Sponsor and stakeholder management

Your personal success and that of the analytics team lies partly in your ability to connect and effectively partner with a wide range of people in the organization. The skills you possess, employ, and deploy in the area of emotional intelligence are paramount in this aspect of your work.

In a global organization, if you have a global role, you will need to meet with a substantial number of people, and depending on the culture of the organization, you may need to meet with those people either in one-on-one settings, small departmental groups, or in large auditorium/stadium settings, or perhaps in all of those settings. In a previous leadership role, I ran the global advanced analytics and AI effort and the associated teams. In the first year, I held over 630 meetings around the world. Those meetings included C-level executives, pision managers, team leaders, inpidual contributors, external vendors, supply chain partners, and customers/patients in each region and country that the company operated in and included multiple company representatives from every operational function across the organization.

All meetings are important to the subsequent success of the analytics team and the engagement you will need from each constituent that you meet. Meetings with C-level executives and senior managers are especially important. These are the inpiduals who will direct their downline organizations to work with you and your team or to thwart your team and efforts. This group of people needs to know that you and your team are working on their behalf to improve the outcomes, operational metrics, and an organizational future that aligns with and delivers on their objectives, goals, and compensation plans.

Without agreement and alignment, functional managers and executives will meet with you and they will be polite, but they will not direct their teams to engage with you and your team.

It won't be obvious to the organization, or maybe even to you, but it will become apparent after a year or more passes where you have been successful in engaging the executive level and where you have more work to do to bring them on board with the analytics, innovation, and transformation journey.

The good news is that you will be successful in engaging a subset of executives and teams. With those teams, you will execute projects, modify processes, develop applications, and deploy models. These will be your quick wins or success stories that you will use to demonstrate the experience and expertise of your team.

Creating internal demand

Word-of-mouth networking by those that have collaborated with you and your team is crucial for sustained success. The people that your team has helped reach and exceed their goals will talk about your team, the projects, and the value that has been delivered. The stories being conveyed at sales meetings, functional gatherings, in the cafeteria, and in formal presentations will make or break the ability of your team to expand its connections and influence internally.

Word-of-mouth – internal and external – marketing, can be thought of as a flywheel effect. Once momentum is achieved, it becomes self-sustaining. Executives and senior managers will tell their staff to seek you and your group out to solve a wide range of problems. Many of those challenges will not be appropriate for your group to address, but if you can direct those team members to other internal groups or external consultants or provide solutions that they can build themselves, you and your group will gain a positive reputation for being the go-to team to solve simple and complex problems.

One piece of advice I will offer for you to employ in the process of starting and accelerating the word-of-mouth effect in an organization that has worked exceptionally well in the past is that you should tell the functional managers to not overthink the problem or challenge that they are attempting to solve. You should not underestimate the concern of the people who want to approach you but feel that they cannot convey the problem well enough or that they have not packaged the discussion in the "right" way. Communicate to people of all levels that they simply need to contact you or your team to start the dialog. It does not matter to you, and it should not matter to you, how articulate they are in describing the challenge or how refined the idea is; you simply want to start the dialog and with as many people as possible, at as many levels as there are in the organization. Always encourage people to bring ideas forward.

This is your demand creation function. You need to encourage people to speak up the moment they have an idea and you want the entire organization to think of you and your team as the architects of solutions when a challenge arises. The issue with people overthinking the problem is that they start to refine the discussion, which is not the optimal approach; you want them to ramble and discuss tangential ideas and talk about the perceived ramifications of the problem and all the unusual and unorthodox approaches that might come to their minds. These holistic descriptions provide a complete picture of the challenge.

You may find that the organization needs multiple advanced analytics applications to solve the complete problem. In general, functional teams and their managers are focused on the problem that causes them the most discomfort or is the most pressing. Once the analytical team engages with the functional team and the dialog begins to flow, you may find that the problem presented is the tip of the iceberg. To solve the immediate challenge presented, the analytics team may need to develop a number of applications based on descriptive statistics to adequately describe the operations and operating conditions.

Once the operating conditions are well documented and described, then the analytics team can build predictive applications to provide a forward view of operational metrics, and then if it is of value, the analytics team may design and build a simulation and/or optimization tool for end users.

You are better served when the entire global organization sees the advanced analytics and AI team as an innovative group of practical and pragmatic thinkers who are pro-active, easy to engage with, and interested in their inpidual success and that of their team and group.

