3 Ways to Build a Data-Driven Team

It is no doubt a sign of progress that a significant proportion of organizations and managers today appear to feel guilty when they admit that they are making big management decisions in an intuitive rather than evidence-based way. Indeed, being data-driven has joined the ranks of "innovative", "diverse", and "socially responsible" as the one of most laudable features of organizational culture, at least if we go by company websites. Although feeling the pressure to demonstrate that objective facts -- instead of subjective preferences -- underlie managers' key choices is no doubt a major step towards actually becoming a data-driven organization, it's an ambitious goal for any company, requiring a big cultural transformation, which will need to transcend the wishes of senior leaders to create real changes in how people think, feel, and act at all levels of the organization. And, as with any cultural transformation, managers are a critical agent of change. As organization turbocharge their ability to gather more and more data -- and it's not so much about size, but rather about quality -- what matters most is having people who can ask the right questions to the data.