[best] The obvious leadership behaviors, but they didn't fall from the sky

I looked like such a simple idea to pick out one 'best' article out of my reading list every month. And here I am again for my March pick with a tie between two posts. At the one hand this cry of frustration "I'm not an idiot" of an adult learner makes me want to ventilate some of my own frustrations working at 'the other side' by listing the excuses why we inflict this upon our fellow coworkers. At the other hand this Bersin review of a newspaper article on how Google mines data to identify good leadership behavior triggered my interest as it is a solid example of working backwards. In the end I flipped an electronic coin. .... The coin decides that the latter article is my 'best' of March.

Why am I so intrigued by the fact Google has mined data to find out its optimal leadership behavior? After all, they mine data for everything. Is it because Google is such a great company cited in almost all articles on the new way of working, innovating and learning (or not)?

It is because these leadership skills did not fall from the sky and require religion to believe them. They were tracked. It is because they are doing what any leadership training program should have done: first find out what matters by looking at facts and working that all the way BACKWARDS to experience building and training interventions that support those. OK, the data mining came up with pretty obvious results, but they are the results of looking at the real world with real data. Every learning program should start identifying what matters. And guess what, often the thing that matters is found outside of your own company wall. You should mine data for what your clients find valuable behaviors of your employees, and work backwards on that. You should find out what characteristics make good sales people for your company, and work backwards from that.
This post made me realize that we have the technology and the tons of data to find out what is valuable, and work that back all the way to the training design. We don't have to assume, we can know, and check it regularly as things change over time.

PS
While we are still on the subject of Google... this short article on 'Is Googling learning?' by Jay Cross should make you smile...