What makes a great leader? Before transitioning from an individual contributor to a Data Science team leader, I wrestled with this question of identity. If outcomes are a function of habits and those habits a function of identity, the answer to this question is like a mission statement. Your leadership values can inform your decisions and interactions when you accept the responsibility of building or leading a team.
My management philosophy stems from my core mission and values; I seek to serve as a thoughtful leader by empowering individuals and expanding opportunities for others. Reflecting on that mission, I settled on these four core values to practice as a leader. This essay will discuss these four principles and why they are critical to building high-performing, enduring, and adaptable teams.
1) Entrust individuals with the strategic context to guide their decisions.
The foundation of enduring teams is trust. Without trust, communication becomes unclear and coded, and teams devolve into loose groupings of individuals acting independently rather than collaborators leveraging each other’s strengths. Worse yet, a lack of trust can lead to internal competition as information becomes siloed in cliques or fester into resentment as individuals perceive the dynamics of in-groups and out-groups. Fostering psychological safety is a leader’s first and foremost responsibility, a common trait amongst teams that can rally around a shared sense of purpose and exchange ideas freely to identify the best solutions without fear of failure.
So what’s a leader to do to create a cohesive sense of purpose and psychological safety? It starts with entrusting your team with all the strategic context you have access to as a leader. It’s not enough to simply share the what – such as corporate goals, project priorities, or org changes – articulating the why is paramount. Metering information is rarely a sensible strategy – if you don’t trust someone with the information, why did you hire them in the first place? And if they find out you withheld information without good reason, their confidence in your Leadership may diminish. In this context, the omission of truth can be just as damaging as intentional misdirection.
Trust amongst teams of data practitioners is vital for maintaining high-quality data products. Stakeholders outside the group are ill-equipped to critique ad hoc analyses or data products going to production. It falls to the team to introduce quality controls, and it’s difficult to offer honest critiques without that foundational trust. A lack of trust means people don’t speak up, mistakes go uncorrected, and stakeholders notice, which can impact a team’s credibility.
For example, consider the culture of Netflix, where (almost) all information flows freely amongst all staff. The free exchange of ideas engenders trust amongst colleagues, breaks down barriers of siloed communication, and increases the diversity of perspectives in discussion on strategy. And as Erin Meyer writes, if you trust your team to handle sensitive information, you can increase feelings of ownership and commitment amongst each other [1].
It’s up to the leader to live the message of transparency by sharing as much as possible with everybody. Big things, small things, whether good or bad–if your first instinct is to put most information out there, others will do the same.
- Reed Hastings
2) Empower others to self-organize around goals and determine the best path to success.
Creating a sense of autonomy within teams is the natural extension of trust. If you’ve entrusted your team with all the strategic context available to the organization, let them tell you how best to achieve the team’s or company’s goals. After all, if you don’t trust them to find the best solutions, why did you hire them?
Empowering your team with the autonomy to self-organize around goals has the ancillary benefit of instilling ownership of solutions. "Ownership" here goes beyond organizational roles and responsibilities – we are more likely to feel a genuine connection and sense of pride, commitment, and accountability for the things we create than the ones we are handed. In addition, allowing team members to self-identify their tactical approach to solving problems – and then allowing them to execute against that plan – creates more opportunities for them to grow. This way, they can develop planning skills, interpret outcomes, learn from mistakes, claim credit for wins, and incorporate all those learnings to improve their approach over time.
In the context of analytics teams and data product development, this often means articulating the business goals, product needs, or "north star" metrics and deferring to data practitioners on the correct data, EDA, data products, and experiments to meet those needs. Letting analytic teams architect their solutions is another way to demonstrate trust in their expertise. Simultaneously, individuals have opportunities to think strategically about how they can support higher levels goals (as opposed to the tactical, technical details of implementing a solution).
One pitfall to beware: if you’re prepared to empower your team to identify the best tactics to achieve collective goals, you need to be ready to follow through and trust their approach. Being told you have the autonomy to organize around a common goal, only to have your suggestions ignored or overridden (outside the context of collaborative, constructive feedback) is demoralizing. Reneging on autonomy is a surefire way to undermine trust, not to mention it’s difficult to feel a sense of genuine ownership and responsibility for solutions you did not design (and perhaps were selected over your preferred approach). On the other hand, empowering teams to self-organize also means stepping back and trusting their approach, especially when it requires watching them stumble on the road to an optimal solution.
3) Equip team members with the tools, technologies, training, and time to excel.
