How to Foster High-Performance Culture in Data Science & Analytics

Recently, a friend and colleague asked me a question. We were musing over some of the highs and lows of our professional careers when he caught me off-guard: ?

“You know, Jack,” he said, “you’ve been really fortunate to work with a lot of great teams. I mean, the consistent high-performance you’ve been a part of is pretty remarkable. I’m curious:? how do you maintain that across so many different settings?”

Honestly, given this person’s own accomplishments I thought it was a trick question! He is, in fact, an expert on operational excellence and I know that he has well-reasoned and principled opinions on such matters, having guided many organizations through the process of finding just that kind of success.

Admittedly, I hadn’t really collected my thoughts around this. What would I offer my friend that he didn’t already know? The facts of the matter seemed clear enough to me: ?if one were to call me successful, it would be because I had been fortunate enough to work within teams characterized by high levels of cooperation. Good things happen when really smart and highly-motivated people come together to do something cool that they all believe in.?

So, I answered honestly: “Well, it hasn’t been about me, specifically.? We just cooperated really well.”

“Come on,” he replied, “you have to have a leadership strategy that brings this about, creates the right conditions … something.? You just don’t see that every day.”

Admittedly, it was a little frustrating to be caught flat-footed, but his question inspired a considerable amount of thinking about what had gone right in my career as well as ?about the times that it hadn’t.? This Post is the end-product of my ruminations, which I hope are helpful to you either as a leader of data science and analytics or as an individual contributor thinking about the kind of environment you’ll thrive in.

First off, as it turns out, I don’t believe that people actually work for money.? Of course pay matters, but at the end of the day what people really want is to be valued, respected, and afforded the opportunity to do meaningful work that makes a difference. ?A fair compensation package matters, but beyond that I do not see pay as the key to developing high-performance.

What does matter are a few key principles that any leader can, and I would argue should, adopt to support a culture of thriving in their team:

1.????? Encourage Authentic & Respectful Communication. More than anything—team composition, experience levels, baseline skills, or any other of the myriad of factors that routinely get batted around—communication is the key fundamental to your team’s success. ?Authentic communication requires making your team members feel like they can be a whole person at work and be open about what they need from you and their colleagues to be able to do important things like achieve work/life balance, deal with unexpected adversity, or address complex issues such as grief, loss, or even trauma. They need this just as much as they need collaboration and support on work items, so you can’t afford to neglect it. ?Teams in analytics and data science are guaranteed to be diverse across a number of relevant domains and if your goal is to cultivate high performance, then you are going to have to commit to this in a culturally-pluralistic way. ?No one is an expert on someone else’s life or culture, but what you can be, because it is entirely within your control, ?is an expert listener. It has been my experience that team members know what they need to be successful in balancing life and work and if you are responsive to what they are saying, you are going to build the kind of culture where every team member’s long-term performance can be exceptional. ?I’ll also note: ?this does not imply some contributors working little and others working a lot, which creates a whole other set of issues. This can be achieved with a balanced workload within your team, especially if you see it through a medium-term lens.

Equally important is how you talk to others within the team. When you demonstrate respectful communication, fair-minded candor, and a willingness to consider viewpoints that might be quite different from your own all sorts of good things happen.? Your team members relate to one another in a similar manner.? You’re pleasantly-surprised to find that the silent gems within your team come to life, bringing with them a suite of unexpected brilliance that could have just as easily withered on the vine. Trust and respect embolden everyone on the team – the last thing you want is either an echo-chamber of sycophants or a monastery of silent geniuses.? High-performing teams share their thoughts without fear and as the leader, you are one of the key ingredients that makes that happen.

2.????? Focus on Talent Development as a Priority.? You’ll notice I didn’t say retention. This happens automatically if you take the principles I’m outlining here to heart. In data science and analytics in particular, a key to your success is to stay up-to-date on new techniques and technologies that are constantly evolving.? Your team members are going to want to develop their craft, hone existing skills, and expand their horizons into new and interesting areas. This will be true no matter if they are a recent grad or a highly-seasoned pro. Innovation is grown in the soil of exposure to novel ideas and exposure happens in the context of professional development opportunities such as conferences, trainings, and access to new and interesting projects. As my late mentor and friend, Dr. Adelamar Alcantara, impressed upon me early in my own career, organizations that neglect this factor inevitably become stagnant and are ultimately out-competed by more adventurous and far-sighted ones that understand the value of development. ??

