In this guest contribution to Gallop Insights, Dawn Cronogue, Sales Enableness & Effectiveness Director for Europe, at Sysco, explores why effective leadership requires more than performance dashboards, KPIs and processes – and why curiosity, trust and meaningful conversations remain essential.
People are not excel spreadsheets and why leadership doesn’t work through the KPI remote control.
We have more information about our people than ever before.
Performance dashboards, engagement surveys, talent grids, development plans, competency frameworks, any number of performance metrics, the list goes on and with AI, it’s becoming increasingly easy to create more and more reports and spreadsheets.
Most of them have value and their place but is there a danger along the way that we start believing that because if we can measure more about people we understand them better?
We don’t necessarily and people are not excel spreadsheets, they don’t fit nicely into a cell that can be copied and pasted and perhaps more importantly, you cannot use KPI reporting like a remote control.
Think about how a remote control works, you press a button and expect a predictable response, volume up, channel down, pause, play.
Sometimes our approach to leading people can begin to look surprisingly similar. Performance drops set another objective; engagement is low, launch another initiative; someone wants to progress, put them on a development plan.
None of these responses are inherently wrong the problem comes when the reporting or the tool replaces the conversation, because people are rarely as simple as the data point in front of us.
The person whose performance has dipped could be struggling with something outside of work, the high performer might be quietly running out of energy. The person who’s performing well who didn’t go for promotion may be struggling with confidence and the employee who looks fine in the spreadsheet can be anything but fine.
You don’t discover any of those things by pressing another button. You discover them by talking and most importantly actively listening and hearing what is being said and what isn’t being said.
The spreadsheet only shows part of the picture. Businesses need data, targets matter, performance matters, measurement matters, and the numbers are normally indicators, of something that has already happened.
A good leader gets curious about the who and what sits behind those numbers. They have conversations that create context on an ongoing basis. Leadership is increasingly about connecting the dots as people don’t arrive at work as a collection of different categories.
Managers neither need nor should expect to know every detail of someone’s personal life. They should recognise that life doesn’t happen in silos. Sometimes the most important piece of understanding a manager needs will never be in a dashboard. It emerges because someone felt able to say, “actually, there’s something you should know” and creating the conditions for that sentence could arguably be one of the most important things a manager does.
This isn’t an argument against data, frameworks, or processes. It is an argument for putting them in their proper place. A dashboard can tell you where to look. A survey can tell you where to explore. A metric can highlight something has changed.
None of them can tell you the whole story of the human being sitting opposite you. That requires curiosity, judgment, trust, and great conversations.
Perhaps that’s the leadership capability we need to invest in more. Not simply teaching leaders how to operate within the organisations people processes, but helping them be confident enough to have conversations those data points and processes can never replace.
Because the best managers don’t use the spreadsheet as all the answers or expect the pre-determined response of the remote control. They use both of those things as the beginning of better questioning and great conversations.
What might change in your business if every performance conversation started with curiosity rather than conclusion?
If this resonates with you – you can reach out to us, or Dawn directly, to continue the conversation.
