Improve the Way You Lead Your Organization with People Analytics

Improve-the-Way-You-Lead-Your-Organization-with-People-Analytics

How do you spot a good leader?

If you said, “By measuring their effectiveness based on results and business performance,” you’d be right.

But how do they get there?

Obviously, it is the quality of their leadership skills that enables their success.

Before you can get favorable business outcomes, you must have the know-how to guide the organization in the right direction.

In today’s highly volatile business environment, leaders must continuously look for ways to leverage tools and technology to improve and optimize their effectiveness.

People analytics enables you to do just that by providing the tools to hone, augment and complement your leadership skills. Here’s how:

Decision-making

Successful leaders are those who consistently make smart decisions for their organizations.

Decision-making is one of the most critical leadership skills. When the stakes are high, these decisions determine whether the organization ultimately succeeds or fails. A magic 8-Ball won’t cut it.

Effective decisions lead to positive business outcomes that propel the organization forward, improve productivity and profitability, motivate employees, and engender their trust and commitment from entry-level to senior management.

Poor decisions can send a company into a downward spiral that it may never recover from. There is a strong correlation between companies that excel at effective decision-making and those with strong financial performance.

With so much riding on leadership decisions, how do you ensure you make the right decisions more often than not?

It all depends on the decision-making process. A basic method involves five steps:

Identifying the challenge.
Gathering information.
Weighing options.
Choosing a solution.
Communicating the decision.

Let’s talk about step two.

One way to increase your probability of success is to ensure you have as much information as possible before deciding.

People analytics allows leaders to distill large data sets (compiled from direct observation, facts, and figures) into actionable insights that provide the revelations needed to make smart decisions. Of course, you need information that is valid, reliable, and complete. This data is gold.

The more data you have at your disposal and the higher the quality of that data, the better equipped you are to make a decision, and the better the chances of it being both appropriate and effective.

Data-informed decisions will stand up to scrutiny because they are backed by evidence, not hunches, intuition, or guesswork based on what happened in the past. It also allows for a 360-degree assessment that covers all bases.

Problem-solving

Another must-have leadership skill is problem-solving.

Ultimately, the purpose of people analytics is to use data to solve business problems. While analytical skills are required for any leadership role, they can only go so far.

What happens when you encounter never-before-seen challenges or need to analyze prohibitively large amounts of data? Without technology, human analysis would be painstakingly slow.

Using people analytics technology to analyze data allows you to quickly identify relationships between variables, trends, and patterns, and determine correlations and causation. Through visualizations, you can readily assess the situation at hand and make interventions in a timely manner.

Strategic, critical, and analytical thinking

The leader of any organization is its protector and guide.

One way that they protect the organization is by assessing and mitigating risk. To do this effectively, you have to know what is happening in real-time to predict probable events so you can put measures in place to head off disaster.

People analytics creates the buffer that gives leaders the ability to future-proof their organizations. By gathering an exhaustive amount of data and analyzing it to detect trends, patterns, and relationships, predictive models can put the power into leaders’ hands to make informed predictions and strategize to suit.

Using the analysis of real-time data to identify organizational needs and challenges, map changes, and the effects thereof, leaders are better able to prioritize, strategize and pivot in response to unfavorable conditions.

People Management

The best way to ensure maximum business performance is to hire the best talent.

But hiring them isn’t enough. You want to develop them and keep them.

Hire:

People analytics gives you the insight you need to home in on the best talent that is also the best fit for your organization. You do this by identifying the qualities of the best performers, accessing the right talent pools, and attracting candidates that fit the bill.

Develop:

In learning and development, people analytics matches the capability requirements with the learning needs of employees to identify skill gaps and shore up competencies by identifying the right people for the right training.

Keep:

Analyzing workforce data compiled from employee surveys gives leaders the information they need to keep abreast of employee sentiment, satisfaction, and engagement to help create a work environment that keeps them happy and productive. Monitoring means you can make interventions before dissatisfaction turns into turnover and all the scary resultant costs associated with it.

With a world of capabilities at your fingertips, people analytics can bring you one step closer to optimizing your (number one resource) workforce and talent by acquiring, effectively developing, and retaining the best employees.

Leading into the future

With people analytics tools at your disposal, you have the power to transform the way you lead your organization and enhance the workplace with a data-driven mindset.

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