latest stock report for your store, this is what sold extensively yesterday. You might want to put that, you know, on those shelves right at the front so that you sell even more because it's a hero product. But unless you actually say to your store managers, that's what we want you to do, and we will incentivize you to do that, but also if you notice that bubbling under in your particular region, you're seeing your shoppers have a slightly different view on things, act on that and give us the feedback and record it and capture that data and play it back and be part of that dialogue within the business about what's really happening. So it has to be a two way street and so data literacy is, it's about a shared set of mind and behavior across the organisation that's that's facilitated and encouraged and incentivised.
[00:06:46] Clare Carpenter: I'm hearing in your description, a link between data literacy and tech literacy as well, by which I mean having the capacity to not only understand and analyse data and collect it, but to be able to use the technology that is available to make that an accessible thing. Is that a strong link for you in terms of being able to, does one lead to the other is I guess what I'm asking?
[00:07:14] David Reed: Well, it's kind of inevitable because the two are inextricably linked. The reason we are even talking about data these days is because of the digitisation of our world and every single one of those tools and those platforms is creating data just as a byproduct of what it's actually designed to do and that was the big realisation back in the about 2010, 2011, that big data was this huge unused asset and since then, organisations have been busy leveraging it. Now there's a same time we, as individual consumers have been doing exactly the same thing. So most of us, before we make a purchase or a booking, engage with data in some form or another. It might be a review, it might be looking at some comments or some ratings and the curious thing is, that feels utterly normal. There doesn't have any barrier between those systems and our desire to behave like that. It doesn't feel unnatural, and then we go to work, and suddenly there are all sorts of obstacles put in our way. Usually, very poorly defined interfaces, or a lack of the information we'd really like or an organisational culture that says, look, but don't touch.
In other words, we're going to feed you, but we don't want to hear back from you. So data literacy in the business sense is trying to close that gap between how we operate as consumers and how we operate as colleagues and staff. So technology is part of that, but it is much more that cultural thing of encouraging and wanting people to dig into things and provide their own responses and feedback as well and that's a bit that really, most organisations struggle with, they find it hard to transition from commander control to democratisation of data. That doesn't mean complete loss of control of your data. It means allowing people to engage and respond and wanting that to happen.
[00:09:28] Clare Carpenter: It's fascinating to think about where this all comes from, where it leads to. You've talked about this sort of natural instinct that we have to look at and gather data and to analyse it and I'm going to suggest manipulate it as well, make the data tell the story that we would like it to tell, as well as another alternative version of that particular story and we saw that, I don't know, maybe my recollection of this through the pandemic and the way that data was presented to us as a society through that has brought this into fine relief for me. We really noticed that then, didn't we, in terms of how data is both presented and also manipulated, I'm fascinated by your view on that maybe.
[00:10:14] David Reed: Well, you're absolutely right. The pandemic was probably the biggest data literacy program globally that we've ever seen because all of us suddenly got used to looking at curves and terms like trying to flatten the curve terms of the spread of a highly infectious disease and up until that point, really, we hadn't had that shared experience of being presented with a set of information all at once, all together, which had that level of impact for each of us and of course, it surfaced a number of things. Firstly, that you need utter credibility, utter trust in that data, and the belief that it has been collected accurately and it's been communicated objectively.
I think, in the UK especially, with our Chief Scientific Officer in the government, we had the benefit of that. But of course, you can present that information to multiple groups of people, and they will have a different take on it. Because data can be ambiguous, and especially once you start to use it to forecast and to predict where you might say best case, worst case, middle case scenarios, and we all have our own confirmation bias where we're going to go, I want it to be the best, or I want it to be the worst and then you get into those echo chambers where everyone wants to argue that their point of view is the right one. Now, in a sense, none of that is new, this has always been the case, it's just the scale is different. So go into any business meeting across the last century and you will have found exactly the same discussions taking place about whether the sales number was the one that the sales director is claiming it to be, or the chief financial officer is willing to accept the same is true of the number of customers, for example. Now, just going back to the history of data as a functional area, it really took off because of the financial crisis of 2008 and the realisation in the banking industry that they didn't actually know their level of exposure. They did not know their net number of customers, the net level of deposits, the amounts that they were on the hook for under the various guarantees.
