Be Influential To Be Successful as a Data Scientist
4 approaches to leading a successful cross functional team
Most analysts and data scientists work in a cross-functional team aligned to a product or initiative. It’s the nature of work as someone who brings insights and recommendations. However, bringing together people from different departments and functions to achieve a single goal can be challenging.
How do you work together efficiently? How do you communicate insights and align your vision with the team?
As a member with an analytical and data science function, your job is often to create insights that produce a recommendation forward. You’re not always someone that will implement a specific marketing tactic or develop a feature for a platform, for example, but your role may be to propose a marketing strategy or recommend a certain user experience for the platform based on your analyses. Therefore, your role as someone analytical is to point the team in the right direction. Your team members need to hear your insights and take in your recommendations, and it’s your job to convince them.
Read that last line again — it’s your job to convince them that they should listen to your recommendations — it’s never a given or a requirement that they need listen to you. The mark of a successful career in analytics is whether or not you can influence your team in the right direction.
This article will cover a few approaches to consider when working in a cross-functional team.
But first, what is a cross-functional team? And how did I get put on one?
Cross-functional teams are simply teams that consist of people from different departments or functions within a company. Many companies structure their teams as a matrix style organization where team members have both a functional and a product manager. Your product team is usually your cross functional team that can consist of a product manager, engineers, data scientists, marketers, and sales.
What are some challenges brought by cross-functional teams?
It’s always challenging to create a new team, but building a cross-functional team has other difficulties.
For example:
- Members of the team might still be doing their daily jobs with the same deadlines, workload, and responsibilities as before the team. This often leads to prioritization issues.
- It’s harder to manage performance, motivate people, make decisions, or set priorities when one person doesn’t have direct authority over the other members.
- Team members might be required to utilize a different set of skills in a new environment. For instance, a programmer who works alone in his daily job may now be required to work with other members of the team.
- Different viewpoints and pieces of siloed information can make it difficult to align everyone
4 approaches to working in a cross-functional team
Cross-functional teams aren’t the easiest team to work in, especially since they consist of people who come with an array of competing priorities, ways of communicating, personalities, and more. Below you’ll find a list of things I think about when working on a cross-functional team.
1. Make your goals public
Have your teammates understand what your goals and contributions are and will be, and what a successful deliverable looks like to you. This allows your teammates to understand why you may be setting up meetings or asking certain questions.
After your teammates have an understanding of your workstream and goals on the project, check to see if it’s aligned with their expectations. More often than not, what success looks like to you is different than what success looks like to them.
Often times, their perspective and their constraints are different than yours, so the ultimate goals are different because everyone on the team is coming from a different function or department. It’s important to get on the same page but you can only do so if you make your goals known to your teammates. You’ll have an opportunity to tweak your output so that all teammates are satisfied with the end result.
2. Your goal is to have anti-climatic reactions to milestones by influencing and compromising with your teammates
Building on top of #1, keep your teammates in the loop with status updates so that you can iterate on your milestones with your team. It’s not a straight trajectory to the finish line, it’s a windy road. It’s important to keep your team updated so that your final deliverable and recommendation doesn’t come as a surprise to them.
Remember, you’re not writing a book — there should be no climax to the story — so keep your approach to finishing your work as anti-climatic as possible by keeping your teammates updated on your progress.
What can be difficult about keeping your teammates updated is that they’ll have opinions that conflict with yours. This is where the ultimate skills of influence and compromise comes in handy and where I see most people fail. Knowing how to influence a conversation can help you and your teammates align on your approach, milestones, and ultimate goals. Knowing how and when to compromise without sacrificing your goals makes your teammates feel like they’re involved. Eventually, your deliverable will be something that the entire team feels like they had a hand-in. That feeling feels good and is the ultimate goal when working in a cross functional (or any project) team.
3. Emphasize Great Communication
The first rule in a successful cross-functional team project is to never let your team be surprised. This means that you should be investing energy and time into good communication techniques — during meetings, over email, or in person.
You should enter meetings with a clear agenda, set up check-ins weekly (or whenever you feel appropriate), use team meetings as updates to share the progress of the project with stakeholders and ask your team members to share their progress. All of these things ensure that you have everyone’s involvement and that everyone feels part of the team.
This also means that you need to set clear roles and expectations from the beginning, acknowledging when your teammates do good work and encouraging cross-collaboration — all of which makes for a happy and motivated team.
If, for instance, you have an idea that you’re trying to get your other team members to agree with, sit down with your teammate individually to vet and get their reaction to the idea before you take it to the other team members; this shows that you respect their opinion and want their buy-in — this immediately encourages collaboration and trust.
If you find yourself in a frustrating situation, try to focus on doing what’s best for the company, this will make it so you can be more strategic and act and think like a leader.
4. Understand Your Team Members Priorities
You must keep the project’s deadlines and objectives in mind. However, you also need to understand that your project could be one of several that your teammates could be working on, and likely not the most important to them.
When you get started on a cross-functional team, make sure that you’re gathering insight about how your teammates are budgeting their time to gain a better understanding of their expectations so you can better plan out your schedule.
Additionally, get a well-rounded perspective on the project’s importance by asking your team members what outcomes they’re searching for and what’s important to them. Likely, there’s some output from your work that they’ll find valuable. Their responses can help you figure out how to prioritize your work.
Finally, you should note that this goes both ways — so, make it clear to your teammates what you’re currently working on outside of the project and any times where you might not be available.
Conclusion
These four ideas have helped me put together a framework to collaborate with my team. The underlying theme of the framework is to have empathy for your team members. Even though everyone knows what the purpose and end goal of the project is, everyone brings in different experiences and perspectives, has a different way of working, and has different motivations. This is what makes working in a cross functional team difficult. The goal is to come out of each deliverable like you achieve the end goal and that everyone’s voice was heard.
