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Six Steps to Building a Data-Driven People Strategy · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:03
  Edwin, last episode we talked about the gap between wanting a data-driven culture
• 0:07
  and actually having one.
• 0:09
  Today I want the roadmap, because I think a lot of leaders skip straight to "buy a
• 0:13
  platform" and call that step one.
• 0:15
  Buying a platform isn't step one, Claire, it's usually step three or four,
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  and doing it earlier is exactly how you end up with data sprinkling.
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  Step one is defining business outcomes.
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  Two or three measurable goals, cut twelve-month voluntary turnover by fifteen
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  percent, improve first-year sales productivity by ten percent.
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  Every analytics effort after this has to tie back to those goals,
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  or implementation just drifts.
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  And step two is the unglamorous one we touched on last time.
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  Inventory and clean your people data.
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  Map every source, ATS, HRIS, surveys, assessments.
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  Fix the duplicates, the inconsistent job titles, the missing exit dates.
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  Agree on definitions before you analyze anything, what counts as a quality hire,
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  what counts as regrettable turnover.
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  Skipping this step is why so many analytics projects produce numbers nobody trusts.
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  Step three is where the behavioral piece comes in.
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  Implement or strengthen a validated behavioral assessment, so you have structured
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  data that complements resumes and interviews instead of competing with them.
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  And critically, build benchmarks.
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  Compare the profiles of your current top performers to figure out which traits
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  actually predict success in a given role, not which traits sound impressive on
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  paper.
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  And step four is integration, which I think is where most companies actually get
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  stuck, because it sounds like an IT project.
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  It is an IT project, to some degree, but the goal isn't more dashboards.
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  Connect the systems so HR and managers see a small number of clear signals,
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  hiring funnels, engagement by team, flight-risk flags, all tied directly back to the
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  step-one outcomes.
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  The test for whether integration worked isn't "do we have more charts,"
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  it's "do we have three or four insights people actually act on."
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  Give me an example of what that kind of connected insight actually looks like,
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  versus a report that just sits there.
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  Something like "these three traits predict success in our SDR role,"
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  or "this team's engagement drop correlates with a specific behavioral mismatch."
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  That's a sentence a manager can act on immediately.
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  A twelve-tab dashboard with no sentence attached to it is just noise with good
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  formatting.
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  Step five, then, is making sure people can actually use what you've built.
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  Train managers on data-driven decision-making, specifically.
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  Short workshops, practical playbooks, teaching them to interpret an assessment
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  report or an AI-generated insight without either ignoring it or over-trusting it
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  blindly.
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  The actual skill that matters most here is asking "what might this data be missing,"
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  not advanced analytics training.
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  And step six closes the loop.
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  Iterate and govern.
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  Quarterly check-ins on which predictions were actually accurate.
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  Recalibrate as roles evolve, because the traits that predicted success two years ago
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  may not hold as the role itself changes.
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  And keep a small governance group, HR, legal, and data together,
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  overseeing ethics, privacy, and process changes on an ongoing basis,
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  not as an afterthought when something goes wrong.
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  So the whole roadmap is really outcomes first, clean data second,
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  behavioral signal third, and only then integration, training,
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  and governance.
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  In that order, every time.
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  Reverse the order, start with the platform and work backward toward the outcome,
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  and you've built exactly the data-sprinkling problem we talked about last episode,
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  just with better software underneath it.
• 3:39
  If you want to start step three with real behavioral data on your own team,
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  OAD's free Top Performer Profile is about seven minutes, results in twenty-four
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  hours, no credit card.
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  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
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  Six steps, in sequence.
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  Skip the sequence, and you've just bought expensive software for an intuition-based
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  process.
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  Perfect place to leave it.
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  Thanks, Edwin.
• 4:00
  Always, Claire.