So that hurried them up to create data offices to integrate and aggregate their data and to bring in a Chief Data Officer to oversee that from there, we got it expanding into most other sectors and then, of course, with the pandemic, there was a second realisation that a lot of investment, a lot of commitment to data offices still hadn't transformed how the business itself operated and I think that is partly a failure of leadership, both by Chief Data Officers and especially by the C Suite and going, great, we've tidied everything up, that's the job done, isn't it? Well, no, do you want it to be transformational or not? If so, you need to be braver.
[00:13:31] Clare Carpenter: We are moving into this place of the role of the Chief Data Officer, and that even of itself is a relatively new role, isn't it?
[00:13:43] David Reed: Very new. I think if you try and track it back, I think the very first. person with that title was working at Capital One, or Yahoo, it's slightly contested, you can't get it further back than about 2004, but it really, like I say, it wasn't until about 2008 or 9 that the bank industry introduced them and since then we've seen a lot more chief data officers introduced. Most organisations who have one have had one for less than 10 years and there are many who still don't actually have one at that level.
[00:14:22] Clare Carpenter: And how do they make their voices heard? I'm fascinated by whether or not, in your experience, the Chief Data Officer role has as much clout at the boardroom table as some of the other members of the board.
[00:14:36] David Reed: Well, this is where things get really interesting Clare, because there has been a very determined effort, led not least by ourselves at DataIQ to elevate the status of the Chief Data Officer into being a genuine C Suite role. Now, having the term Chief in the job title has been a little bit deceptive because it tends to imply that someone is sitting on the ex co or at the very highest level of the board, it's not necessarily the case. It just means they are the most senior individual with responsibility for data.
Why should it be that there are very few organisations globally who have a CDO? at the board when the predictions a few years ago were that, you know, we were going to see between 50 and 85 percent of businesses recognising the criticality of that role. Well, I think it's partly a power play, especially by CIOs, so Chief Information Officers, and also by Chief Digital Officers, both of whom contest that data is part of their domain and we can unpick that for sure and also the fact is, you know, the C Suite is very crowded, because there have been other things happening that are important, like customer experience, for example, or, you know, the chief digital officer role itself that want to get into the board, want to have that position and can make a serious claim. So it's important, we believe, to have someone designated with a very senior role responsible for data, whether they have to be at the board level, however, is a secondary issue because organisational structures are complex. They differ hugely from company to company. It's more about the reporting line and the ability to get the ear of the CEO and the CFO. So we delight if we see someone on the board, obviously fantastic, quite rare. If someone reports the CFO, that's excellent because it means they can make their investment case to the right person very quickly, but they will be under the gun to prove the return on investment and where we get a bit anxious as if the CDO is just a secondary to the CTO, because that really constrains what data is then able to do within the organisation.
[00:17:22] Clare Carpenter: It's so important, isn't it, to draw this distinction between data being a historic collection activity and it being something that an organisation and the leadership team of an organisation use to horizon scan, if you like, to think about what's going on in 10 years time, not necessarily two minutes ago. How do you see that mindset shifting in the people that you're talking to?
[00:17:51] David Reed: Yeah, it's a great question and you're absolutely right, that's data collection, data management, that's relatively mature. It's been around for a long time. Then it got the push to say, we've really got to get this right. Fortunately, cloud computing came along and made it a lot easier to bring your data into one place. The multiple clouds are a thing, but at least to have it somewhere that's accessible. So you can then start to extract things from it, do things with it and that is the critical shift. So, data management, data governance, very, very important things to do and what you see a lot of, and this is especially the case, for example, in the USA, is what they like to call the defensive play around data. So, gather it, govern it, protect it, very important, and that role is very easy to delineate, but what it doesn't do is start to create value or drive innovation, and so what we're seeing really is if you're a CDO who is closely associated with analytics or data science or now AI, then you have the opportunity to be a genuinely transformative leader within the organisation, but of course that does require a mindset and approach that is offensive to use the US term, that is aggressive and looking for opportunity, looking for value creation, and they're often different people. So if you as an organisation recruited in someone to operate in that defensive space and to be the protector, the guardian of your data.
