C-Suite Confidential: Leadership Development

Leadership Ignorance No Excuse

“Ignorantia Juris Non Excusat” in Latin means Ignorance of the law excuses not. Ignorance is defined as a lack of knowledge or information that creates a state of unawareness. When someone is unaware their actions are violating a law, ignorance is not a legal excuse for being held liable for the act. As leaders, our role is to generate business results. So we continually work to refine and improve our strategic focus. Yet, as leaders, how often are we acting on behalf of the organization with a lack of knowledge, incomplete information, and unawareness leading from a state of ignorance?

As I shared in the previous C-Suite Confidential: Leadership Malpractice, without data we are left to our decision-making biases. Where are you implementing processes to generate knowledge and intelligence to stimulate insights throughout the organization? The good news is that leadership development training is a proven method for improving a CEO’s strategic agenda, effectiveness and results. Intentional efforts in the area of leadership development have proven impacts including:
Employee Satisfaction Reduced Absenteeism
Culture of Trust Increased Retention
The bad news, according to EY Leadership Forecast 2018, ONLY 14% of CEOs have leadership talent to execute strategy. What is the leadership gap in your organization? Knowing leadership ignorance is not an excuse, what will you invest in 2019 to address your leadership ignorance and improve your business results?

Leadership Malpractice

“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion” – W. Edward Deming

Malpractice in healthcare is the result of prescription without diagnosis. How often have you made people decisions without data, based on “gut” instinct? I’ve been guilty. There are many instances where we as leaders have to rely on our gut instincts. However, science and technology have come too far for us to continue down this path of leadership malpractice with people.

Imagine you visit the doctor because of a lump on your head. The doctor spends 6 seconds reading your chart and 10-mins with the examination and says take two aspirin. Ready. Fire. Aim. Wait! What about the other tools available? MRI, CT Scan? By the way, here is some real data. We spend 6 seconds scanning a resume and only 10-mins preparing for an interview.

Without data, decisions are fueled by our biases: cognitive bias, confirmation bias, attribution bias. Our biases are expensive, resulting in carnage across our organizations like an 82% manager failure rate, only 3 out 10 employees engaged, and 45% turnover.

Thanks to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends Report, we know:

Only 8% of businesses have usable people analytics.

Only 9% of business leaders believe they have a good understanding of which talent dimensions drive performance.

Only 15% of businesses have broadly deployed HR and talent scorecards for line managers in their organizations.

Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends Report

How can we optimize human talent in our organization, when we only have 8% of the picture? Scientific, objective data needs to fuel the development of a business strategy to replace “gut” instincts when it comes to our people. Just as MRI and CT Scans are available to doctors, human analytic tools are available to leaders. When we can rely on science-based technology tools to optimize our people strategy, we can stop committing Leadership Malpractice and get back to our responsibility of leading a healthy organization.