Growth CEOs & data smart cultures

When you work with a great CEO, several key attributes will stand out, emotional intelligence, technical appreciation, empathy with customer application and people skills but here we want to focus on an underlying truth, that is they build “data smart” teams.

Growth CEOs will be fully aware of the importance data and securing data understanding skillset essential within the senior management team. If the CEO or the management team are weak on data, the organisation has a existential uphill challenge.

Too often we see the development of MI (management information) to support performance monitoring or decision making added to the task list of a loyal and long-serving internal doer (likely within the finance function) and it never gets over the line.

The business limps along with average more traditional MI or KPIs and decisions are reactionary, based on the immediate environmental theme or challenge, using team experience and employee gut instincts.

We recommend that you bring in a specialist to address any gaps in skills or systems as in our experience it is painfully slow to get up the curve organically. This injects momentum and possibly the opportunity to push harder (than you would the internal staff) without the step change in fixed overhead.

Implementing Data Smart Cultures

A good corporate advisor will deploy a data savvy manager who will:

1. assess the sources of information & understand what should be measured
2. trial and install collection & reporting methods
3. support the other management in adoption of new indicators

The rewards are so rich with this one and the growth CEO will use the data output sagely.

• Setting clear goals based on the data
• Distilling a “learning mindset“…so what is this telling us?
• Encouraging a Learn | Change | Grow mantra and this starts with the CEO themselves (talking about how they need to change and encouraging others to go on the same journey).
• Data smart Feedback loops are essential (customers, employees, suppliers)
• Thinking growth or you are falling behind

The onboarding and performance review decisions get smarter, resulting in the best players in each position. Overall the culture moves from old school “we have always done it like this” to a data based culture where the data systems gel with every day and longer term objectives and you have improved the working environment for the humans that you wish to retain.

The CEO can then move on to obsess with the higher value-add dilemmas such as :

• are we growing fast enough? now this is measured and reported daily
• we are getting bigger but are we increasing our operating profit clear understanding and accountability of operating costs
• do we have sustainable competitive advantage? yes our metrics confirm this every day
• we need capital to grow – we now time funding rounds or refinances better and have a data savvy storybook to support our messaging

Enabling the business growth journey

You will be used to us likening business growth to a journey, maybe that is the small harbour origins in us, but the analogy rings true time and time again. A data smart team will view the changing scenery along the way and really, capture, measure and reconfigure their route planning for those observations.

The CEO can focus more the destination and how to inspire business growth from a data savvy culture supported by precisely informed management team, a team routinely accustomed to change.

• Attract and retain talent – the long pole in the tent. Blending right & left brain types for data maximisation and creativity differentiation
• Inspire a high performance culture. one that welcomes change
• Create accountability based on data driven decisions and first principle problem solving capability, deconstructing problems routinely, humble about mistakes

Such an environment not only performs the established roles to a higher standard, it has bandwidth and agility to pivot, explore and understand the market dynamics playing out around them. The result, a high performance culture, one step ahead of the competition, greater ROI.

If you would like to know more about building data savvy teams and developing your growth culture, please contact us at hello@smallharbour.com

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