It's very hard to then anticipate that they will be the one driving the new set of things that we're seeing happen, especially this year, 2023, you know, with the eruption of a new generation of tools like generative AI you may need to look around, have you got a Chief Analytics Officer or Chief Data Scientist, who is maybe that person and work out the relationship between those two roles, CDO, CAO, CDSO, whatever you want to call them and of course, the other players who are senior, that is for them again, an opportunity to pitch for the C Suite. So digital officers, marketers, customer experience people are all looking at AI as a way to go, we're the people who get this. We can drive this. It's not about data. We argue it is, but you can understand that everyone is always looking for their chance.
[00:20:45] Clare Carpenter: And we've been collecting data forever, haven't we, as human beings. You know, where to pick the best berries, what to do if a bear's running at the door of your cave, you know, all of those kind of things.
[00:20:58] David Reed: Well, if you go into the Old Testament and you look at, you know, there are books in the Old Testament that are essentially family trees, right? You know, Isaiah, Begat, Ezekiel, whatever. That's a family tree. That's data gathering. That's actually lineage, right? That's still a really important thing in data. Where does it come from? What does it lead you to? Can you trust that connection and what can you infer from that connection? So yeah, absolutely. It's essential to how we as humans understand the world.
[00:21:27] Clare Carpenter: And I'm thinking that we also become quite protective of data that we feel we have some level of ownership across in terms of the basic survival data that I've just mentioned, but also when you then build that into, you know, the business world of today, how do you see organisations working collaboratively to look at how data is being both collected, analysed, used, interpreted in the world as a whole, rather than uniquely in their own organisation?
[00:22:00] David Reed: Yeah, that is a really interesting space to try to understand and of course a few years ago we suddenly understood the extent to which certain digital platforms were aggregating data from all of the brands and the services that were operating in that space and were able to create incredibly rich views of us as consumers. Now there are good things and bad things about that. The good thing is when it removes friction from what we're trying to do, when it supports in a positive way, engagement with each other and with the world and with brands and perhaps reduces the cost of doing those things. All of those are really critical enablers that the data aggregation allows you to do. So if you are an organisation that has a relatively narrow slice of a market. Yes, you can go and find data sets that have been aggregated that tell you a lot more about your target audience, you can get into media channels. The digital media, especially where they can do that on your behalf and it's very powerful and it's very dynamic and you can never hope as a single organisation to achieve that from your own footprint. Of course, the downside is we as individual consumers, might not fully understand the extent to which that's happening. Some of it was happening without gaining our consent back when GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, came into force, it surfaced a lot of that activity. I think we've mostly got past that. But there are, of course, places in the world where the rules are different and the experience of citizens is very different and that's, you know, a macro political issue which could lead to friction between the West and some of those systems. Once you look at how integrated the internet is and the technology platforms is and where things gets produced and stored and manufactured. So you can get into biggest discussions imaginable just through the lens of data, whether as a senior data leader, a CEO, you have the ability to influence any of those things is probably much more of a challenge than if for example, the CDO you interviewed at Microsoft, Microsoft has a global voice, and so its ability just recently to talk about building ethical tools into its data solutions and its AI platforms, that's really important, and that's very powerful, and it's a very positive step because it starts to level set for everyone else in a way that all of the individual customers of Microsoft couldn't hope to do for themselves, so it's starting to solve one of those problems of these enormous technical and data ecosystems that we all operate in and businesses operate in.
[00:25:37] Clare Carpenter: So I'm thinking about the world of data specialists and the unique talents that those in that world may hold, what's it like to lead a team of people in that space?
