Greg Stevenson, 58 and studying psychology, realized he'd overlooked a crucial leadership skill: reading people beyond their credentials and data. Georgia showed him that understanding who actually performs under pressure beats relying on metrics alone, a mistake that costs organizations real money.
I think about that moment often, particularly now, because here I am, 58, in the middle of a psychology degree. People ask me why, and part of the honest answer is Georgia. That conversation showed me that understanding people, genuinely understanding people, not just reading their performance data, is a skill, a learnable, developable skill, and it's one of the most important skills a leader can have. The higher you go, the more the job becomes about people, about reading the room, about knowing which person in front of you is telling you what you want to hear versus what you need to hear, about understanding who will perform under pressure and who will fold. And if you haven't developed that skill, if you're still leading primarily from the data, And the credentials and the track record, you will make expensive mistakes. I was lucky Georgia stopped me from making one of them, but she won't always be in the room, of course. The question is, when she's not there, what are you relying on to read the person in front of you?