High-performing teams are ones where opportunities for professional growth, including the appropriate title and pay adjustments, are available and where the criteria for advancement is both fair and transparent. This is part of creating an environment where people feel valued and respected and where they know that they are making a positive difference. Nothing kills morale quicker than a failure to recognize that advancement is an important part of how you show that you value high-performance. On the flip-side, failing to fairly allocate these opportunities and provide an equal opportunity for all to excel is just as lethal to high-performance. Moreover, while it is a potentially less pleasant aspect of leadership, your willingness to part ways with team-members who aren’t committed to innovation, professional growth, and exploring areas that stretch their comfort zones is just as important to team development as providing appropriate opportunities.?

3.????? Embrace Your Role as a Facilitator. More than once, I’ve heard other leaders liken analytics and data science teams to pirate ships with a crew ready to mutiny at any given moment.? While leaders outside of these teams often seize upon worn-out and ultimately unproductive tropes about “big egos” and “type A personalities” to explain these observations, the truth is outside of these stereotypes. In fact, while analytics and data science teams are often comprised by higher-than-average educational levels due to the nature of the training involved, the real factors leading to this kind of drama are perfectly mundane.? Like everyone else, professionals in our field want to be valued, acknowledged, and appreciated for what they bring to the organization and to their specific team. Leaders are no exception to this, but often leaders in analytics and data science groups seem to lose their way, seeing their own contributions as facilitators as somehow less than those of individual contributors. When leaders respond to these feelings by misplacing their focus on control rather than facilitation, they all too often create Mutiny on the Bounty scenarios of their own making. ?Ultimately, this is 100% solvable for you as a leader, because it is something that you are 100% in control of.?

As a leader in analytics and data science, your job is to facilitate the overall success of your team’s portfolio of projects. ?You should embrace this. ?For less experienced team members, you may find it necessary to engage at a more granular level (even developing code examples and such).? For more experienced team members, a mis-placed interaction can have demoralizing effects on the very talent you want to foster. While staying engaged in some of the day-to-day work of your group can have massive benefits for you—keeping you in touch with the amount of work required to do specific tasks, keeping your skills sharp, etc.—misplacement of this effort on your part can actually stunt the growth of your team members.? A wise leader discerns the appropriate level of interaction, but you should remember that your main job should be always be facilitation and integration.? Showing team members that, as you are able to, you trust them to make sound decisions and exercise good judgment is immeasurably important. This is how they come to trust themselves and show themselves trustworthy to others. There is no point in developing a team that requires approvals and other forms of hand-holding for all tasks. This is the opposite of a high-performance team.

?I suggest that you fully embrace the role: successful facilitation requires knowing quite a lot about each project within your group’s portfolio. The intellectual exercise of integrating disparate workstreams in alignment with an overall set of strategic organizational goals can be its own engaging intellectual feat.? You will find that in your area of expertise, your subject-matter knowledge will allow junior scientists to take flight while it can also collaboratively enrich the work of senior-level team members. Where you have hired for expertise outside of your own—which you should—adopt the role of sounding board and colleague while respecting the expertise of the team member in their domain of specialization. You really don’t need to be an expert in all things and as your leadership responsibilities grow to multi-team levels, you’ll find this increasingly impossible anyway. ?The more that you embrace this role and all of the scientific excellence required to be successful at it, the less you’ll create an atmosphere of adversarial competition in your team. This matters.? In high-performance teams, leaders accurately judge the appropriate level of engagement to promote the greatest potential overall team success. Creating a culture of one-up-man-ship is the worst possible outcome for your team.

On a closing note, I would be disappointed if readers were to take my points as suggesting that foundational factors such as appropriate access to supporting technology (software and hardware) or accurate and detailed planning are not important aspects of leadership in analytics and data science. These are, of course, table-stakes to your success.

With these met, however, one of the key things I would hope to communicate with this post is that when we focus on creating a high-performance team culture a great many obstacles to our success evaporate. Having led high-performing teams through several economic crises, periods of fairly intense social upheaval and political polarization, and a global pandemic, I am speaking from experience.? You can trust your gut that being a genuine and decent person who demonstrates the values I’ve outlined here pays off in spades when the going gets tough. ?During those times, the key things you’ll have to rely upon have little to do with technology and everything to do with the leadership groundwork you’ve laid during the good times. ?