[00:25:49] David Reed: Well, they are a fascinating group, both the individual practitioners and the people who lead them and incredibly diverse, not just at the usual level that is taken to mean, so gender, ethnicity, et cetera. It is a diverse industry, but also by the pathways they've chosen to come into the industry. Now, right now, people joining are more likely to be coming from STEM backgrounds, so science, technology, engineering, maths. But there's been a huge recognition that you also need the humanities and the arts as part of the mix of any team. For the leaders themselves, they don't necessarily come from that background because this role did not exist when they started their careers and mostly they fell into it either through having a personal interest in data or taking a job that ended up being more about data and analytics than anything else and then getting promoted, right? So most of the CEOs that we know didn't know they were going to be a CDO. There's only a couple who always had this in their sights and wanted to get into that leadership position and there's a really interesting moment for everybody where they are required to step around from being behind the screen to being in front of the screen and that's a real pivot because the skills that make you good at data and analytics are not the skills that make you good at managing and leading a team and management is one thing and leadership is different. So your question about what's it like to manage a team? Difficult because analysts, especially quite bloody minded, and there are things they love doing and things they don't want to do and the one they don't want to do. Nobody wants to do this is data quality and yet it's typically 78 percent of what anyone working with data. Has to do is clean up the data before they can do anything with it. So there's an awful lot of cajoling and incentivising and nurturing that has to happen to get your team to do those grunts jobs in order to get onto the good stuff.
Now, once you sort of mastered that with the benefits of the organisation giving you the tools, whether that's, you know, all the classic incentives, all the lovely workspaces that, that typically anyone in a digital space now enjoys. Salary upticks because it's been very hot space, so people get paid a lot of money to do this work and also, as a result of the pandemic, the hybrid working, that's a huge breakthrough. It's been tremendous for employment in data analytics because it absolutely lends itself to remote working. There's no reason if your job is behind a screen for you to be in an office until you have to come and present and engage, so that hybrid is brilliant for this industry. So the whole management piece of data analytics teams has got easier. But the leadership piece, I think, is still a problem and it's just a problem because of that characteristic I spoke about earlier, of the people who find themselves in those roles, who are tasked with historically being defensive with data and are now being looked at to go, what are we gonna do with AI right? Now they may well have been working on it, but the idea of taking a, you know, a machine learning model that's there to help you transfer data outta one system into another and then viewing the opportunity to transform an enterprise wide process through AI, which is what's being looked at right now. That's very different mindset and that does require leadership because you're going to have to get a lot of powerful people into a room to agree on what it is you're targeting, to acknowledge how much funding they're going to have to put behind it, to let go of a lot of things that they're used to doing, and to move forward. That's leadership. Very few of the people that we encounter at DataIQ who are in our membership or in our community have ever been taught those things and maybe it's not innate to them, so it's a challenge right now and of course, a huge opportunity for them.
[00:30:34] Clare Carpenter: And one that they share with emergent leaders and learning leaders, my favorite kind, by the way, across all sorts of disciplines and schools of entry into the world of leadership, isn't it? It's not unique to the world of data.
[00:30:47] David Reed: Well, it's not unique to the world of data, you're right. I don't think business is great at conscious succession planning and nurturing talent. We've just recognised that spring of next year, we're launching an academy for future leaders towards people working in data analytics who've maybe worked 5 to 10 years. Maybe they've been promoted into a role already, or maybe they're looking for that to happen. To say, given the complexities of this space, here's a set of things that you need to have some understanding of and here's a set of personal qualities and competencies that you're going to need to develop to be a leader and we hope that this might build a cohort and some attempt to standardise pathways towards that. Now, there are a few parallel examples, there's an example, I think, in the world of insurance, the Association of British Insurers has a future leaders program, for example. There's a couple of others. I think there's probably at least one for marketers, but it's not common, you know, and it's not easy as someone planning your career, when you get to that level of senior or head of department, whatever the function might be, to know how to take yourself up to the next level. Generally people end up buying their own career coaching and such in order to do that.
[00:32:23] Clare Carpenter: Yeah. This notion of leadership being a learned skill behavior is fascinating, it's not new, we used to say, though, that leaders are born, which I couldn't disagree more with, by the way. But still...
[00:32:40] David Reed: I think I agree with you Clare. Some leaders are born, some people are born with leadership qualities, yes, in the same way as some sports people are born with an ability to run incredibly fast, you know, or to throw an object a really long distance, but they still have to train and train and train and train.
