Lead like a statistician - without the math

If you are a fan and student of analytics and infographics, I hope you visit, subscribe and follow the work and discovereris of Nathan Yau and his Flowing Data blog. (Blog, Twitter) I am a data geek in my day job and appreciate the growing use of analytics and infographics as a means of communicating and making sense of data.

My interest in infographics brought me to the Flowing Data site and Nathan's collection of unique and informative visualizations. I'll share a couple of favorites before I get to the leadership message of this post.



A favorite blogosphere chuckle came with the post Data Underload #6 - Bed Head. Here is a snippet, check the post for the entire visualization.







In another clever application of infographics, Nathan represents familiar movie quotations in Data Underload #12 - Famous Movie Quotes. Visit the post to see the entire collection.









What about Leadership?

Nathan wrote a post on his Flowing Data blog entitled Think like a Statistician - without the math. In the post, Nathan describes informal and practical insights that he has learned about working and playing with data. He suggests that " the most important things I've learned are less formal."

The parallels to leadership struck me almost immediately. The Lead Quietly blog focuses on the informal, practical and "quiet" principles of leadership, collaboration, community, balance, and vision. One of my missions is to share the informal insights that I have discovered and validate those insights through links to other work in the leadership space.

Statistics and leadership both call for principled action and I found the overlap surprising. Let's review Nathan's five "statistical" principles with a leadership twist:

Attention to Detail
In data work, Nathan suggests that, "it's the little things that end up being the most important." You should be looking for outliers, missing data points, and inconsistencies.
In my view, the parallel leadership attribute is vision, the ability to sense and observe what is going on around you within your teams. I believe that as a leader you know the little details about the people around you. If you know about your colleagues children and spouses, this attention to detail will serve you well in building trust and community.

See the Big Picture
While attention to detail is important, statically speaking, Nathan encourages us to not get get "too caught up with individual data points or a tiny section in a really big dataset."

In leadership you also need vision to see the big picture. Leaders need big-picture vision to have an awareness of the of the people, skills, processes, and opportunities around you. I previously wrote about vision in Act with vision - the Vision of Quiet Leadership. See the Big Picture, it's a practical piece of advice for leaders and statisticians.

No Agendas
In statistics, Nathan describes the dangers of letting preconceived ideas influence the results of a study or experiment.
Leadership requires the same type of objectivity. There is a certain maturity required of good leaders that allows them to work without personal agenda. As I cited before in The Maturity and Balance of Quiet Leadership, maturity may be the basis for objectivity, patience, and humility exhibited by great leaders.

Look Outside the Data
To think like a statistician, Nathan proposes that the:

more you know about how the data was collected, where it came from, when it happened, and what was going on at the time, the more informative your results and the more confident you can be about your findings.

Whereas, he proposes context, context, context for better understanding of data, I couldn't help but think of mindfulness, mindfulness, mindfulness for a parallel concept in leadership. A quote from George Ambler from The Practice of Mindfulness on the Practice of Leadership blog proposes this context awareness:

When navigating through uncertainty, especially during times to rapid change, crisis or when facing novel situations the ability to be fully present is critical. This is because in these types of situations, “When faced with this kind of turbulence, mindfulness becomes even more important. You need more, rather than less, information, and it is generally more difficult to get. You need to leverage your strengths and find those people who are succeeding despite the disruptions. You need to stay calm.“

Mindfulness allows you to establish awareness of your surroundings and understand the context, context, context of your situation.

Ask Why
Nathan states, " this is the most important thing I've learned, always ask why." For a blip in a graph, you should wonder why it is there.

I equate "asking why" to curiosity. Curiosity links directly to learning and passion.

Curiosity is a measure of your passion. In Curiosity as a measure of passion, I quoted Steve Roesler of the All Things Workplace blog who stated,

successful employees of every ilk display a never-ending curiosity that emerges as "passion" in a meeting room filled with people.

Effective leaders recognize the value of curiosity. They are driven to ask why?

The important thing is not to stop questioning; never lose a holy curiosity.
- Albert Einstein

Principles as a Compass
Principles guide action and clearly statistics and leadership are principled genres. As Stephen Covey writes in Principle Centered Leadership,

Correct principles are like compasses: they are always pointing the way. And if we know how to read them, we won't get lost, confused, or fooled by conflicting voices and values.

Thanks for reading. Mesh. Lead quietly and like a statistician.
Don

Top 150 Management & Leadership Blogs and so much more

I'm a fan of lists. I'm a huge fan of the list of the best management and leadership blogs that Jurgen Appelo compiled at the Noop.NL blog. It is much more than a blog roll of great blogs. Here is what you get:

It's a list of the top 150 leadership and management blogs that includes the best in the business. I could spend hours navigating from blog to blog to receive the best insight on leadership that the blogosphere has to offer. I'm also pleased because my humble and amateur efforts at LeadQuietly made the list (#123). I appreciate being on the edges of this community.

