How Many Organizations Are Led by “Data People”?

In our previous article on building a strong data culture, we outlined an ambitious agenda for change — recognize how the company makes decisions and what needs to be changed, embed business translators and data product managers into the organization, and build an ideas factory instead of becoming too attached to early experiments or models. 

Here, we’ll take those ideas a step further to identify who can be the change agent to put that agenda into practice and the leadership qualities they will need to actually get it done. Warning to CDOs and data executives: these tips may encourage you to step outside your comfort zone and act differently to increase the likelihood of these changes becoming reality (and, spoiler alert, you will end up thinking like an organizational leader and not necessarily a data leader!).

As challenging as it may be, data leaders can’t get too attached to ideas that aren’t sticking, especially their own. Instead of trying to generate ideas (and eventually projects, data, and models) within the data team, setting up the conditions for an ideas factory can bring others into the fold, help decide what’s valuable, and instill a feedback loop with the business. To be sure, we don’t just mean any ideas — the phrase ideas factory indicates a larger scale, but the only way to achieve this is if the business is generating ideas from real problems to solve. That can go against every fiber in a data leader’s body, who has possibly delivered value in the past by assembling (and protecting) experts from too much business influence. 

If a data leader is too protective about their team, models, or roadmaps and dwells in the past instead of figuring out how to change the future, step three of our prior article is going to be especially difficult. If, instead, the data leader puts on the cap of an organizational leader (e.g., making a tough decision to nix a precious use case that business stakeholders will not adopt), they will help their own teams achieve cultural affinity with the wider organization, changing everyone else a little by changing themselves a lot. By adopting the mindset of those they should aim to serve (i.e., members of the C-suite with P+L responsibilities), data leaders will better lead the organization through significant change, instead of being laser-focused on solely their projects and how to make everyone else just like them.