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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.

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Welcome to Moments with Marty. Your short, sharp shot of leadership insight to help you to stay on track between our weekly episodes of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. Is your inability to understand and analyze the numbers holding you back? If you can't make sound decisions using complex data, you may have already built your own glass ceiling. One of my all time favorite podcast episodes is the one where I expose the disturbing lack of numeracy in people who we rely upon to make really big decisions. A high profile court case in the UK a few years ago resulted in a woman being convicted and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment based largely on flawed and misleading statistical evidence from the prosecution. The evidentiary process was so egregious that the Royal Statistical Society of Britain took the very unusual step of publishing a paper to point out the fatal flaws in the presentation and interpretation of that data. They weren't saying that an innocent woman was wrongfully convicted. That's not the point. What they were saying was that the judge and the lawyers involved in the trial simply didn't understand the numbers. This situation is a lot more common than we'd like to think. People who we don't Even know, politicians, CEOs, doctors, judges make critical decisions every day that affect our lives. They think they're really smart, but they can't recognize their own basic lack of competency with numbers. It only takes a few promotions and a succession of people telling you how good you are for many senior leaders to start believing their own bullshit. But numeracy is a tangible, measurable capability which is an essential competency for for decision making. So if you're a non finance leader, how do you get good at the numbers? Let's start with self awareness. Cast your mind back to the times in your life when your numeracy skills were formally tested. High school maths exams, a statistics unit in an undergraduate degree, or even the numerical literacy testing that's often prescribed in a recruitment process. If you struggled or scored poorly in any of these, it's likely that your level of numeracy has not improved since then. Unless of course, you've taken deliberate steps to improve it. Most frontline leader roles don't require high order numeracy skills. If you just make sure you don't spend more than you've been allocated in your budget, you're going to be fine. Easy. But in any leadership role beyond that, you have to at least be able to manage the financial basics and make sure you have access to solid analytical skills. If you don't, this could well be the reason that you're stuck at your current level. For a start, think about the P and L. If you can't read financial statements, you have no chance of working out what to do to improve your team's performance. You also need to understand the basics of project investment. If I decide to spend this money here, what do I get out the back end? Is it worth the investment? And what other options do I have for deploying that capital that might give the business a better return? You don't need to be an expert in liquidity or leverage ratios, but you do need to know the numbers well enough to work out where you should channel your resources and how to be a good steward of your company's money. If you don't have a decent level of numerical literacy, your decisions are likely to be poor. So how do you acquire these skills? Well, reading financial how to books is just going to crush your spirit. And not all of us can afford to attend a week at Harvard Business School to study their Finance for Senior Managers program. The best way to get up the experience curve quickly is to find a good finance person who's willing to spend a couple of hours explaining the ins and outs of the financial statements. If you can at least understand those, it's going to get you by for a while. And if you don't take to that like a duck to water, it's a pretty good sign that you'll need someone reporting to you who is rock solid with the numbers. You don't have to be an expert in everything, but the combined skill set in your leadership team has to cover all the major food groups. If you don't have it, hire it to take a deeper dive into how you can improve your grip on the numbers. Have a listen to episode 320 of the no Bullshit Leadership podcast. Is data illiteracy holding you back? We'll leave a link in the show. Notes I really hope you enjoyed this moment and that it gives you that extra little spark to be a no Bullshit.