Listening this morning to Janice Marturano speak with Sharon Salzberg on her Metta Hour podcast, she articulated something beautiful about leadership:

Leadership is about influence.

A leader embodies the attitudes, habits, and characteristics that comes to define those who follow them. Applying this more specifically to data-driven leadership, something near and dear to me: If we want our organization to be more data-driven, then we must be data-driven ourselves. We best influence others to see the value of data and leverage it in their work when we do it in ours.

This is true whether you’re at the top of the organization or at the bottom, and every rung in between. We all influence each other and it isn’t for just the people at top to exercise the leadership necessary to change culture.

This was originally posted on 13 November 2018 on the previous Datapolitan blog