Learn, Do, Reflect, and Start Again! How to Become a Better Leader

Alexander: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of the effective statistician and today I will talk about something that is very close to my heart and that is learning how to be a really good leader, how to be an influencer in a way that is really someone that’s Influences people, not just someone that has many people on following them on social.

Influencing skills are a little bit like statistics skills. So how do you become a good statistician, a good data scientist, a good programmer? You can read a book about things. There’s lots of books on all kind of different things. Within statistics, but reading, getting knowledge will not make you a great statistician.

Learning statistics is also not so much about whether you can do [00:01:00] statistics or whether you can’t do statistics or programming or data science, all these kinds of different things. It is about how good you are. It’s not a binary thing, yes, no. It’s a continuous thing. And the better you are, the more impact you can have.

Now, what actually does mean better? I think there’s two variables. The first is What kind of knowledge and tools do you have? And when I’m speaking about tools, I’m not speaking about PowerPoint or these kind of things. Yes, you need to know these as well. I’m speaking about all your statistical tools.

What kind of Design options. Are you aware about, and you can actually understand so much, implement them, you can speak about them, you can defend them. What kind of analysis tools do you have? What kind of [00:02:00] communication tools in terms of data visualization do you have? All these different things. I think if you have a bigger tool set, and you master all these tools very well, then you’re a good statistician.

Two things come into play. First, having a big tool set, and second, mastering all these tools really good. And how do you learn about that? First, of course, you need to know about it. Then you need to implement them. You need to apply these different things and then you reflect on them.

For example, a specific study design. You read about it, you implement it with a study. Implementing kind of discussion with regulators, having discussion with your team. Maybe you’re not even implementing it in the end, but maybe you are. You have all these kind of different discussions about it, and there you reflect about it.

[00:03:00] Maybe there are specific things that I haven’t, wasn’t aware that, okay, that has a time problem with recruitment, or yeah, that increases the cost here, or maybe it gets a little bit problematic with these kind of different assumptions. You really understand it by doing it. Same with analysis.

First time when you do it, you actually see okay, there’s this different option, this detail, and, ah, here’s this data point that doesn’t really fit whatever I do with it. And then you really understand, and you reflect, and you refine, and you learn more. And every time you do it, you become better. better.

If you want to be a good statistician, from a technical point of view, you need to have a big tool set and you need to have good mastery of all these different tools. And you learn about these things that you first get to know about [00:04:00] it, then you do it, then you reflect, then you And then you repeat from the start.

Learn, do, reflect, and repeat. And it is exactly the same with all the influencing skills, with communication, with building trust, with networking, with negotiation, with resolving conflict, with driving initiatives forward. All these different things. It is exactly the same. You need to know the different tools.

You need to be able to speak about it. One of the great things about statistics or mathematics in general is that we give certain words to concepts. A probability distribution, a p value, a test, a confidence interval, variability, bias. All these [00:05:00] things we can only talk about because we have a name for them.

We have a concept for it. We have additional definition for it. And that’s why we can think about it. And that’s why we can communicate about it. And it is the same for leadership, for influencing. Very often we use kind of their words that, generally maybe aware about, like trust, build trust.

But what does that actually mean, building trust? How do you do that? It is really important to People understand the concepts behind it, and for trust it is the three fundamental things about it is care, character, and competence. We talk about it a lot in our leadership program. And yes, people first listen about it, then they try a little bit again with it and reflect about it.

What could they do better? Maybe sometimes [00:06:00] they forget certain aspects and then they are challenged again. Also in leadership, and when I talk about leadership, this concept in itself is something that is quite vague for lots of people, but in the essence it is, you want to create value together with others, value for your organization.

together with others. And these can be people that report to you. These can be people that are in your project team. These can even be people outside of your organization. This can even be people high up in your organization. You can also lead your supervisors and your staff. A level supervisor and all these kind of different things, all these kinds of different areas.

Now what is actually happening then in terms of leadership learning in the field? So first what I see [00:07:00] is there’s a lack of focus on it. Do you want to read the paper about the last stats? Methodology is the latest phase 2 design. No problem, spend your time. Ah, you want to go to a presentation course. Not sure whether we have the budget for that.

These skills are so fundamental, so important. You can be the best technical statistician. If you can’t convince others of your ideas, they are not worth a penny or cent. You need to be able to convince others. Own your ideas. Then all the stats stuff that you know and learn about becomes really valuable.

It becomes only valuable if there’s action. If people are implementing things. I think this is one of the fundamental flaws that very often people don’t see is that knowledge [00:08:00] is nothing without action. Only When you implement, when you do, then there’s value created. Knowledge, for example, also for physicians.

If they have all that knowledge, but they never apply it to a patient, who cares? So you need to apply things to create value. The other problem that I see very often with all these trainings in terms of influencing is they’re very sparse. They happen only here and there and maybe and very often sometimes also pretty condensed like this is this two day training on xyz.