Because we can't afford to spend hours and hours navigating from blog to blog, Jurgen has also provided a link to the efforts of Jay Goldman at the Make Work Meaningful blog who supplies the list in an OPML file that can be imported into Google Reader. I was already following many of these blogs in my Google Reader but really appreciate the full list. For me, my Google Reader allows me to follow hundreds of blogs across a half dozen interests areas. It is essential for my daily reading.

You are already getting your money's worth but wait, there is more. Follow these top bloggers on Twitter by following the Twitter list that Jurgen compiled. Get the list from the post. Click the list URL and you are ready to follow the group. It's a big job to compile a list like this. Thank you, Jurgen.

And yet there is more to learn from Jurgen. In another post entitled How to Make a Top Blog List, he provides a detailed description on how this list was compiled. Reading this description of his algorithms is a great lesson in page rank, traffic rankings, Technorati Authority, and more.

Thank you, Jurgen. This effort demonstrates the best of the blogosphere. Its a real meshing effort.

Thanks for reading. Please Lead Quietly and Mesh.

Don

Posted via web from Meshing Up

Ten Unwritten Rules of Communication - a good reminder

We all know that communication is a key element of collaboration and leadership. Communication and leadership are inextricably linked.  We don't need a reminder for this. 

At the same time, we also understand that communicaiton is an art with gads of variables and nuance.  It's the type of challenge that can benefit from a list of rules, guidelines, or reminders.

I found such a list from author and consultant Mike Myatt on his N2Growth Post Unwritten Rules of Communication.  Here are the rules and a summary of Mike's elaboration:

1. Speak not with a forked tongue: Trust is key and  is best created by earning it with right acting, thinking, and decisioning.
2. Get personal: There is great truth in the axiom that states: “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
3. Get specific: Specificity is better than Ambiguity 11 times out of 10: Learn to communicate with clarity.. weed out the superfluous and to make your words count.
4. Focus on the leave-behinds not the take-aways: The best communicators develop the ability to get the information they need while leaving the other party feeling as if they got more out of the conversation than you did.
5. Have an open mind: I’ve often said that the rigidity of a closed mind is the single greatest limiting factor of new opportunities. In my opinion a leader takes their game to a whole new level the minute they willingly seek out those who hold dissenting opinions and opposing positions with the goal not of convincing them to change their minds, but with the goal of understanding what’s on their mind. I’m always amazed at how many people are truly fearful of opposing views as opposed to being genuinely curious and interested. Open dialogs with those that confront you, challenge you, stretch you, and develop you. Remember that it’s not the opinion that matters, but rather the willingness to discuss it with an open mind.
6. Shut-up and listen: No elaboration required. 
7. Replace ego with empathy: When cador is communicated with empathy & caring and not the prideful arrogance of an over inflated ego good things begin to happen.
8. Read between the lines:  Being a leader should not be viewed as a license to increase the volume of rhetoric. Rather astute leaders know that there is far more to be gained by surrendering the floor than by filibustering. In this age of instant communication, everyone seems to be in such a rush to communicate what’s on their mind that they fail to realize everything to be gained from the minds of others. Keep your eyes & ears open and your mouth shut and you’ll be amazed at how your level or organizational awareness is raised.
9. When you speak, know what you’re talking about: Develop a technical command over your subject matter. If you don’t possess subject matter expertise, few people will give you the time of day.
10. Speak to groups as individuals:  Knowing how to work a room and establish credibility, trust and rapport are keys to successful interactions.

via n2growth.com

I'd recommend a full read of the post not only as a checklist for your own actions but to also help understand the approaches of the people that you work with daily.

Thanks for reading.  Please lead quietly.

Don

Posted via web from Meshing Up

Learning from the Age of Conversation 3 Authors - I'm Addicted

Last week when I posted about my participation as a contributor to the ebook, Age of Conversation 3, a challenge I made for myself was to visit the sites of as many contributors as I could.  From the start of this effort, I became addicted to the learning that was taking place. I immediately discovered new ideas, new tools, and great concepts from the AOC3 contributors.  It is an amazing group of writers, thinkers, and innovators and I wanted to learn and share my discoveries. Consequently, I started planning my AOC3 Learning Quest.

I wanted to accomplish three things in my quest. 

1. Visit the contributor's web site and learn.
2. Follow the author on Twitter.  I created a AOC3 Twitter List if you want to follow along.  Click to access.
3. I wanted to share specific new discoveries at my other blog:  MeshingUp.com

Of course, being a data guy in my day job, I had to organize this information, keep some records, and keep score.   This link will take you to my  my AOC3 Learn Quest Dashboard where I keep track of my progress.  There is a lot of learning from my fellow authors.  

