My previous role as Business Data Analyst was in advertising, I was working in a team of 16 Analysts and we were well known within the business. I was absolutely spoilt rotten with attention and admiration. Whenever any stakeholder needed expertise in my Business Area they were so keen and excited to come to me and discuss their ideas with me. Glorious days!
My new cake
I moved to a new company (and a new country!) and switched to being a People Data Analyst. People Data Analytics is a new topic as a whole, which was one of the things that attracted me to the role. I joined knowing that the People Analytics team was very new (one lead, one analyst) and that stakeholders were not that familiar with the role of a Data Analyst.
The team had already existed for 9 months when I joined. From the interviews/hiring process I understood that even though not everything was built, my role had already been ‘established’ or communicated somehow, and at least some type of relationship had been built with the stakeholders so they understand what my role was and how it can benefit them. It really wasn’t so.
Within the first project I realised that the ‘sparring partner’ relationship that I was used to from my old job had not been established and most stakeholders had no idea what exactly my role is, and by extension, my scope. Repeatedly I was asked, ‘can you add a dropdown to this spreadsheet?’ or tagged in documents stating ‘add a graph to this number’ when the appropriate graph was available in a dashboard. Additionally, there was not a lot of data literacy going around - no surprise really, since a majority of People People have no exposure to Data Analysts and most of them just made do with whatever they can concoct within their spreadsheets.
Stakeholders are your everything
It is really important to me that I am utilised well and a key part of my role (other than analyse business stuff ofc) is to enable the people around me. Honestly, one of the things I love most about my job is working with these people, i.e. my stakeholders. No partnership is ever the same, we always find new ways to connect with each other and over time we can tickle out and develop all of their amazing ideas.
What never changes, though, is that the most valuable ideas only surface once stakeholders truly trust me: they trust that I’ll engage thoughtfully with their thinking and support them as fully as I can. They know I will help shape, develop, and execute their ideas. However, this trust doesn’t appear out of nowhere, it grows over time, and only when stakeholders clearly understand how I can best support them.
Building relationships
Trust that grows over time
Trust that builds over time is generally something that comes naturally if you’re (reasonably) good at your job or at least willing to learn by iteration. As someone that tries to be a good sparring partner I do a few things: I try to be as honest/realistic as I can (with data, and with timelines), not bother stakeholders if they don’t need to be bothered, and be there when they call (not immediately unless it’s super urgent, I principally work with timeboxes to manager my own workload but I offer intake meetings / catch-ups the next day). I try to be a pillar, someone to rubber-duck, someone to rely on.
Understanding how I can best support stakeholders
The second part, i.e. stakeholders understanding how I can best support them, was the more challenging puzzle for me. In an organisation that is unfamiliar with what I offer as a Data Analyst I have the opportunity to take an active part in shaping and defining this role. I started putting a few things in place to change the narrative around my role, and ‘unlock’ this trusting relationship. I hoped that these would help clarify any confusion about how we work as Data Analysts, what is within our scope, and how one could best interact with us or essentially use us and our skillset to complement and grow their own work and ideas.
- I started pushing back (gently) on requests that were outside of my scope, and having conversations about what I can actually offer as part of my role to support their projects.
- I wrote some guidelines to clarify my role to stakeholders. I made this available in a shared space as a reference point for all things relating to my role.
- In the same place I created some information about data-driven decisions, a ‘FAQ’ basically with some baseline stuff - though I explicitly invite people to pop themselves into my calendar to have a conversation / ask questions (and people actually make use of that! love it)
- One little ‘feedback’ thing that I do is that I have a survey I send out to stakeholders post-completion of a project / collab with some questions about how they felt the working-together went. It’s of course optional but usually, if someone has something to say, they take the time to complete the few questions I have in there.
How it’s going
Well, this is more of a soft report I suppose, but I notice that people come to me more often now. The questions they come to me with have changed, more in the direction of what I’m meant to offer support on. As they learn about me and my role, I also learn about them and what makes them tick (plus!! I get to tap into all this People knowledge that I am not familiar with).
The questions now relate to dashboards that I built (e.g. how to interpret certain values, and if their ‘so what’ interpretations are correct. so amazing!). This also helps me develop their tools of course (e.g. V2/V3s of dashboards or reports) or iterate through something I didnt do well or that needs to be clearer. I am also invited to meetings where ‘I might be useful’ (noice) or my expertise is requested (so cool). I have also become a point of contact for people when they have (people) data questions!
I do think I am seeing a shift. It feels like we are moving into a good direction and I am excited to see where it goes.
Reflections on me and my franken-cake
What I do on a daily basis now is so very different to what I was doing last year at this time. I went from everyone knowing who and what I am to being considered the data-clerk. I went from analysing advertising-quantitative datasets to building shitty engineering workarounds for people-focused-qualitative datasets. I also went from having every tool an analyst can dream of to having an array of ugly cheap tools that were stitched together somehow (this is a story for a different post). For a while I thought I was drowing, I was incredibly overwhelmed and upset. But then I reflected and realised that I really needed to re-think my role and understand what makes me want to get up in the morning. I am an analyst through-and-through and don’t care about what data I look at - I cherish and apply my technical skillset and I find a lot of value in offering this to others in a productive way. I understand on a more holistic level how to leverage data, and am realistic about what can be achieved with different the types of it.
What this means for the blog (kind of)
In the past few months, and still now, I learn how to break down not only my role into its most basic parts and how to best explain this to stakeholders, but also how to best support people that have been thrown into the deep-end in a data-obsessed corporate world. I would like to share what I concoct as a way to document my learning.
image source: SeattleDataGuy’s Substack.