Dunbar’s Number is roughly 150. Who is Dunbar and why do you care? Dunbar’s number states that the human mind can keep a finite number of personal relationships in order. After you reach that number it is harder for you to keep track and remember details on all of the individuals. Cute. Why does it matter?
For many leaders that are leading groups of 200, 300, 500 or 1000 associates, they probably are not wholly concerned with social circles and knowing everyone’s name. However, they likely gained success with smaller groups which created the opportunity to lead larger groups. Some leaders are able to adapt seamlessly to managing larger groups, while many struggle with the increase in responsibility and the challenge of staying aware. As the popular book by Marshall Goldsmith covers – What got you here wont get you there. If you want to scale, you need to adapt.
Many leaders relied on their cognitive abilities to keep all the people, business details and customer information together. Their success and vision is predicated on gathering all that information and processing it in a way that few can to make the best possible decisions. When you had less responsibility, you could get most of that information through meetings, conversations and emails. Your eyes and ears interpreted a complex web of data, body language, understood biases and voice tones to sort through the fact, fiction and opinion. Once you reach a certain size, it is harder to get anything better than a subset of the data that you need with many interpretations and biases layered in. How do you know what to believe? Do you need all of the low level information that you used to get?
In my view there are three challenges to processing the information you need to run your business at scale:
- Figuring out the information that is needed to do your job
- Gathering that information (easily and in a timely manner)
- Validating that information
Figuring out the right metrics, KPIs and information to use is both a simple and complex challenge. You can start with some industry standards and add or replace metrics that you informally gathered in your interactions. Over time you will continue to fine tune this based on how well these do or do not support your decision making. You can start small and grow it over time. How do you ensure these metrics are valid and meaningful? Simple – do they allow you to make good decisions and do they accurately reflect the health of your organization?
Metrics can be compromised through both well meaning and malicious intentions. Not all data is binary that you can instantly interpret good or bad from a specific value. Many times people try to assist you by interpreting their data for you. They inherently mix in their biases to that data. What if their biases are not obvious or not aligned to your beliefs? Their opinion appears as fact to you and is the basis for your decision making. How do you compare two similar operating groups with the same metrics when interpretation is mixed in? That can be dangerous because you either make the wrong decision or are unable to make timely decisions as you validate the information. Gathering the data objectively and having methods to validate it are critical. Ensuring that the data collection can be done with minimal effort and in a timely manner also are very important.
What to do? Stay tuned – more to come!