Thanks for reading.  Please Lead Quietly and remember, it's all about learning.

Don

 

 

Posted via email from Meshing Up

A Humble Contributor to the Age of Conversation 3

The Age of Conversation 3 will soon be available. I am both humble and proud to be a contributor to the effort and want to express my gratitude and appreciation to Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton for pulling it together.


The authors list is below. Each of these thought leaders contributed a chapter to the effort. Some of the contributors are names that have been cited on Lead Quietly before. However, there are others that are new to me.

In the spirit of the blogosphere and in recognition of each contributor, I have set a personal challenge for me to visit the blogs or site of every single contributor. I'll post about the highlights that I discover.

As for my contribution, I wrote a chapter on influence for introverts where I identify six ways that introverts can have an impact with their teams without leaving the introvert zone. Stay tuned for more information about the Age of Conversation 3.

Adam Joseph	Priyanka Sachar	Mark Earls
Cory Coley-Christakos	Stefan Erschwendner	Paul Hebert
Jeff De Cagna	Thomas Clifford	Phil Gerbyshak
Jon Burg	Toby Bloomberg	Shambhu Neil Vineberg
Joseph Jaffe	Uwe Hook	Steve Roesler
Michael E. Rubin	anibal casso	Steve Woodruff
Steve Sponder	Becky Carroll	Tim Tyler
Chris Wilson	Beth Harte	Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Dan Schawbel	Carol Bodensteiner	Trey Pennington
David Weinfeld	Dan Sitter	Vanessa DiMauro
Ed Brenegar	David Zinger	Brett T. T. Macfarlane
Efrain Mendicuti	Deb Brown	Brian Reich
Gaurav Mishra	Dennis Deery	C.B. Whittemore
Gordon Whitehead	Heather Rast	Cam Beck
Hajj E. Flemings	Joan Endicott	Cathryn Hrudicka
Jeroen Verkroost	Karen D. Swim	Christopher Morris
Joe Pulizzi	Leah Otto	Corentin Monot
Karalee Evans	Leigh Durst	David Berkowitz
Kevin Jessop	Lesley Lambert	Duane Brown
Peter Korchnak	Mark Price	Dustin Jacobsen
Piet Wulleman	Mike Maddaloni	Ernie Mosteller
Scott Townsend	Nick Burcher	Frank Stiefler
Steve Olenski	Rich Nadworny	John Rosen
Tim Jackson	Suzanne Hull	Len Kendall
Amber Naslund	Wayne Buckhanan	Mark McGuinness
Caroline Melberg	Andy Drish	Oleksandr Skorokhod
Claire Grinton	Angela Maiers	Paul Williams
Gary Cohen	Armando Alves	Sam Ismail
Gautam Ramdurai	B.J. Smith	Tamera Kremer
Eaon Pritchard	Brendan Tripp	Adelino de Almeida
Jacob Morgan	Casey Hibbard	Andy Hunter
Julian Cole	Debra Helwig	Anjali Ramachandran
Jye Smith	Drew McLellan	Craig Wilson
Karin Hermans	Emily Reed	David Petherick
Katie Harris	Gavin Heaton	Dennis Price
Mark Levy	George Jenkins	Doug Mitchell
Mark W. Schaefer	Helge Tenno	Douglas Hanna
Marshall Sponder	James Stevens	Ian Lurie
Ryan Hanser	Jenny Meade	Jeff Larche
Sacha Tueni and Katherine Maher	David Svet	Jessica Hagy
Simon Payn	Joanne Austin-Olsen	Mark Avnet
Stanley Johnson	Marilyn Pratt	Mark Hancock
Steve Kellogg	Michelle Beckham-Corbin	Michelle Chmielewski
Amy Mengel	Veronique Rabuteau	Peter Komendowski
Andrea Vascellari	Timothy L Johnson	Phil Osborne
Beth Wampler	Amy Jussel	Rick Liebling
Eric Brody	Arun Rajagopal	Dr Letitia Wright
Hugh de Winton	David Koopmans	Aki Spicer
Jeff Wallace	Don Frederiksen	Charles Sipe
Katie McIntyre	James G Lindberg & Sandra Renshaw	David Reich
Lynae Johnson	Jasmin Tragas	Deborah Chaddock Brown
Mike O'Toole	Jeanne Dininni	Iqbal Mohammed
Morriss M. Partee	Katie Chatfield	Jeff Cutler
Pete Jones	Riku Vassinen	Jeff Garrison
Kevin Dugan	Tiphereth Gloria	Mike Sansone
Lori Magno	Valerie Simon	Nettie Hartsock
Mark Goren		Peter Salvitti

Thanks for reading. Please keep Meshing.
Don

I'm Meshing Up

In January, I proposed that my themeword for 2010 was Mesh.

