Fanatics HR Leader: Your Leadership Data Problem Is Filtering, Not Reporting

Leadership data isn't scarce — it's overabundant, and that surplus is stalling HR teams. That was the core message from Ericka Portis, Director of Performance for Fanatics Betting & Gaming, who presented her leadership development framework at this year's SPARK Talent conference.

Her argument lands on a real pain point for people teams. Even candidates with strong qualifications and strong skills aren't leading the charge the way businesses expect. Portis rejects the idea that proper leaders are simply going extinct. Her position: great leaders still need a proper support structure in order to make great change, and HR's job is to build that scaffolding rather than wait for ready-made executives to appear.

Can you have too much data?

Portis opened with the foundation of any framework worth building: data. To construct something that works, HR needs accurate numbers — and, just as critically, the right numbers.

Her diagnosis reframes a problem many teams attribute to their tooling. Portis said: "I don't believe that this is a reporting problem. I do believe that it's a filtering problem. Too much data, but there's not enough what we would call decision-relevant signal."

The timing of her point matters. In the age of AI, data of every kind has become readily available and accessible, and organizations now have the capability to organize it at scale. But Portis was clear that capability alone doesn't close the gap. HR leaders still have to know what they're looking for in order to make use of any amount of information. More dashboards won't fix a filtering problem; sharper questions will.

What comes after the numbers?

Data isn't the end of the process, even once it's organized and its utility is vetted. The next step — arguably the most important one in Portis's framework — is acting on what the information shows.

That requires translation work, and Portis put it directly on HR's shoulders. "Your job [as HR professionals] is to draw the line from the work that you're doing to a number that the C-suite or executives already trust," she told the audience.

The implication for leadership development is concrete. When building out a leadership framework, HR needs to give leaders accurate, useful numbers, but it also needs to be ready to tie those numbers to change that can actually be made. Metrics without a decision attached to them don't move anything.

Why alignment drives the last mile

More than anything, Portis argued, leaders can only act when they understand the "why" behind the data. What do these numbers mean? How can the business act on them? What goal is everyone trying to reach?

True change comes from seeing what's in front of a business accurately and planning accordingly. Most HR professionals know the dread of leaders stalling out, unsure which direction to move toward. Portis's presentation pushed back on the idea that this stagnation is inevitable. With attention to detail and consistent effort, HR can point leaders in the correct direction and help them keep moving forward.

What HR teams should take from it

For people leaders weighing their own development programs, the framework reduces to three sequential questions:

• Are we filtering for decision-relevant signal, or just producing more reports?
• Can we connect our HR work to a metric the executive team already trusts?
• Do our leaders understand the "why" behind the numbers well enough to act?

Portis's framework positions HR as the architect of that support structure rather than a bystander waiting for leadership talent to materialize on its own. As AI-generated reporting keeps expanding the volume of people data available, the teams that learn to filter first — and tie what survives the filter to trusted business numbers — will be the ones whose leaders actually take charge.