by Peter A. Arthur-Smith

“Thanks to the computer and information age, we’ve become even more fixated with numbers – people be damned!” 

Wall street and other bourses along with banks and finance houses rave about numbers! Sportscasters rave about numbers! News reporters and business networks rave about numbers! It’s almost as if people are a sideshow, even though the numbers wouldn’t be produced without people.

When are we going to start pushing back against the number crunchers? It would almost seem that the people who obsess about the bottom-line have completely forgotten about the fundamental drivers that lie behind those numbers. It’s overdue time for the pendulum to swing back the other way.

It requires an effective strategy, defined by people, to produce optimal numbers. It usually requires a team, populated by people, to produce optimal numbers. And it requires leadership, where leaders are people, to orchestrate the strategies and people that are required to produce optimal numbers. These are the fundamental components that Wall Street, sportscasters, news reporters and business executives so often fail to mention when they are raving or groaning about numbers.

All the most effective leaders succeed because they know how to engage and orchestrate people. The numbers are secondary indicators of how well their people handled their workplace journey and reached their destination in optimal time. Meantime managers revel in numbers that they can squeeze and manipulate, sometimes to obscure performance shortfalls. Such cover-up behavior often adversely impacts the morale of the people they are required to manage.

Effective leaders are people with vision, courage, integrity, humility and wisdom, whereas managers too often rely upon projecting numbers, planning for those numbers, organizing events to hit those numbers, directing everyone to meet their numbers, and controlling everything to ensure those numbers are met. Ultimately we need a combination of the two, where leadership predominates to inspire all those involved and management takes care of the details and minds the store.

This writer interacts a fair amount with British officers who are transitioning back into the civilian world. Their biggest shock is the adjustment from an environment where people-leadership is paramount and then  enter a civilian work world that’s largely fixated on specialist expertise and numbers. Their considerable people-leadership exposure doesn’t seem to count anymore.  When will the tide turn and fundamental people talents that really underscore your desired numbers be fully valued once more?

To meet the leadership needs of millennials, Gen Zers and beyond, which are fast becoming the backbone of our current workforce, you need to ask:

» Have I articulated a clear team/venture purpose for my team members or venture to buy into?

» Have I involved my team in articulating a compelling team/venture vision?

» Do we have complementary strategies and resources to meet that compelling vision?

» Do I understand the full-range of my people’s talents and experience?

» Are they clear about their own work-related roles, journeys and destinations?

» Do I encourage team members to work as complementary “pairs” rather than act as lone-wolves?

» Have we determined who else to collaborate with to enhance our chances of success?

» Do we have the right overall venture success strategy to build ongoing momentum?

» And so on…

All of these questions are synonymous with effective leadership, but are all largely people rather than numbers oriented. Once we have everything in place, we’ll have a pretty good shot at surpassing our desired numbers. So the management-numbers are not the “be-all and end-all” in themselves, because they don’t propel anything, except profiteers. It’s the fundamentals of people involvement that really spur momentum and what finally counts! Sometimes what really counts cannot be counted!