The Data Leader is the ultimate Servant Leader 7 CDAO Habits #6

The Intelligent Business operating model is one where ‘Data Serves People’ and masters ‘Process and Technology’. Therefore, the most important capability for a data leader is to remember it’s all about people!

Data rarely delivers value in isolation; it’s when it’s combined with other activities that it becomes an enabler and a multiplier of value creation because it is the information derived that enables better human (and, for that matter, machine) decision-making.?As discussed in earlier habits, we need to remove the straitjacket of process/function and move to a leader/people-centric model focused on outcomes and the decisions needed to drive them. Leadership must evolve to enable a flatter structure within the enterprise. The data leader must be a master collaborator, and ultimately your job is to be the servant of the servants who use data to serve people!

This is further reinforced by my research, which has focused on ‘Resource Theory’, which identifies the VRIO – Valuable, Rare, Immutable and Organisational capabilities that organisations use to create sustainable competitive advantage.?The organisation's operation functions as the adjustment factor in deciding a firm's ability to enable or prevent realising the benefits embodied in its valuable, rare, and costly-to-imitate resources.?To be truly transformational, data, therefore, needs to touch all aspects, or in this case, all people connected to the organisation.

When talking about people, there are three key communities that need to be supported and enabled:

1. Customers of the organisation?(mentioned in?Habit 1, Customer is King or Queen ). You must be using Data & AI to develop products and services that make a difference to the end customer.??
2. People within the organisation.?They are your immediate customers. The whole concept of the Intelligent Business is to ensure that the data in your business serves the people in your business to help them make better decisions, which improves service to the end customer and allows the organisation to deliver better revenues, lower costs and improved ESG outcomes.??That means upskilling the whole business and developing, amongst other things, ‘citizen’ data scientists as well as ownership of data amongst the whole employee population.??
3. Data & Analytics team.?The job of the effective data leader is to create, grow and nurture a great team and provide them with exciting work that delivers transformational products and services for the other two populations. I include here also the machine learning/AI that your team develop, which will make an ever-increasing number of decisions on behalf of the business.

Robert K. Greenleaf first coined the term 'Servant Leader', and in his view, the servant leader should be focused on: "Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become a servant?”.?The "I serve" mentality provides two premises, I serve because I am the leader, and I am the leader because I serve.

Whilst the concept of 'Servant Leadership' was focused on serving the people who traditional models ‘work for you’, for my purposes, the 'Data Servant Leader' serves all three communities because informed knowledge – as opposed to beliefs or instincts – improves both the effectiveness of decisions AND efficiency.

Another pioneer of 'Servant Leadership' is Larry Spears, who described 10 characteristics of the Servant Leader: empathy, listening, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people and building community.

As someone with a technical engineering background, like many Data & Analytics people, I exhibit(ed) many ‘autistic spectrum’ characteristics and lacked several of the 'Servant Leadership' characteristics. I had to learn them (the hard way), and it took me over 20 years to start listening, become self-aware and empathetic, and I’m still learning.?

With those characteristics in mind, let’s consider the three people communities in reverse order:

1. The?Data & Analytics team. As a CDAO Servant Leader, this would be your starting point. Your role is to provide the capabilities and resources that the Data & Analytics team need to be successful.?Critically, to do that, you need to join the dots between the capabilities of the D&A team, the data you have access to, and the needs of the internal customers within the business. Having valuable and interesting problems to work on, which deliver value to the business, makes for a happy and motivated Data and Analytics team. Stepping back, many Data & Analytical professionals exhibit some/many ‘autistic spectrum’ characteristics, and that typically makes them bad at listening, weak on awareness and very weak on empathy. Being very committed to the growth of my people, I try very hard to instil those capabilities in my team and to do that more quickly than the 20 years it took me on my own.?Training and developing your people is key, as is establishing psychological safety. So often, they have been poorly managed and supported in the past, and therefore healing is a critical competence. This team will be developing increasing numbers of AI and Machine Learning models that will themselves make decisions on behalf of the business. We need to ensure as many of these listening and empathetic characteristics are passed on to those models!

2. The?Internal Customer(s). Logically, your role as a data leader is to serve the needs of your customers, and they are the people across the business. The whole concept of the Intelligent Business is to ensure that the data in your business serves the people in your business to help them make better decisions, which improves service to the end customer and allows the organisation to deliver better revenues, lower costs and improved financial and sustainability outcomes. Foresight, persuasion, and conceptualisation are critical here, coupled with the soft skills of collaboration and listening to be a good servant leader. The reality is for many data solutions, ‘seeing is believing’ – business users struggle to articulate what their requirements might be until you show them what is possible and more likely ‘probable’. Furthermore, as a 'Servant Leader', your role is to make them Servant Leaders too. Stewardship and building the community are particularly important characteristics as you will effectively need to upskill the whole business and develop, amongst other things, ‘citizen’ data scientists as well as ownership of data amongst the whole employee population of the business.?

3. The?External Customer(s). They are the Kings and Queens of the Data Leaders world. Logically, you would not expect to make them 'Servant Leaders' (as you might expect it to be beyond your remit). However, data about your customers allows you to listen more closely to their needs, to be aware of their needs and, importantly, to help your internal customers to have better foresight of what those customers might want in future. Further, you can help your internal customers to better conceptualise those in the form of products and services and then provide messaging and propositions that persuades the external customers that they want those products and services now and not at some point in the future.

In conclusion, the data leader must be a master collaborator and ultimately, your job is to be the servant of the servants who use data to serve people!