The mid-year check in. pt. 3

Welcome to Leadership Sovereignty. I'm your host Terry Baylor along with Ralph Owens. Today we'll answer questions such as what are the common tools used to track metrics, how to visualize the data for your customer, how data counters emotions and feelings, and how the power of transparency creates trust. Enjoy the show.

So so so we talked about defining the KPIs. What are those things we're gonna measure? And then we just touched on actually tracking or reviewing the numbers according to your goal and your actual performance. And the third part of that is

So I'm sorry, Ralph, let me interrupt one quick second. Do you think it's important? Maybe we give because I don't know. We may have some folks on here who haven't tracked numbers before. And so maybe talk about a couple of tools.

Right? Of course, Excel is the base tool to track numbers, right? You got sales, you can do across the top, you can do your months or actually down the left, you can do your months and then across the top you can do what the X and the Y axis you can do what is it that you're actually tracking. So Excel is a method to do that with that I know we've used some tools, there's some Microsoft tools, There's a BI dashboard tool for those who are more database driven. I haven't dealt with this one in a while, but Tableau, I believe is a tool that will allow you to do that.

But maybe what are some more tools that are closer to maybe Excel that folks could probably use if they just wanna get started?

Yeah, no, that's a great question actually. So you're right, Excel is where you start. I mean, you just basically define what those key performance indicators are. Let's say they're one through 10. You define the timeframe in which they're supposed to be done, what the goals are, you know, you set what your goal is and you start entering in the raw data right there in Excel.

That's where everybody starts, right? Then from there, you wanna visualize the data because most of your stakeholders are not gonna wanna look at the raw data, right? It means nothing to them. They need to see it in a visual way. So Terry, you and I, when we started this, we started using PowerPoint, right?

Because you could take a spreadsheet and use it, as the data for a PowerPoint diagram, right? Whether it be a graph, whether it be a pie chart, whatever the case may be, can you're taking the data and putting it into a visual aspect and you just work on a format that works for you. Your format is probably different than what we used. And it took time, right? It took a lot

of I remember we'd be up two in the morning, man,

these numbers, I remember. It took a while. It took a while. It a while. Even in my new company, it took a while.

It took a while before we got the formatting right for our business, right? Because you're basically formatting this to show value to your business, your customers of how you're performing. So those two typically are the ones that are available to everybody, right? Most people in corporate America in these days and times they use, Office, right? And with Office you get Excel and you get PowerPoint.

So you can start there. Now, when you want to take it a step further, you could go to Power BI, which gives you the ability to do data visualization, Tableau. Also going back to the idea around PowerPoint, we started to use different, templates. So with PowerPoint could be very tedious in getting the formatting, the visual formatting perfect. Right?

So what we decided to do was to use a template that was already preformatted to where all you had to do is fill in your data. And I want to give you all, a reference of the one that we like to use a lot. What's it called? Executive PowerPoint templates. So that's a website.

You can do a search on that. And they have preformatted templates for PowerPoint, for dashboards, for almost anything you can think of, any presentation. You can think of it's a subscription based model, so you can subscribe to them and then you can download as many templates as you want. But that's how we kind of upgraded our presentation game, was we went from making our own, PowerPoint presentations backed by that same data that we're collecting on a monthly basis to using these polished PowerPoint presentation templates that really looked really nice. Now from there, we took it a step higher and we, deployed to Power BI, which gave really rich, data visualization that was web based instead of us having to send a file to someone so that they could see the data.

Right? So again, some of these things have a cost that's associated with them license wise. But anybody can get started with Excel, right? And you can and really I want to kind of step back. You can create data visualization within Excel.

You can have Excel create charts and graphs based on the sales that are in there. So, but I hope that answers your question. Any other thoughts about that?

No, I think it's perfect. And I'll say this, If you're going to use PowerPoint, man, don't waste your time building out slides.

That's right.

