I stumbled upon the first message.

It was an accident really. Didn’t set the intention or join a think tank problem solving session. There was a clear need for the work, and then came the obvious disconnect in critical players who held the keys but lacked the understanding. It was that moment when the message became more important for me than the data.  

We spend our days submerged in the numbers. Data driven the moment we step out of bed in the morning, we busy our brains by calculating the details of our daily commute or performing ritualistic cost benefit analysis of each side bar conversation, each email, phone call, each report. The importance of data sets, frequencies, and trends is drilled into us early in our careers. Those oh-so-necessary numbers quickly show our successes and failures and send us into flurries of discussion around spending and performance and knowing your market. While we have developed a high degree of tolerance for this ongoing barrage of numbers-thinking, it can be exhausting. By the day’s end, we feel like we’ve lost more than just a few IQ points along the way. We’ve lost the purpose in our work.

The minute we get serious about telling our data stories in meaningful ways, an undercurrent jumps into play, and a fight ensues between what might look like productivity and what truly leads to sustainable solutions. The fix for this brain sucking, time eating, crunch-and-consume data cycle may be just a storybook away.

Simple idea really. Tell the message of the data so people find a reason to care about it. It’s called Social Math.

Social math is strong messaging that makes data comprehensible by connecting it to things we already understand. It uses data to inspire collaboration. A call to action, it is a method of storytelling that fluidly shares what is most important about the work. Speaking to our emotional connections, social math defies all practices taught in our business classes about distancing ourselves away from the personal. 

Consider the impact of the following statement…
Americans dispose of 72 million plastic bottles annually.
As compared to...
Every year in the U.S., we throw away enough plastic bottles to circle the globe – five full times. 

Strong messaging, story-telling, is personal. It asks us to prioritize issues into tasks that require clarity and demands immediate thought that leads to sustainable solutions. 

The promotion of Mental Health in schools is another good example. Tough to argue that schools should be safe places of learning; however, we know that the rate of incidence in school violence, bullying, and suicide ideation continue to rise. So how do you move an entire educational community toward sustainable solutions? It’s not the data that matters; it’s the story behind and, better yet, in front of that data that gives us cause and helps us find purpose in our work. And it only has to take a few moments to tell, like this three minuter… 

Data Story Book

As smart as it all seems, it is not easy to jump into this level of messaging. Maintaining it offers even greater challenges. Taking time to tell the data story can be all too easily swallowed in the sea of action plans, benchmarks, and reporting. However, if we build markers for ourselves, cues to the story so it stays in the forefront throughout the work day, the quarterly statements become secondary to the reason the work exists in the first place - rather than the other way around. It's time once again to use the data to return us to our love for the work.

Find the story, and you find the purpose. 

When I share the idea of "Followership" with leadership groups, invariably I get pushback.  Some people are just flat uncomfortable with the term Follower.  It is not unusual to see people shut down to the discussion before they understand how the word is used in a leadership context.  

Let's face it.  We all want to see ourselves as leaders and certainly not followers.  And it's true.  We are strong in that way.  Every day we are making the tough calls and wear that buck-stops-here kind of accountability cape.  But what about your work around growing the other leaders, namely your superiors?  Does your Followership support the growth of your immediate supervisor and of their immediate supervisor?  It should, and more importantly, it can easily.  If it doesn't, you are missing out on prime opportunities for you and for the entire organization.

It's what I like to call "the forward effect".  Sound a little like kissing up? If Followership is well done, it's way more effective than mere flattery at not only strengthening your own job security but also opening up opportunities within the organization and elsewhere. CEOs and other senior staff need to be surrounded by people with integrity who are looking out for them, and middle managers need that from their subordinates, and subordinates need it from each other, and so on, and so on.  Just for the record, we're defining Integrity as transparency in agendas, owning mistakes, taking healthy risks for the good of the cause, and honest reporting. 

Today, having strong Followership skills means professionally nurturing those above us in the chain so they can be as successful as circumstances allow.   It's the new black in professional protocol fashion.  I use to half-jokingly call it Raising Administrators.  We were the foundation on which that administration was built.  My bosses had to have the support they needed to do well; otherwise, none of us would have been very successful.  They needed us to provide room for their growth. 

It's a chain of support and one that is not entirely selfless. Sharing the credit may feel out of whack at times.  After all, it's your project, your team, your sweat and tears.  But your being there is not by accident, and though that supervisor may have done nothing more than to get out of your way long enough for you to get it done - that's important!  Just ask the leader who is micro managed by an overbearing and controlling superior.   

So, here's the deal.  The more successful my boss is at her work, the better the likelihood I have for increased opportunities.  I consider it my job to promote my supervisor's accomplishments, protect him from misinformation or lack of information, and establish a No Surprises work environment.  I ask that of my team members as well.  

It's pretty simple really.  If the ones at the very top are not succeeding with integrity (see definition above), no one else will either.  In some ways, my Followership skills are some of the most important tools in my Leadership Toolkit, and I keep them sharpened and on hand.

Want to know more?  Followership:  How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders.  Barbara Kellerman (2008)