What Are You Scaling On—Force or Facts?
The most powerful leadership tool isn’t a skill you can learn or a trait you’re lucky to be born with.
Your most influential tool is data.
I was once hired to deliver a company-wide initiative in a 400-person organization that had completely stalled. They didn’t lack effort or intelligence, but they’d lost unity: everyone had a different story about why things weren’t moving—no one had a plan.
I knew I couldn’t untangle their stories. I certainly couldn’t convince them of a new one. No amount of persuasion, charm, or force was going to right the ship.
Objective fact—whether it was pretty or not—was the only thing that would align the company.
They needed data.
So I set up a red/yellow/green tracking system. The system showed exactly what had to be done, who was responsible, and how it was going: done, at risk, or already behind. And, it was available for everyone to see.
This wasn’t an exercise in judgment or punishment, it was about creating visibility. When everyone knew where the ball was getting dropped, conversation shifted from “who’s to blame?” to “how do we fix it?”.
The data made the work less personal and more doable.
This is data’s superpower.
It’s also the reason leaders resist harnessing it: when work stays personal, we get to feel like the hero.
Data the Enemy
No one will say they don’t want data. We all know that a company benefits from a clear understanding of what’s going on.
And yet, I see many leaders resisting it.
We’ve been handed a narrow story about leadership: a leader is decisive, persuasive, and always in control. They rally the room, save the day.
Data-driven leadership doesn’t look like this.
It doesn’t rely on our powers of persuasion, charm, or genius. Instead, It puts responsibility back into the system and the team. Emphasis shifts from personality to process, pressure to accountability, interpretation to evidence.
This feels like a loss of control—it is a loss of control, but it’s an essential loss.
If you remain the central force that moves everything forward, your company will always be at the mercy of your personal capacity.
This may work for a while, but it will never scale.
What Data Eliminates
When you lead with data, instead of uniting around you, the company unites around your vision.
This is a much stabler center.
Data-driven leadership returns you to your real work. Instead of controlling everything, you stay focused on vision and strategy.
Meanwhile it strengthens your team. A strong goal and a clear picture of progress keeps people aligned, focused on solutions rather than problems.
Here are four key habits data-driven leadership completely transforms:
Micromanagement
Without clear signals, you hover.
You check in at random, worry when you should be focused elsewhere, and at worst, take over someone else's work.
This slows the company down and discourages your team. When you hover, they don't have room to focus, experiment, or trust their own instincts.
Visible metrics replace all of this. When you have a system that shows what's on track and what's not, oversight becomes strategic instead of reactive.
Instinct
Without clear signals, decisions default to instinct.
Instinct matters—but it shouldn't be your only tool. Sometimes what feels like wisdom is just the mood you're in, the last conversation you had, or whoever made the most compelling case in a meeting.
Data balances instinct. It lets you apply your judgment to clear patterns.
Heroics
When you don't have clarity on what needs to happen, who's responsible, or when it's due, projects get saved at the last minute by a handful of talented people.
These last-minute saves only buy a little breathing room. Those people were supposed to be working on something else, what they dropped becomes your next crisis. This pattern means your team’s talents are used to save the company, not push it forward.
Data allows problems to surface earlier and teams to adjust before crisis demands a savior.
Persuasion
Building a company means balancing competing priorities, short and long term goals, risk and security. It is a complicated balancing act.
Without data, you spend enormous energy trying to align around what matters, what’s wrong, what needs attention.
With data, urgency becomes visible. Alignment—with yourself and in your team—comes out of this shared reality.
Putting it All Together
Data-driven leadership just means building a rhythm of visibility.
It can look like a dashboard tracking system, but it doesn’t have to. It’s anything that aligns your company around the reality of your goals and progress.
In a different company, my data took the form of a weekly memo.
It started as a personal exercise to ground myself every Friday. I wrote down what happened, what moved, what stalled, and what really mattered. Eventually this turned into something the whole company did. We ended every week by coming together around what really happened.
Over time, patterns of friction and success emerged in our memo. Whether they were “good” or “bad”, these patterns brought us together.
When reality is visible, politics quiet down, energy redirects, and responsibility becomes shared.
We all have access to data. The work is really about whether or not we’re willing to let it replace us in the places we don’t need to be.
See you next week! 👑
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