The person with the most data wins if someone is listening

This series exists because I believe leaders learn more from honest stories than polished ones.

As leaders, we care about our teams. Not just about the work — about whether our teams actually have what they need to do it. The people. The tools. The capacity.

I have always  care deeply about that. Sometimes too deeply.

Because when I'm passionate about something, I didn’t  always stay cool, calm, and collected. I get impatient. I get frustrated. And yes — as you've seen before in this series — I occasionally reach for some spicy language.

This is one of those stories.

When I came into government, my department had a significant vacancy rate. It was early COVID. We were already stretched — and it was only going to get worse.

I was used to running at my own pace. I'd led my own organization for almost fifteen years. When I needed to hire, I hired. When it didn't work out, I moved on. Limited process. Fast decisions.

Government was a different world.

Process was the priority. And the hiring process — I actually mapped it out — made my head spin. There were a lot of steps. Most of them had nothing to do with me or my team. We were essentially passengers.

But I could see what the vacancy rate was doing to the people who worked for me. They were struggling. Not because they weren't capable — because there simply weren't enough of them. The work wasn't getting done. And this wasn't internal work. The people waiting on us weren't other departments. They were organizations and individuals in the community counting on us to deliver programs that mattered.

That felt urgent to me. Because it was.

So I did what I do. I went to data.

I built a tracking tool to map every open role through every stage of the hiring process. My thinking: if I could show where things were getting stuck, I could make the case for moving faster. I could fix the bottleneck. I could get my team what they needed.

It didn't work.

If anything, watching the data made it worse — because now I could see exactly how slowly things were moving and still couldn't shift it. The people in the hiring department were doing their best. They had other priorities, other departments, a full plate of their own. They weren't indifferent. They just didn't feel the same urgency I did.

And I couldn't understand why.

Here's what I understand now that I didn't then.

I never made them care.

I gave them numbers. I gave them process maps. I gave them my frustration — probably more of that than anything else. What I never gave them was the story behind the vacancy rate. I never sat down with them and said: here is a real organization that didn't get the funding because we didn't have enough people to process the paperwork. Here are the consequences on the other side of this spreadsheet.

Data doesn't move people. Consequence does.

I was so focused on the process — on being right about the problem — that I forgot the most basic leadership truth: you can't make people care by showing them numbers. You make them care by showing them what the numbers mean to a real human being.

My passion was real. My urgency was justified. But I had pointed it in the wrong direction. I was pushing on a process when I should have been building a shared understanding of why the process mattered.

Caring deeply about something is not enough.

You have to make the people around you care too. And you can't do that with data alone.

That's the flaw I'm still working on.

What's the thing you've been right about — but couldn't get anyone else to care about? And looking back, what did you lead with?