Datinuum Podletter 5: Watch Out for Those Data Charlatans

Eric Gonzalez: Welcome to this week's Datinuum Podletter I'm your host and author, Eric Gonzalez.

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week's newsletter. Wavestone: 2024

Eric Gonzalez: Data. Career tips. Learn to manage up. Everyone has a boss, no matter your level. Analysts report to managers. Directors report to VIPs. C-suite executives report to the CEO. CEO reports to the board. Regardless of your role, you must manage up effectively. However, this is a skill rarely taught. Managing up is vital because it cultivates positive relationships between you, your team and your boss. Remote communication gaps between you and your boss shows accountability for your deliverables and safeguards against micromanaging. To effectively manage up, follow these three steps. Review the next steps and priorities at the end of each conversation. Provide a time estimate and receive confirmation on when the deliverables will be completed. And follow up on the deliverables and follow up on feedback. Reviewing the next steps and priorities at the end of each conversation shows that you can be trusted and understand how to prioritize. This is an essential skill for anyone wanting to advance in their career and necessary for people. Leadership. By providing time estimates and receiving confirmation on when the work will be completed. You are aligning on timelines and showing that you can be held accountable for tasks. Following up on the completed work and the feedback with your notes and your JIRA board at your standup meeting or via email highlight that you're an effective communicator, are coachable and can handle constructive feedback at every stage in your career. You'll need to manage up the more effective you become at it early on, the better for your career.

Eric Gonzalez: Data leadership forcing square pegs into round holes. Quote, The job needs to get done. So someone needs to do it. End quote. This tends to be the argument for most quote leaders when they assign a task to an individual that doesn't fit that individual skill set or passion. The argument works. If you're a small team, everyone is overburdened and the team is falling behind on pushing work out. However, most of the time, the manager giving this work fails to ask a simple question Is this something that you want to be doing? Let's use an example with person A and person B and Project One and project to person A, wants to learn Project one and is passionate about that work. Then by all means, give personally that work. This person is not. Then maybe person B is also not passionate about Project two and would enjoy Project one more. In that case, you can put Person B on Project one and Person A on Project two. I was faced with a scenario like this early in my career during a one on one with a person on my team. He told me that he wasn't passionate about health care, studied finance, and wanted to focus more on that domain. The problem with this request was that we worked for health care client and our contract was for three more months to fulfill his request. Also help the project. I executed three steps, one backfilling his role. We're in the middle of renegotiating for an extension, so I proactively looked for a new resource with a health care background to backfill him on the project. Two Identifying finance projects that the client was a health care client. Many aspects of the work we were doing was finance driven for those last three months. I had him focus his efforts and attention there, so he was more fulfilled. Three. Connecting him to a new financial services client. Once the three months were up, he would need to find a new engagement. I reached out to the account manager of another client who had a few potential opportunities starting in the next couple of months. I had them set up lunch and eventually he started on that engagement following the completion of his contract with the health care client. I could have never held one on ones or asked him what he was passionate about and he probably would have left the company feeling overworked and unfulfilled. I didn't want to see this person lead the team, but ultimately it worked out for all parties and we kept moving forward. This exercise is more work and pain for the manager, but that is the point of being a leader, matching people's passions and skill sets to the work that needs to be done. It's not always a one for one match, but you can always strive for as close of a match as

ion jobs to the job market in: 2023

Eric Gonzalez: Thank you. Thank you for subscribing and for listening to this week's podletter If you enjoyed the podletter, the best way to help is by sharing it with colleagues and friends. If you prefer to read the newsletter, the Datinuum newsletter will be released weekly on Beehive. You can find a link to subscribe in the comments. Feedback as a gift. Please reach out to Datinuum@gmail.com with any feedback or questions.