Note from Art: I’m pleased to share the thoughts of Scott Spreier, head of the Leadership and Talent Practice in the Federal Sector at Hay Group, a global management consultancy.  I was a happy customer of Hay Group in a prior lifetime, where they provided my team with valuable input and guidance on a complex and fast-moving sales restructuring.  I am pleased that they reached out to share this thought-provoking post exclusively with readers of Management Excellence. Enjoy!

You can follow Scott and his colleagues on Twitter @ Hay Group.

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The Trouble with Leadership by the Numbers by Scott Spreier, Hay Group

Ah, those geeks from Google.

After months of crunching numbers, a team of their top statisticians cracked the code on what it takes to be a good leader.  Their finding, as reported by The New York Times, was that what employees valued most in their managers was not technical expertise but “even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”

Now, is that surprising?

A few paragraphs into the story, the Times’ turned to human resource experts to help put Google’s research into context.

They quoted Todd Safferstone, managing director of the Corporate Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board, who noted that Google is at the “leading edge” of trying to apply a data-driven approach to what the Times calls the “unpredictable world of human interactions.”

Project Oxygen, as the research was named, is unusual, Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.

Two observations here: (1) We (the HR experts of the world) are a sincere, but dull lot whose lingo about leadership is indeed often limp; and (2) it is this habit of sounding warm and squishy, not hard and businesslike, which drives organizations like Google to try to create leadership by the numbers.

The truth is, for more than 50 years researchers, particularly behavioral scientists, have been studying and linking these so-called softer attributes of leadership to performance. At Hay Group, we’ve done numerous studies that tie the hard stuff of business − gains in productivity, revenue, and profits − to the human stuff of leadership, such as providing vision and context, showing empathy, and engaging, coaching, and developing employees.

In general, our body of research has shown that when managers and executives use a good combination of these behaviors or styles, the performance of their teams − again in terms of measures like sales, productivity, and even revenue − tends to jump 15 to 30 percent.

That Google had to rediscover this, however, is not cause of smugness or ridicule. Like most organizations and the people who run them, it’s human nature to try to succeed by the numbers. All of us, not just Charlie Sheen, want to win. And winning in our society is defined by the specific, not the squishy: scoring more points, putting up better financial numbers, the number of goddesses one lives with, etc.

David Brooks, in a recent column, The New Humanism, blamed this in part on the fact that we view ourselves as “divided creatures” who try to separate reason, which we trust, from emotions, which are suspect.

“We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below,” he wrote. “When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relations, we often have nothing to say.”

And, we might add, when those parents and kids go to work, their focus switches from SAT to ROI.

What our research and Google’s show is that organizations need to put more emphasis on the softer behavioral attributes of leadership. They need to move beyond what Brooks calls the “amputated view of human nature,” and embrace the role that motives, values, and behavior have in engaging people to do their best and ultimately driving performance.

Equally important, they have to let go of this nonsense about technical skills and financial results being the perfect equation for running a successful organization. Certainly they are critical elements, but as Google has confirmed, leading solely by the numbers is not only bad science, it’s bad business.