How to be a Successful Data Leader
The hidden facts every data leader should know
In the last few years, there has been great growth in the data domain and the technologies around it. Almost every organization migrated from on-premise to cloud services, data storage, and computational powers got cheaper, managed services are everywhere to ease our lives, and many online courses started to support great minds to build their careers in the data domain. With these changes happening, it has become harder for a data leader to keep up with everything around the data domain and grow as a leader.
In this article, I will share my thoughts on how to gain trust and respect from your team, peers, and stakeholders while growing your team and building impactful data products for your organization in this fast pace environment.
Articulate your team’s vision every single time
Leaders are influential figures. They don’t need incentivizes or power to gather people around and get their respect. They create a vision for their teams, products, organizations, or people and articulate it every single time they have the opportunity.
As a data leader, from team leader to Chief Data Officier, you must have a clear vision of how you collect, derive, populate and use data in your organization. I am not talking about technology because it changes frequently. I am talking about how you will solve the problems with the data you have. And you need to speak about it all the time in every meeting! It can be a daily stand-up, it can be a monthly town hall or it can be a C-level meeting. People need to understand how you shape your teams and lead them through a clear vision that will shake the industry you are part of.
Create a competency list of skills to support your vision
As a data leader, you already have a clear vision of where you want to head and make an impact on your organization. The next thing you should do is to curate a list of skills you need in your team; e.g. bayesian statistics, near-real-time even-driven data flows, image processing, etc.
Warning! A skill is not equal to a technology. Technologies are constantly changing objects to solve certain problems but skills are the ability to do something well. Let‘s check some examples;
- Having a great knowledge of event-driven data flows is not equal to being good at Kafka. Kafka is a technology to support even-driven data flows.
- Being a master at data engineering and orchestration pipelines is not equal to being good at Airflow. Airflow is a technology to support data engineering pipelines.
When you know what kind of skills you need in your team, hiring and scaling your team will be much easier. Always go for the people with the skills. Their learning curves will surprise you when you need some flexibility in your processes.
Search for diversity in your teams
You have the team vision and skills needed in your teams. The next thing you need to start the hiring process. The most critical aspect here is to respect diversity. What is a diverse team?
When you think about a diverse team, you can imagine people from all genders, age groups, belief systems, races, cities, countries, personal identifications, etc. But diversity doesn’t end here. You need to think about diversity in how people think, how they react to certain problems, and what kind of solutions they generate.
Human beings are biased toward hiring people who are like them. This situation is called hiring “like-minded people”. Data hiring managers usually fall into this pitfall unconsciously; e.g. academic background data science leaders tend to hire academic background people, software engineering background data engineer leaders tend to hire backend engineers, etc.
Creativity and flexibility come from diversity. Always tend to fuel the diversity in the team and stay away from creating your clones!
Create learning opportunities for your team and yourself
Learning new skills, technologies, and techniques can be too complicated for your team members to do on their own. The core reason for that is not the lack of resources. On the contrary, there are too many resources but not a clear path to follow.
It is your duty as a data team leader to create close bonds with your team members, understand everyone’s career aspirations, and curate step-by-step learning opportunities and achievable goals for them.
The key factor here is not only giving the learning opportunity but setting achievable goals as an outcome of the learning opportunity. It is like a reward mechanism. You need to motivate people to learn new things and reward them with their goals.
The goals can be anything; e.g. presenting what they learned in the team, peer-coding with the experts to have hands-on experience, and delivering an MVP solution to showcase, etc. The granted weekly or monthly learning blocks will be meaningless without the goals. Just know what is best for that person and challenge them with the opportunity.
The most important thing is you need to lead by example. You have to read all the progress in the data domain, share your thoughts on internal and external platforms, challenge your team on these thoughts and create a space for them to challenge you back.
Nurture an ownership culture in the team
Every individual in the data team is responsible for developing data products. Data products can vary from business dashboards to ETL pipelines. The development of these data products is just the beginning of a long journey. They are going to evolve, they are going to fail, they need maintenance, and they need to be taken care of.
As the data leader you need to give responsibilities to your team members to own what they developed. Ownership culture motivates team members and makes them feel that they are part of something bigger. When they feel part of something bigger, they do things on their own not because they have a Jira ticket for that.
Let your team shine!
If you are a leader, it is proof that you succeeded as an individual and you grew into the leadership role. From now on you can’t continue what you were doing in the past that made you succeed. You need to find methods to support and empower your team to succeed. And most importantly when they do, let them shine!
The “let them shine” part is not always straightforward action for a data leader. You need to define strategies to create opportunities for your team;
- Presenting achievements at internal ceremonies; e.g. at the end of the sprint, monthly town halls, company all hands
- Writing on the company’s blog about the technologies they use or the data products they developed
- Attending conferences, workshops, or hackathons to meet with folks from other companies to exchange ideas
Your job as a data leader is to praise the hard efforts of your team. Find the methods that suit best for your team and start doing them.
Create strategic partnerships in your organization
For nontechnical business leaders, it is almost impossible to imagine a data product, as a solution to their problems. They are the ones with business requirements and data leaders are the ones with the technical knowledge. If you have strong partnerships in your organization, your business leader peers are always going to knock on your door whenever they have some challenge. This is great because you will be the first person to hear that problem and you can start thinking of a data product solution for that.
This process creates new opportunities for your team to develop, succeed, and shine. Your job as the data leader is to create opportunities for your team to keep them engaged, challenged, and privileged to be in the organization.
And the final boss: Stay away from Imposter Syndrome
Especially data leaders are finding themselves in the abyss of hopelessness these days. There is no single day a new technology, algorithm, data product, or AI solution doesn’t pop up. You can feel that you are behind the competition and you don’t have enough time to learn and master all of the new fancy things. Yes, you are right but it is OK!
The only way to survive this crazy responsibility is to create a team in which everyone is good at their parts, everyone respects each other, everyone owns what they build, and everyone supports each other. Data leadership is like leading a professional sports team. You can’t succeed on your own. You need to trust your team!
Thanks a lot for reading
With this article I have started a new series “Data Leadership”. In the upcoming articles I will cover how to create data teams, how to scale them in your organisations, how data leaders should work with engineering and product leaders.
For my Data Product series, you can check the links below;
Data Product Manager: The Most Crucial Job of the 21st Century
Product Thinking for Data Teams
Would You Like to See Our “Data Product” Menu?
You can find me on Linkedin and Mentoring Club