You’ve entrusted your team with the context they need to succeed and empowered them to rise to the occasion. Perhaps they are excited about a new or novel approach to solving some business problem, but no one has ever tested the technology or techniques required. Equipping your team with the resources they need to succeed – tools, training, or time – is really about listening. If you’ve fostered a sense of psychological safety and trust your team to identify the right approach, your team will tell you what they need to succeed.
For a leader of data practitioners, this means listening to feedback on your tech stack, protecting team members’ time to learn, and providing opportunities for growth in problem spaces or domains. Every new project represents another opportunity for someone to assess the competitive landscape, refine domain knowledge, and define the best technical approach to the problem. Protecting their time during this critical learning phase can pay dividends for the project and demonstrate that you value personal growth. Data practitioners who are empowered to learn continually will not only produce the best products over time but are more likely to remain a part of the team that gives the space to grow.
Protecting time for personal development can become particularly problematic in high-performing teams where individual contributors are naturally pushing themselves to meet and exceed collective goals. It’s easy to let individual development plans fall by the wayside with a project deadline looming or take less time to do some literature review when you can get a jump start on development. These are the moments where it’s critically important to lead by example. Many teams take their cues from leadership on company culture, especially when setting aside time for individual development. If your team sees you taking the time for personal growth, deliberate project planning, etc., they’ll feel more empowered to do it themselves.
Of course, sometimes leading by example isn’t enough, especially in a remote work world where some of these personal or technological investments may not be as visible. Setting standards is one way to create psychological safety by level-setting expectations. For example, it’s one thing to say "everyone is encouraged to attend industry conferences," and another to say "everyone on our team should plan to attend at least one conference each year for personal development." The latter signals that you prioritize that time and will work with the team to protect it. And again, if you prompt your team to tell you what they need to succeed, you better be ready to deliver!
4) Encourage a transparent, open culture of supportive feedback and honest communication.
Your team is operating autonomously to achieve the organization’s goals. You equip them with tools, training, and time to succeed and crush their projects. To keep things humming, encourage open dialogue. An honest, open culture is as much about caring for individuals’ personal needs as it’s making sure team members challenges each other.
You may be able to entrust your team with context quickly, communicating strategy and shifting priorities in one-on-ones and team meetings right off the bat. However, candid communication is a necessary but insufficient ingredient for building an open, honest culture – that takes time and vulnerability. This principle comes last but is certainly not the least for leaders looking to build enduring and adaptable teams; it is where you may need to expend the most time and energy to understand the motivations and drivers of individuals on your team intimately.
Vulnerability begins with leaders, who should never be afraid to demonstrate their room for growth with their team. Soliciting feedback is a powerful segway to giving feedback and can become part of a culture of continuous improvement where everyone feels mutually accountable. That said, it’s essential that constructive feedback is with the intent of growth and not license to become the "brilliant jerk" [2].
Be humble, helpful, offer guidance in person and immediately, praise in public, criticize in private, and don’t personalize.
- Kim Scott
For teams that are already high-impact and high-output, vulnerability is critical to preventing burnout. High-performing individuals and groups – where ownership of essential products or projects fosters a sense of responsibility – are naturally inclined to exceed expectations. You need your team to tell you when they’re stretched too thin, which only happens when they feel safe communicating it. It can be encouraged by regularly checking in on personal bandwidth. Seize opportunities to touch base on the feelings around work ("what project is stressing you out the most right now?"), show that you care about someone’s well-being and life outside of work ("how was your weekend?"), and perhaps coach them through delegation and prioritization as needed. We all have priorities outside the workplace, and effective managers support their team in the context of everything happening in their life.
Another result of cultivating a culture of vulnerability is adaptability. It takes humility and openness to admit when you don’t know how to tackle a new problem, and teammates who can openly hash this out or discuss it with you are more likely to respond rapidly to new challenges. So if you want your teams to endure – avoiding burnout while responding to the changing needs of an organization – prioritize vulnerability.
Conclusion
As stewards of an organization’s culture, outstanding leaders embody their values in every interaction, how they conduct themselves, and solicit feedback from their team and peers. To build high-performing, adaptable teams, you can:
- Entrust individuals with the strategic context to guide their decisions.
- Empower others to self-organize around goals and determine the best path to success.
- Equip team members with the tools, technologies, training, and time to excel.
- Encourage a transparent, open culture of supportive feedback and honest communication.
I am always looking for opportunities to improve and iterate on my style and, in doing so, engender a culture of trust and empowerment where others can thrive. Find the philosophy that resonates with your core values in building high-performing, fulfilled teams, and let me know what’s worked for you.
[1] Reed Hastings and Erin Meyers, No Rules Rules (2020) [2] Kim Scott, Radical Candor (2019)
