Welcome to Part 3 of our Anxiety and Data Webinar series! On April 16th, we spoke with Liz Guthridge, founder of Connect Consulting and co-author of Leading People Through Disasters, and Dr. Jamie Madigan, Industrial-Organizational psychologist and Product Lead at LeaderAmp in our Webinar, Your People are Dealing with Anxiety. How Can You Help? 

In our last post, we wrote about the importance of collecting data. As a continuation of the conversation, we’re moving on to the question: what do we do next?

To watch Part 3 of the conversation, check out the video below!

Dr. Madigan explained the elemental steps once you’ve collected your data: look for patterns, make note of the highs and lows, then infer. Although the low scores are typically where we look for insight to improve our results the next time round, it’s also important to address the strong positives in your data. Dr. Madigan explained a psychological safety assessment used by LeaderAmp, where members on a team rate one another in order to determine how well psychological safety is being fostered for the group (in a previous article, we discussed how psychological safety is the responsibility of everyone, not just leaders). 

While it’s one thing to focus on those who need to improve their psychological safety scores, Dr. Madigan reminded us that acknowledging those who have high scores is just as important. We can learn more from those who have had a positive impact, than focusing on what feedback to give to those who haven’t performed as well.

Another point that was made during the webinar was that data isn’t just numbers and words, but actual human experiences. According to Liz, we need to remember to look at the whole person and their unique situations, before jumping to making big decisions. To be fully informed, we should be aware of the unique circumstances, like that of which many of us are in today. These will allow you to be supportive of 

Once you collect your data, it’s important to remember that you may not have an immediate solution. It’s more than a matter of being “right” or “wrong”. We need to look at both ends of the spectrum we’ve pieced together, and look at the circumstances that have created our results. At SupportingLines, we are data-driven. We use data to determine what questions to ask, rather than looking to data for immediate answers.