In the past, I was approached by the corporate communication team because they felt that advanced analytics and AI was a hot topic that was trending internally and externally. The initial conversation was simply informational and exploratory; neither of us had an idea of where the dialog would lead. The result of that discussion was an agreement that one of the analytical applications that had been built and was driving a new level of effectiveness and efficiency was of internal and external interest and we wrote and edited a story for the company newsletter. That story was then edited and posted to the new corporate mobile app on multiple news channels. The story was then pitched to an external expert who wrote a new story that ran in a top business publication in the US and finally the story was excerpted and included in the annual report. All this activity and positive exposure came from an initial conversation because a team member in corporate communications thought that the topic might be interesting.

Typically, we, in analytics, do not think about where our work comes from. When you consider the idea of where work is sourced from, wouldn't you want the work to come from strategically aligned areas of the business that result in measurable, significant positive improvements in the way the firm operates, patients are treated, customers are engaged with, and the level of profit generated? There is a larger topic here that we will examine later, but let's keep the focus on demand generation.

The way you, as the analytics leader, show up in the company and in each meeting determines who will engage with you and your team. The impressions you make determines how successful the team and you will be because it determines the people who will engage with you and your team and the level of funding, effort, and resources they will dedicate to the projects that you and they jointly undertake. That engagement results in success that is discussed around the organization, and it begins a wave of new cycles that carry the process forward and can carry you and your team forward for years.

So, when you think that you want to phone it in on a meeting or postpone a meeting, or just outright cancel a meeting because you can't immediately see what will come of it, think again.

Let me outline a couple of examples of activities that analytics teams I was part of, or led, undertook to create interest and incent participation across a broader cross-section of the organization. These activities and events can be particularly valuable if you can create buy-in from your leadership peers.

While at Dell, we created an Analytics Innovation Day and Contests. Teams from across the organization showcased their use of data and analytics. One of the primary and most visible results was the cross-pollination of collaboration from areas that, previous to the event, were not aware of each other.

At CSL Behring, I organized a Data Science Summit (DSS) and asked team members from around the world to present their vision, views, and projects in data and analytics. Nearly 150 people attended a 3-day event that showcased over 35 different areas of focus related to data and analytics. The DSS not only spurred collaboration, it created new groups focused on data and analytics and created new projects to drive change across the company.

Projects and initiatives like these elevate team members in the analytics team and across functional groups as well as creating tales of winning with analytics that can really go far in getting more buy-in and engagement momentum.

Every meeting is a chance for you to show up and put your best self forward. Don't squander that opportunity. Not everyone gets the chance to make a difference.

To command or to collaborate

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with a person who has had a highly successful 30-year career in the US public sector, at the federal level, who had successfully transitioned to a new role as a C-level executive in one of the most iconic American brands. The company has been in business for over 150 years and has been an innovator throughout that time. When he provided the opportunity to ask a question or two, I asked, "What is the most common reason people do not succeed in their endeavors in advanced analytics?". He responded, "Hubris. Thinking that they know more than their stakeholders and/or customers do about the businesses that the stakeholders are running on a daily basis."

Let's contrast that with another executive, in a global organization with over 25,000 employees operating around the world in a firm that has over 100 years of successful operating history. This C-level executive who is capping off a 20+ year history in large organizations recently joined a new company and is making his way around the globe communicating his vision for the firm. He recently said something like, "We need to stop listening to the business. They do not know what they need. We need to tell them how to run their business and operations."

Both of these comments were made in the same week.

There couldn't be more distance between these diametrically opposed positions in how to approach engagement with sponsors, stakeholders, and subject matter experts. I find it interesting and slightly ironic that the person who has spent multiple decades at the senior levels of one the most advanced military organizations in the world is the inpidual espousing humility and collaboration and the corporate executive is raising his voice and promoting a dictatorial style of management and a unidirectional approach to communications and operations.

I have been subject to both approaches and I am here to explain and communicate that the world, for at least highly evolved and intelligent people, is well past the top-down command and control approach. In extraordinarily successful organizations that aspire to succeed over a period measured in decades and centuries, demeaning people and offending them by telling them what to do is an outmoded approach.

This is especially true for knowledge workers. It is worth noting that this overbearing approach is an absolute non-starter for the best Millennial and Gen-Z talent. I suspect that Gen-X would still put up with it if the pay was exceptional, so it's doable but pointlessly expensive when managing Gen-X talent, but it is not even a possibility for the next generation.