The intention of this article is to serve as a “how-to” guide for data leaders to foster the development of a data culture through our proven approach to data community management. Sections will be followed by a series of questions to facilitate your thought process on where you can tweak or pivot your data strategy to empower your data communities to drive real and measurable results with data.
Data…Culture???
Culture is simultaneously the most and least important thing at a company.
People can easily visualize a perfect culture. Meaningful work, relationships, a sense of purpose, a great team, work-life balance, excellent compensation, and knowing that you’re making a difference. Sounds wonderful right?
Then why do people roll their eyes when you say the culture needs to improve? Or look at you like you’re crazy if you say the root cause of this problem is culture. From customers to employees, to leadership to investors, you would think that everyone would benefit from a great culture.
The reason people roll their eyes at culture is that it’s a painful topic, and people tend to have complex relationships with something that’s easy to visualize but hard to attain. It’s like getting healthy or building wealth. The future state is crystal clear and the path to success is simple. However, for most, the journey is arduous and fraught with disappointment, isolation, and pain, which leads to inaction and poor habits.
A culture of inaction is where most data cultures are today. A loose network of colleagues that don’t trust each other, working in literal silos of information to advance their personal and departmental goals. Complexity becomes an excuse for disengagement, leaving data leaders carrying the weight of a problem that really isn’t theirs to own entirely by themselves.
Firstly, Could Being a Data Leader Get Any Harder?
Data leaders, once tasked with monetizing data and automating the business model with machine learning, are now charged with radically changing their company’s culture.
Let me just call out the elephant in the room here, and I don’t say it enough. The role of a data leader is really f***ing hard. It’s an unproven function, with unclear success metrics and unfair expectations. It’s easy to get frustrated. It’s logical to want to quit. It’s normal to be disappointed by your stakeholders.
Where organizations need to temper their expectations is that building out a data culture is less about the destination and more about the journey.
That being said, let’s get that journey started.
Changing the Approach
Data leaders spend an inordinate amount of time talking about data. Guess what, people find data boring, complex, and conceptual. Very few people get excited by a spreadsheet or a database.
Think of it like this, if you’re going out to the business to talk about solutions with funny names or abstract topics like data quality you’re not going to be winning friends and influencing people. What you’re doing is positioning yourself as a doer or user of technology. Assuming technical work that people don’t want to do and are OK to let go of is of low value. It’s a waste for smart and talented data leaders to go down this path.
Data leaders need to spend the majority of their day talking to their colleagues. Understanding their problems. If they want to solve these problems. If these are actually problems. If these people actually want help and if it even makes sense to solve these problems.
A data leader must first re-orient to people/problems versus technology/solutions.
Easily said, hard to do.
Breaking Culture Down into Communities
Data, like culture, is intangible. Because it’s intangible it’s hard to measure and demonstrate value. Also, like culture, data is the responsibility of everyone who participates. By virtue of this, data can simultaneously become one of the most and least important things at a company.
So now we’re working with two intangibles: data & culture. This means we need to get two extremely difficult-to-understand and measure topics to the board through a sea of skepticism and disengagement.
I don’t think any data leader would disagree with the importance of data-driven decisions and building a data culture, but I would think that a minority of these people know how to take action. We need to drill down into “data culture” a little further.
So what is culture?
A culture is a group of communities;
A community is a group of people that have a problem(s);
who have clear roles & responsibilities on how to solve a problem(s);
through a well-understood and documented language;
where the actions they take solve a problem(s).
Ask Yourself…
What are the communities you are serving? Do they actively sponsor/champion the data strategy?
Do they know and accept their responsibilities within the data strategy?
Do they know how to communicate with each other with data?
Do they want to solve problems with data? Do they want your help?
Note: For the sake of your own career development, if you don’t know what the problem you’re solving is and for whom, think twice about the value you’re bringing to your organization.
Fostering a Data Community
In today’s world, the workflow for data is backward. People jump into data before defining the questions they want to ask, to let the consumer know that the data isn’t available or not of sufficient quality to serve their needs. If the data isn’t perfect, an investment in technology is around the corner to fix everything so you can placate your concerns in perpetuity. Problem solved.
Kidding aside, by now, hopefully, most people have learned that technology investments alone don’t solve data problems. Data problems demand changes to processes, people, and technology that requires many stakeholders across functions to collaborate. The reality is that you need 3 groups of people to get your stakeholders to play nice in the sandbox: executive leadership, the business, and technology.
Earn Executive Leadership’s Voice
Start by talking to your leadership team. Ask them how the data strategy can help their teams do better work. Guage whether or not they are paying lip service to the importance of data or they are truly going to go to bat for you. You will need their “air cover” to engage with their teams and do meaningful work. Without that, you will likely go through undue suffering.
As the data leader it is not your responsibility to manage other people’s teams and people, but to influence them to achieve a greater end state. Lean in on executive leadership when people aren’t supporting the data strategy, and make it clear what needs to be done and when. If your data strategy is decoupled from business goals, they won’t listen or support you. Ask them for someone on their team who can champion the strategy on their behalf.
The influence an executive brings to the table can accelerate your efforts in a magnitude of months or even years.
Earn the Business’s Trust
You don’t need to build out a big data governance team and host periodic meetings to talk about data. Your stakeholders will come together on their own time if the problem is important enough and the path to solving the problem is crystal clear. People in the business want to solve data issues. They are lost in the world of Excel spreadsheets and enterprise software, trying to plug gaps to create new angles to drive business performance. They are quite capable to solve problems without a data leader’s direct help.
