What is Data-Driven Leadership and how do you teach it?

The role of a Data-Driven Leader is to drive accountability and build a data culture characterized by the leader and the organization's staff implementing decisions in a fact and data-based process. This is achieved by steering teams away from opinions, cognitive bias, group-thinking and self-censorship. But how is this leadership developed individually and organizationally? This paper attends to this question specifically for master students in Analytics and Data Science. While comprehensive reviews of what the market requires of a Data Scientist for employability consistently point at technical skills, soft skills such as, e.g, the ability to communicate effectively and being a team-player are additional prerequisites from the employers' side. However, soft skills are at the best indirectly developed by the students in most programs in the field. For instance, a dedicated curriculum in Data-Driven Leadership is a rare encounter, and the few existing ones are highly heterogeneous in content and learning goals. This paper offers a proposal for the standardization of a curriculum in a Data-Driven Leadership course. In doing so, we argue for content consisting of behavioral experiments, cognitive bias and debiasing, game theory, investment under uncertainty, mechanism design, optimal stopping theory, and systematic review methodology. Moreover, we argue for team-based learning where self-learning of teams on conceptual topics is combined with data analysis assignments. Further, their communication skills is developed by testing their presentations on their peers. During the course, the team members monitor the leaders and themselves by a self-reflective protocol. The findings of this paper is based on the analysis of data on 50 enrolled students, where students' perceptions, assessment of learning goals, pre/post personality tests, and team performance data consistently indicate the enhancement of the students' soft-skills and data-driven leadership ability.

Business Value

Data Science Strategy

Statistical Numeracy

Team-based Learning 

Expert

Education

Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) 2023