I was, and am still inspired by a Seth Godin ditty titled, What Matters Now (download the ebook). Lisa Gansky wrote a section titled Mesh that called for a change in how we relate to things in our lives. She called for us to reshape how we work, plan, embrace, and engage.

I liked the concept immediately and made Mesh my #themeword for 2010. I expanded the idea of mesh in my blog post. I am Meshing Up and as Gansky meshes, "Some things are best shared."

I am sharing my mesh on a new blog hosted at Posterous where I plan to share my discoveries and experiments. I have been intrigued by Posterous as a blogging platform for my mesh lifestreams. I like its email interface that seems to have the capability to receive just about anything, e.g. photos, text, video, audio, etc. that you send it's direction. I am still learning and experimenting. I guess you could say that it's a mesh!

The site name is, of course, MeshingUp.com. At MeshingUp I intend to explore the intersections of my mesh. I'm a data geek in my day job and have interests in data, information, analytics, learning, innovation, and of course, leadership.

I will continue to explore leadership here at Lead Quietly. But I invite you to come and mesh with me at MeshingUp.com. Let's get in a Mesh of trouble!

Thanks for reading. Please mesh and, of course, lead quietly.
Don

The Perils of Distracted Work - It should be illegal. I'm on a rant.

Call your Legislator, your Representative. Call the President. Let's rally the Tea Party, any party, its a bipartisan issue. The deadly impact of distracted work isn't getting enough recognition.

On the other hand, distracted driving is getting appropriate attention. The news that legislatures around the country are recognizing the dangers of distracted driving and passing legislation that would outlaw activities like texting, phoning, eating, and general fiddling is based on the same science that suggests that distracted work is equally perilous. The actions of our legislative bodies are well supported by research and science. There is danger in distracted driving.

However, I'm really talking about multitasking at work. And just like there are many who would adamantly brag about their ability to drive and use their cell phone, there are many managers who insist that multitasking is a prerequisite to today's demanding workplace. However, there is a cost and a danger associated with multitasking and it is not getting attention.

I'm on a rant here because I have been frustrated in my ability make the point that there is peril in multitasking. We know we have to multitask to succeed in today's environment. However there is a myth about multitasking not supported by research, science, and results.

Others are also meshing with this topic in agreement. Blogger Terry Starbucker in The Secret To A Lifetime Of Productivity - And Five Ways to Find It when he wrote that one of the five keys to is:

Reduce the multitasking - severely. Think about how hard it is to have a meaningful phone conversation while you are answering e-mail or Tweeting at the same time. Now add the critical task of prioritization on top of that. Tilt!! Our minds are a marvel of nature, but there not that good!

Further meshing of the concept came as I read Gary Woodill's post Stop Multitasking and Start Working on Workplace Learning Today blog where he cited a New York Times article Meet the Life Hackers. I could only laugh as the article noted that, "And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task." Don't they know that many of us have work days that typically includes 3 to 4 hours of meetings with 30 or 60 minutes blocks of time between those meetings. The calendar image is my actual schedule for tomorrow and I don't think that it is unusual in my work.

Let's do some simply math. If you have 60 minutes between meetings to work on an ongoing task, you spend the first 25 minutes reacquainting yourself with your work. That leave's 35 minutes to focus. But 35 minutes assumes that there were no colleagues looking for you to return from your meeting and waiting to "GAM" you. (GAM is the acronym that I use to frame the outcome of when a colleague says those three magic words, "got a minute?")

I'm on an uncharacteristic Lead Quietly rant. I first brought up the challenges of multitasking almost exactly one year ago when I reviewed the wonderful book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by Dr. John Medina. In Brain Rules, Medina's cautions about multitasking. His approach is much more scientific in proposing that, in reality, the brain simply cannot multitask.

In fact, as I was searching today, I failed to find a single proponent of multitasking. But I'll keep looking. In the meantime consider two quotes from a PBS Frontline interview with Standford professor, Clifford Nass:

We have not yet found something that [multitaskers] are definitely better at than people who don't multitask.

we could be essentially undermining the thinking ability of our society....Multitasking is one of the most dominant trends in the use of media, so we could be essentially dumbing down the world.

I'm looking for opinions on multitasking via comments. Do you feel that your workplace encourages you to take on more and more tasks in parallel? Can you cite instances of successful multitasking. Perhaps most importantly, do you have recommendations that would help quiet leaders resist the demand for multitasking.

Thanks for reading. Please stay focused, keep meshing, and lead quietly.

Don