Why CEOs Have To Drive the Data-Driven Cultural Charger

Data has become the single most impactful resource that businesses now have access to. Without a continual stream of insights, information, and useable data that you can turn into actionable steps toward success, many businesses find it difficult to thrive in our current data-first economy. Yet, this confidence in collecting, processing, integrating, and using data doesn’t come overnight.

While the benefits of becoming a data are evident, with companies that embrace data-driven decision-making being 23x more likely to capture new customers, not all employees understand what that means. When sitting in a boardroom presented with two pathways, one that achieves higher profits by taking data insights and one that doesn’t, it’s easy to understand the need to pivot internal strategy.

Yet, the average employee has no idea about the true benefits of incorporating data into their workflows. In order to achieve a truly data-driven culture, CEOs have to take the lead. By setting a clear example, leading the charge, and detailing how data can change the average worker’s job for the better, CEOs are able to begin to change company culture for the better.

In this article, we’ll dive into the core reasons that CEOs should lead the data-driven culture charge, and exactly how they can kickstart this change in their company. Let’s just right in.

Strategies for CEOs To Promote a Data-Driven Culture

For the average employee, data engineering is not something that crosses their mind particularly often. Even in our modern era, with countless data-first tools and systems available to us, it’s not often that we stop and think about where this data comes from and why it helps us. When instilling a change as huge as incorporating data across an entire organization, we need to present clear points of understanding for all users.

CEOs act as the tone setter for all businesses. While company culture is proliferated across teams and from employee to employee, a CEO is the one who decides the values, objectives, and ideas behind that culture. In order to pivot an organization to a data-driven culture, here are a number of strategies that CEOs can employ.

Bring Data Into Every Communication

If you want to construct a business that truly offers a data-first culture, then you need to center data as the most important resource to which your business has access. In order to do this at scale, CEOs should take every opportunity possible to highlight their active use and dependence on data.

Whenever a CEO sends out a company-wide correspondence, do so by including statistics and core studies as the basis for all your talking points. At this level, you can demonstrate that any decisions that you are making as CEO come from an alignment with data. As you are the leading example in the company, this allows you to rapidly demonstrate how vital data is for your business.

An additional step here is to ensure that all team leaders do the same. Whenever they address their team, you should ensure that they follow the CEO’s example by focusing on data and its positive impacts. Beyond just showing why you’re making certain decisions with data, you can also use statistics at the end of a quarter or year to show the positive impact they’ve made on your business.

By creating a space where data is at the core of every communication you send out, your business will quickly notice that they, too, should be using data. If they see a CEO’s leading example and realize how data can benefit their jobs, they’ll be quick to make it a core part of their day-to-day.

Set the Tone from Onboarding Onwards

When a new employee joins a business, they have to quickly adapt to its culture, work ethic, and typical style of running operations. This initial period is often seen as one of great change, with each new employee having to learn new skills, communication pathways, and policies. This initial learning period is the best time possible to teach about the importance of data-driven decision-making.

During the onboarding process, be sure that HR managers stress the importance of data in your business. Instead of focusing on other core pillars, center this as a leading quality of your organization that you want to prioritize. If you’re able to do this, then every new employee you bring onto your team will already understand the importance of data.

While changing the habits of employees who have already worked with you for years may be tough, new employees are malleable and open to learning about your new company culture. This approach is a ground-up strategy, which you can pair with the CEO-down method.

Empower Managers

Across any given week, CEOs won’t actually have much direct contact with the vast majority of employees. While the rest of the C-suite and executive level employees will see the CEO, most workers will only see their team and manager. Due to this limitation, it’s vital that every CEO takes their own strategies and passes them to all team managers.

A CEO doesn’t have time to explain to every single employee why they want to focus on creating a data-first culture. However, they do have time to bring all team leaders and managers into one room and walk them through just how vital data is. By focusing on spreading the message to people in charge of others, CEOs can create a chain of information that will distribute this information more effectively.

Empowering those with direct lines of communication over other employees will ensure everyone in an organization gets the message. Not only is this an extremely time-effective strategy, but it also helps to give employees closer reference points for how they should be using data. If their manager has examples to share, they’ll always have someone one contact point away who can help them integrate data analytics into their decision-making process.

Final Thoughts

CEOs aren’t just the head of a company, they’re the cultural heart. Whatever practices, strategies, methodologies, and ideas they prioritize will trickle down throughout the entire organization. By ensuring that CEOs place emphasis on the importance of creating a data-driven culture, managers, team leaders, and all employees will start to get the message.

Over time, CEOs can convert their business into one that places data-driven decision-making at its core. A top-down approach to instilling a new company culture will help people to understand why it’s important and the benefits they can draw from turning to data. As businesses become more data-driven, they’re able to step into a future that is more sustainable, profitable, and efficient.

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