The “Spreadsheet Mentality” sucks, and kills the efficacy of jobs

I write about topics related to organizational change a lot. Just a few days back, I wrote about the intersection point of productivity, organizational alignment, and self-awareness. (Many companies and individuals struggle with that point.) A couple of days before that, I wrote about change management approaches. It’s interesting to me.

By way of a slight bit of context, here’s my deal: I went to graduate school for HR and organizational change issues from 2012 to 2014, over and up at the University of Minnesota. I had never lived in Minneapolis before that, and the place is a bit insular, so socially it wasn’t awesome. Obviously don’t get me started on the weather. And as for the graduate program I was in, well … it had pros and cons. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone, though. I was trying to make a career change and better myself financially, and it ended up pretty much moving in the opposite direction — so now I work freelance and make less money. But you know what? Everything happens for a reason, and it’s probably best for me. I’ve never been great at office jobs, to be totally honest.

I’ve worked at a lot of them, though — and had a lot of different bosses and seen a lot of different organizational change processes begin, stop and start, falter, re-begin, stop and start, and ultimately be tossed out the window like rubbish. This happens at a lot of places.

And it happens because of The Spreadsheet Mentality, which is something that needs to be avoided.

Organizational change: What is The Spreadsheet Mentality?

You can probably figure this out on your own, but I’ll walk you through it a little bit. In simplest terms, The Spreadsheet Mentality comes from the age-old executive wisdom of “Only what’s measured is what matters.” As a result of that wisdom, the underlying assumption becomes: “If it can be tracked, it’s important. If it can’t be tracked, it’s less important.”

That’s basically The Spreadsheet Mentality. It’s absolutely toxic to organizational change.

Here’s why: by and large, effective leadership is actually about what most executives and leaders would probably call “soft skills.” Leadership and…