So this expectation that even someone with an innate leadership quality, just let them loose, right? That's false and people who maybe don't perceive that within themselves, or have never drawn on it, of course they can develop abilities, absolutely. Do you know where I think part of this comes from? If you look at our model of government, especially in the UK, where someone gets appointed to be a minister and, you know, within a week or so, they're expected to have learnt the new brief of an entirely new department and to be able to create policy and argue with the treasury for funding and, you know, lead the thousands of people in that department and it's absolutely ridiculous because that individual may not have any leadership qualities. They happen to be the member of the party that's in government and have the right connections and have said the right things and yet they're landed into an entirely new space and let loose, right? But that's what happens in business all the time. People get promoted, they get pushed towards things, or they get headhunted out of a belief that they're capable of doing something because they've nurtured their LinkedIn profile and they've, been seen in the right list and it's other right awards.
We're guilty of that. Sorry, but we feed that machine as well. So I believe you can develop the leadership abilities that are required to be very effective within business, but especially those that make your colleagues and your teams really want to be led by you and those are different from those individuals who are born with what we always think of as leadership qualities because they're often a little bit sociopathic.
[00:35:00] Clare Carpenter: Yeah.
[00:35:01] David Reed: Let's be honest, they're not always the nicest people to work with. Now, of course, leadership does require sometimes making hard choices, and the role of a CEO is the most nakedly exposed of that, and that's why they don't last very long, because they are constantly under the spotlight, doing difficult things in a situation of information overload. For the rest, being a leader is something you can practice and get good at, and be recognized for, and nurture without burning out, and with the opportunities that come alongside that.
[00:35:37] Clare Carpenter: I think that if you find yourself in a leadership role and or you aspire to be in one, you have a responsibility to learn and to train and to grow and to keep doing it as the demands of you as a leader change over time, not just an interest in it, but a responsibility, a requirement that says you owe it to the people who are following you to invest in yourself and learn to do what you're doing in that space better.
[00:36:08] David Reed: Well, I think that's right, Clare, because as a leader, you hold the fortunes of a lot of people in your hand. So obviously, you're immediate employees whose careers and opportunities you're directly responsible for, beyond that in the wider organisation are you enabling that business to achieve its goals and therefore to grow and develop in the way it wants to, that has benefits for all of its supply chain for its investors and potentially the wider economy and society, which is, of course, you know, another issue where Data Analytics has a big opportunity, you know, in terms of data for good.
So as a leader, you can't just go, great, I've got my team humming along, you know, we're growing nicely, we're delivering our projects on time. That's not job done, because things externally will change. Who knew we were going to get a pandemic? Who knew that Russia was going to invade Ukraine? Who knew that generative AI in March of this year was going to explode all over the headlines? Nobody. So as a leader, you have to have that ability to flex, to be resilient, to think, what have I already experienced that gives me a model to absorb, respond, and decide what to do in this changed situation? And constant learning, constant self nurture and support is part of that and don't be shy about being vulnerable and part of being a leader critical part is being open about not knowing and not always saying, I have the solution, but saying we need a solution, let's gather the right people to look at the problem and listen for what they think is going to work and it might not be what I think is going to work, but if I believe in what they're offering, I will support that and I will lead for that solution within the environment, within the business, whatever the case may be and that again is very, very difficult. It's probably self reflection is probably the weakest skill that I encounter most often with everybody that I meet in this industry, there's always that deflection to it's about the team. It's about the organisation. So what about you? Are you willing to be open to take inputs for yourself to take the support that you need? And again, I think it's just to do with those complex pathways and skill sets that got someone to where they are now, no longer being what's going to take them forward and for any of us, we all reach those inflection points in our life, and it can be challenging, but it can also be hugely powerful if you acknowledge it and you take the right steps.
[00:39:20] Clare Carpenter: This concept of self reflection and being vulnerable and staying in the not knowing and actually embracing that state and going what a wonderful place to be to not know the answers and to also have the capacity to ask really interesting questions, it's fascinating, isn't it? There's something that's coming up for me around the recent work that you've been doing in what you're calling the data skills paradox that sort of sits neatly against this, maybe that's a place we could travel to next. Tell us more about that. What is that? What does that mean?