They also recognize they have limited time to solve an endless list of business priorities. Anywhere you can demonstrate their time and influence can go to making their future state better will earn their engagement fast. Making sure that you’re building something for them to solve their problem will keep them involved over most difficulties. The second you start doing what’s good for you and solves your problems they will vanish. It is extremely difficult to earn this trust back.
Earn Technology’s Respect
Guess what? Without technology’s support, you’re not going to get anything done. They, for better or worse, control budget and development resources. So until no-code solutions are at parity with other technologies you will be at the mercy of your technology team.
Something that I don’t think everyone understands is that not all technologists have data pedigrees and specialize in infrastructure, software development, and technical solution implementation. Therefore, the value you bring to technology as a data leader is enormous as you are likely solving a problem they don’t necessarily have experience with or the desire to solve. Generally speaking, technologists are pretty disinterested in solving “people problems”, and would gladly pass it on.
Ask Yourself…
Does executive leadership know how to best support you? Are you clear?
Does the business know how you can help them? Are you credible?
Does technology understand how you complement them?
Note: If executive leadership, the business, and technology don’t have your back you’re in for some serious pain. What’s your plan to earn their support? Also becoming Chief Data Officer doesn’t exempt you from the realities of this problem. As a data leader, you need to be able to influence.
Bringing Clarity to the Problem
So you’ve got executive leadership’s blessing, business leadership is willing to put skin in the game, and technology has your back. You’re going to do all this work, and demand your best and brightest’s time? For what?
A data leader must be able to link their efforts to growing the bottom line. Saying you’re building a data culture will get you either blank stares or a resounding “yes” followed by “how?”
Well, you can grow the bottom line by cutting costs, improving the productivity of the workforce, growing revenue, and reducing risks. The only way for a data leader to grow the bottom line is for solutions to be adopted by the business that captures these benefits. Where it gets tricky, is that the data leader cannot sign up for business benefits. In fact, only your executive/business stakeholders within the data strategy can.
You also can’t force the business to use what you built or purchased. This is where your relationships with the business are paramount. If they don’t trust that you have solved their problem, they will not trust your solution and therefore not adopt it. The only way they are going to adopt the solution is if they have a hand in designing it. This takes tremendous effort, if you cannot communicate to your stakeholders why their time is needed to perform XYZ activity and what the benefit is, you’ll lose traction. It goes without saying the solution should cost less than the problem being solved.
As a data leader, your success is dependent on the successes of others - don’t lose sight of that.
Ask Yourself…
How big is your data community?
Do your stakeholders get credit for supporting you through the design and development of these solutions?
What solutions do they use? How often? What percent of your data community is using these solutions?
Note: When communicating about the impact of the data strategy, your executive, business and technical counterparts care about different things. You can’t tell a different story simultaneously and expect these stakeholders to stay engaged.
Empowering Your Data Community
Where most data projects go off the rails is requirements gathering. Getting cross-functional teams to do good work is very difficult. Especially with data, where problems are complex, highly politicized, and oftentimes boring.
Build a Common Language
It may surprise you, but data communities don’t always know how to talk to one another. Ask marketing, sales, and finance what “revenue” is and you’ll likely get 3 different answers with a novel supporting each. A data leader can provide enormous value to their communities by helping them define what key business terms actually mean. Be patient with the process and do your best not to talk about data. It’s not about what’s possible today, but where they would like to go.
Assign Clear Roles and Responsibilities
People use confusion as an excuse to disengage from the data strategy. You need to make it clear what role someone has in the data strategy and what they are responsible for. The activity expected of them needs to be crystal clear and manageable as it will likely be an additional time commitment. Not everyone is a data steward and there are many types of “stewardship”.
Measure and Track Results
You’re going to get the question “what the heck are you doing” and “why does it matter” often. It’s important you can show how the work activities directly link back to business value and who’s helping and who’s not. It gives credit where credit is due and takes the noise and confusion away where it needs to go away.
Ask Yourself…
Do you have a business glossary? Is it full of fields in systems or actual business terms? Are these definitions owned by the business?
Do your stakeholders know what they need to do and what they will get in return? Or is the work purposeless to them?
How are you measuring the impact of your data strategy? What metrics do others care about?
Note: Your business is not organized by data domains. Don’t try to have the business define data. Focus on understanding what they need, and bringing clarity to what they need to do to get results. Prove their efforts generate real results. Small working teams are always better than a committee.
Don’t Forget About #1
I’m talking about you.
Last time I checked, if you’re a human being you don’t like failure and pain. Therefore culture can become an overwhelming topic for someone whose pedigree is in a technical discipline, so I’ve found it helpful to apply the above principles. Hopefully, they help you and your colleagues.
In a technical discipline, there is generally a right answer. When it comes to people, what’s up to one person is down to another and changes day to day. A data leader needs to get comfortable with this ambiguity.
Remember, no salesperson closes 100% of their deals, but with a good process, they can convert a healthy portion. No CEO can unilaterally influence everyone at their company, but with the majority, they can enact meaningful change. No product manager has a user base where everyone loves their product.
Whether it’s a company, team, or family, building out any culture is a journey that takes time. There will be ups and downs, and what will hallmark your journey is the shared growth and experiences you will share with those around you.
More importantly than anything I’ve shared above, a data leader needs to be kind to themselves and others, celebrate small wins, and be patient with others as they apply these principles. Together you will go far.
Best of luck in your journey.