Your team has already decided what you do with their data

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Hey Spark Family,

I sat with a leadership team recently that had just rolled out new productivity tracking tools, and they were genuinely excited about it. Response times were up. Output was measurable in ways it never had been. For the first time in a long while, they felt like they could actually see their organization.

I believed them. They were not trying to catch anyone at anything.

Then I spent time with the people being tracked.

Not one of them had been told what was being collected, or what it was used for, or, and this is the part that matters most, what it was never going to be used for. They had pieced it together themselves, out of fragments and guesswork and the stories we all tell ourselves when nobody tells us anything.

And what they had filled that silence with was not generous.

Neither side was wrong. The leaders thought they had rolled out a helpful tool. The team thought they had been handed a scoreboard. Both groups were walking around with a completely different picture of the same thing, and nobody knew it.

That gap is the whole story. And Gallup just put a number on it.

The Research Is Clear

Gallup surveyed 22,573 employed U.S. adults and published the findings in September.

➡ Only 20% of employees have a great deal of trust in their leaders to use employee data responsibly. 37% trust them not much, or not at all.

➡ Among engaged employees, 40% have a great deal of trust. Among the actively disengaged, 4%.

➡ Only 19% of employees say anyone at work has ever spoken with them about the data their organization collects on their work.

➡ And here is the one that stopped me: leaders have barely had that conversation either. 21% of managers. 23% of leaders.

Sit with that second number for a moment. Same tools, same data, same company, and a thirty-six point gap. Not one point of it is about the technology. All of it is about the relationship.

And that last finding reframes everything. More than one in five managers and leaders do not even have a clear view of what employee data their own organization holds. Which means the leader who has not explained it to her team very often simply cannot.

Nobody explained it to her either.

This was never leaders hiding something. It is a silence nobody started on purpose, and nobody has thought to end.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders I work with are not trying to surveil anyone. They care about their people, the tools are legitimate, and the intent is good. What is missing is the one conversation that turns data collection into something a team can trust instead of something they have to decode alone.

I see the leader who assumes her team knows these tools are standard, so why would anyone need an explanation. Her team is not thinking about standard. They are thinking about what their numbers mean for their reviews, their standing, their future. She has not said anything. They have not asked. And the silence between them is doing quiet damage that neither of them can see.

I see the leader who can tell something shifted after the tools went live but cannot name what it is. People are still producing. The energy is just different. She has not connected the two things, because she does not see herself as someone who would ever make her team feel watched.

She is right about who she is. Her team is feeling it anyway.

That is the hardest part of this. Your intention is invisible. Only your impact shows up in the room.

↓

What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I bring this into a leadership conversation, I ask one question before anything else.

Not what you are doing with what you know about your people.

What do they think you are doing with it?

Most leaders have never asked. And the distance between those two answers is exactly where trust either holds or quietly comes apart.

Three things close it, and not one requires changing a single tool:

1. Find out yourself first
​You cannot explain what you do not understand, and the research says a lot of good leaders are in that position right now. Get clear on what your organization collects, who sees it, and what decisions it touches. That is not a step before the work. That is the first half of the work.

2. Name what it is not used for
​Most leaders explain what a tool does. Almost nobody says what the data will never be used for, and that is the part people are actually lying awake about. Your people are not opposed to being known. They are wary of being judged by something they cannot see.

3. Have it in the room, not in an email
​Among the small group who have had this conversation, trust is measurably higher. Being willing to sit in the room with the question says something no document ever will, especially when someone asks the follow-up you did not prepare for.

And expect this: when you open it up, some people will tell you they have concerns. That is not the conversation backfiring. That is worry finally moving out from behind closed doors and into a room where you can actually do something about it.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

Before your week gets moving, sit with these honestly.

➡ Do I actually know what data my organization collects about how my team works?

➡ When did I last explain that directly, including what it is not used for?

➡ Has anyone gotten quieter or more careful since a new tool went live?

And the hardest one:

If my team described what they believe I do with what I know about them, would their answer match mine?

Here is what I keep coming back to. People do not leave silence empty. They fill it, and almost never generously.

So the good news is that this one is yours to fix, and it does not take a new policy or a new platform. It takes one honest conversation with people who have been waiting longer than you realize for someone to simply tell them the truth.

That is a very good thing to be able to give your team this week.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If you are working through how to have this conversation, hit reply and tell me what you are running into. I read every response.✨

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