Want to Supercharge your Analytics Career? Let Go of this One Thing
Let go of your fear — fear of being wrong, of not knowing everything, and even fear of more work — to engage with your stakeholders, drive value, and enjoy your job.
Fear of being wrong. Analytics and reporting comes with extensive reputational risk to the analysts themselves. In a single report or dashboard, you may be presenting a dozen or more different metrics. Let’s assume your report is viewed each week by 20 different stakeholders — that’s roughly 960 metric views over the course of a month. It is also 960 chances to be wrong. There may be faults in the calculation, in the source data, or even the visualization. If you, as an analyst, make a mistake on this one dashboard just 1% of the time, that’s almost 10 tickets, Slacks, or emails coming your way to question your results each month. With this perspective, should you really live in constant fear that something will go wrong with your work?
No! You need to embrace the fact that, yes, you will almost certainly have something be “wrong” on an ongoing basis. What you can do is make sure you have documented your sources, known data gaps, and definitions. Review logic, methodologies, and code with peers and more experienced leaders. You should also always make sure to spend the time to get to know your data up front using descriptive methods, and automate ongoing checks for data quality.
Now, you may say, this is fine for marketing analytics for example, but you’re running pharmaceutical trials. Being wrong comes with very real risks to people’s health and safety. In these cases, you should invest additional time and effort to minimize the probability of errors, perhaps in more extensive pre-validation data work, review cycles, or other approaches. While your chances of being wrong may never be zero, channel your fear into as much mitigation of risk as possible.
Fear of not knowing it all. You have spent multiple sprints sourcing and cleansing new data, describing patterns and trends, and are finally ready to present your findings. You’ve prepared multiple views, metrics, and statistics, and woven it into a presentation that meets your stakeholder requirements, is visually intuitive, and calls out clear recommendations. You walk into your review confident and prepared. But now, you’re quickly asked a series of deeper dive and follow up questions by your customers. What does that number look like for this other location or cohort? Did you compare those trends? What about last year’s numbers? While you’ve anticipated many of these in advance, you just don’t have all the answers at your finger tips. Do you panic, and try to cover?
No! It is ok to not know everything. Indicating that you will need to follow up is a perfectly acceptable answer, and is highly preferable to half-baked or incomplete responses on the spot. You are a human, not Google (or ChatGPT)). Partner with your customers in their curiosity — don’t assume you’ve also asked all the right questions of the data, and look to a review as a joint exercise in inquisitiveness! You may learn more about how your customers think about the business or the project and how you can ask even better questions the next time.
Fear of more work. Closely related to fear of not knowing it all — fear of the follow up question. First of all, congratulations! You have an engaged stakeholder, who actually wants to know and do more! You now have a much higher chance of your work driving new impact. While you may need to minimize follow ups that sound a lot like data tourism (“this could be nice to know…”), embrace the follow up. Work with your manager to plan for this time, so it isn’t an unwelcome surprise that needs to be squeezed in with other tasks. This is part of the review cycle, and where so much of the value can be created.
Most analysts are inquisitive, conscientious, and detail oriented — but these same traits can run the risk of tipping into anxiety, worry, and ultimately fear. Let this go, and channel yourself towards openness to supercharge yourself and your career.