It will, that is the biggest and I'm speaking from advice here. I'm not speaking from experience here. Until we started going out and getting those templates and there's also, I think Slide Modal, I think Ralph you turned me on to that one as well but thank you for the executive one as well. Yeah, you don't wanna spend the time building out the slide. You wanna spend your time inputting the data into the slide.

You are not a graphic artist. That's not what this is about. All you want to do is represent that data in a way where it's value to the business. So no Ralph, that was a great summary and wrap up and any of these things, right? If you go to YouTube and enter, hey, turn my Excel into a pie chart or turn my Excel into a bar graph that they'll walk you through it.

It's pretty straightforward. It's not a whole lot to it. But yes, no, that was a great summary of that.

And you know, I'm glad you asked that question because I did wanna touch on this too. So, kind of like with us, when we started doing this, nobody was asking for it. Okay. We decided that we wanted to make sure, and it really came through frustration of other people in the organization that we work for misrepresenting what we do. They would get into these rooms that we were not in and talk about our work and what we do.

And we never had a chance to really sit at the table and and give our input. It was all based on what someone else thought. So we can we said to ourselves, well, what we'll do is we'll create, charts and graphs based on our performance that shows what the goal was and then what we hit so that it told the truth in the room. Because you gotta remember data is very, very powerful. Data can combat anybody's emotions and feelings.

Right? So we that's how we actually started doing this. Well, we found a whole host of benefits and value to the organization after we started to deliver it. Like, wow, okay. Because again, for those who are non IT, who are listening to this, a lot of times IT gets a bad rap in the organization.

They feel like we're a call center, that all we do is spend money and nobody knows what IT is doing. Okay, fair enough. So when we started doing this, it made it very clear what IT was doing and the value that we were translating to the business. Now they have such an appreciation for us. They look at us as Terry said, a partner, right?

And not just a department that's just wasting a lot of money that goes down a black hole and nobody understands anymore. Right? They didn't bounce about that too.

Right, no. Yeah, we turned from the guy behind the curtain.

Yes.

Right?

Yes.

We all know the whiz. We weren't the guy with the big voice behind the curtain telling people what to

do. That's right.

Right? And we we honestly, it did, it it made IT transparent.

That's it transparency 100%. Whereas you have some some of those in IT who like to be non transparent. Correct. They want you to think it's magic and behind the curtain and all that other stuff.

Yes. Hope is pocus of it.

Yeah, we flipped that on his head. It's like, we wanna show you everything. The good, bad and the ugly. Because you gotta remember when you're doing KPIs and showing performance, you can't just show them the good times. Gotta show them when it's bad too.

Yes, you gotta because that's gonna give you the credibility. Hey, we had this outage over here, but here's the beauty of it. We know that it was seventeen minutes and thirty seconds.

Exactly, because you get to determine the narrative. That's the powerful part about being able to tell, talk about your bad times is you get to come to them and say, hey, we instead of doing, because this happened to me. Okay, so we had a series of outages in one month. Okay. All right.

And to the end user, it feels bad because of the amount of times that it happened. But each time it happened, let's say it's an hour or so like that. And then when I look back at my chart and I'm saying this off the top of my head, so don't hold me to this. When we say something like, you know, 99.7 uptime, 99.7% uptime for the year allows us forty hours of downtime per year, and we've only been down three hours in a year, I think we're still marking our goal. Right?

When you start putting things into perspective like that, they're like, oh, I guess yeah, I guess you're right. Right? You know, those types of things. So you get to control the narrative and you get to, you know, hand use data to handle people's emotions, right, without you having to try to fight them. It's a very powerful tool once you start to really engage with it on a regular basis and then then, deploy it out to your stakeholders.

Thank you for being with us today on Leadership Sovereignty. Stay connected with us on X, formerly known as Twitter, and on Instagram by searching for Leadership Sovereignty. And just like this podcast, let's all collectively grow as we go. God bless.