[00:39:51] David Reed: Well, the data skills paradox, that came out of some research that, one of our partners Corndell did, and it's actually the... Sorry, my dog's barking. Sorry about that. The data skills paradox came out of a piece of research that one of our partners, Corndell, did and it really goes to this issue I was talking about earlier in the interview about how we as consumers very actively engaged with data and technology and are really interested in trying new things, I mean, how many people do you know who go off and do, you know, thrill seeking holidays and all sorts of adventures that they undertake? And yet, when they come to work, tend to inhabit a fairly constrained, tightly defined sphere of activity and are often a little bit afraid of change and the new and this is one of the problems when you're trying to transform using Data Analytics AI, that people get resistant to change and, they get angry about it. They actually go through the grief cycle of, you know, anger, denial, bargaining, hopefully acceptance.
So, I think trying to close that paradox requires applying the same tools at work that the brands we engage with as consumers use on us all the time, all of that nudge marketing, the behavioral economics around how you bit by bit encourage people to do something, reward them, you know, even if it's just a quick hit of great, well done, you've achieved this step on the road. That doesn't happen at work, right? You get told, oh, we're retooling the entire function, you're going to be adopting this new software and you don't get little badges and nudges and reminders and, you know, leaderboards of who's doing great and the gamification of all that training, you just get told you gotta do it, Monday you're gonna have the training, Tuesday you're up and running, right?
Well, if you expect humans to absorb and adapt to that, that fast, then it's gonna fail and repeatedly transformations fail for that very reason. So again, as a leader, I think getting into the psychology and the behavioral modification tools that exist and applying them internally is not Machiavellian, it's just recognising that that's the world that the people you're working with operate in every single day, the minute they're off the clock and they're behaving as a consumer.
So make it feel the same at work and I said earlier about, you know, digital workspaces, soft-play areas and coffee machines and comfortable furniture everywhere. If you're willing to do that with the physical environment, then do it with the mental environment as well and lead people with things that we know work and part of that is just simply going you're doing great, you know, I said, but here's a little nudge to the next bit and by the way, the person next to you is two steps ahead, here's how you can catch them up.
[00:43:20] Clare Carpenter: I'm hearing so many. echoes and nuances of psychological approaches to all elements of being a human being, as well as being a data leader, in the way that you explain that around our relationship with change and each other, around our capacity to let go of biases, both conscious and unconscious about accessing creativity in different ways through different physical environments as well as, psychological environments, it's so interesting talking to you could do it for the rest of the week, however, I wonder if in closing today, what would be some nuggets from you in all of the experience that you've had over the time that you've been in your current role and before, as you've seen the emergence of data as a topic and as an area of specialty, what would you say to people now, who are in perhaps their first leadership role coming through to this space where people are asking them to get involved in this and they're feeling a little bit wary? What would you offer them as advice?
[00:44:37] David Reed: So we spoke about the need to develop your skillset to get that support, make sure that you allow that to happen, and especially ask for the budget for that, right? And this is one of the problems, I used to write a lot about marketing directors and CMOs and to them, it was natural that they will have a coach to Chief Data Officer, it doesn't feel natural. So there's a curious paradox that they don't feel that they have the right to do this. But in terms of understanding what leadership means and trying to sum it up, there's a quote that I use in my book Becoming Data Literate that for me really is the way to understand the difference between management and leadership and it comes from Antoine de Saint Exupéry, who most people know as the author of The Little Prince, and it goes like this.
"If you want to build a ship, don't draw up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea", and I think that's so powerful because in a leadership role, you have to set the vision as well as manage the delivery and you have to keep people focused on that bigger goal that you're pursuing. Help them understand how each task they perform takes everyone a little further forward towards that sometimes seemingly unattainable end, that's really what leadership is about.
[00:46:28] Clare Carpenter: Thank you. How interesting to have spoken to you across so many different subjects today. Thank you so much for joining the podcast. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
[00:46:39] David Reed: Well, I've enjoyed it thank you very much indeed!
[00:46:43] Clare Carpenter: Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode of Unlocking Leadership, you can subscribe through all the regular podcast channels, and please do leave us a rating and review there.
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