Microsoft crunched insights on employees' calendars and emails to see what made effective leaders.

Consistently working long hours was a bad sign — leaders were less productive.

But leaders who frequently had one-on-one meetings and a wide variety of contacts thrived.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As anyone who follows baseball or saw the 2011 film "Moneyball" knows, America's favorite pastime now runs on data. Players are monitored on a minute level, generating a flood of statistics that both players and managers use to make better decisions. What would happen if we tried the same approach to leadership, Microsoft recently wondered?

What came next is the subject of a fascinating recent New York Times article by Neil Irwin, chronicling the effort of Microsoft HR manager Dawn Klinghoffer and Ryan Fuller, the founder of a data analysis startup, VoloMetrix, acquired by Microsoft, to wring insights from employees' calendar and email metadata.

The long piece is centered on a mystery: Why did people hate working at Microsoft's hardware division so much? (Spoiler: The answer is mostly meeting bloat.) It's a great read if you have a half hour to spare. But in the course of teasing out this answer, Irwin also reveals a few short, easy-to-digest takeaways of the project that can help anyone become a better leader.