From Vision to Victory: Executing Your Data Leadership Plan

Plans sound great. Ideas are fun. Dreaming about what can be is where a lot of us spend our time. But at some point, we must look back at what we’ve done.

This is the final part in the three-part “Data Leadership Academy” series. We’ve talked about assessing, planning, and now we will work on performing. Before we get into the actual work, let’s set some ground rules.

Truths That You Need to Hear

• You have fundamental and intrinsic value as a human.
• You are an image bearer. Of your parents, community, country, faith, and ethnicity.
• You are not defined by what you do or don’t accomplish.
• Humans make mistakes. Every day. That’s why pilots use checklists that are checked, counter-checked by the copilot, and rechecked by systems. Systems prevent anything bad from happening if, for example, you put your car into reverse while going 70 miles an hour on the highway.

Before you judge your performance, ask how you would respond if a friend had done the same thing under the same circumstance. That’s how you should respond to yourself. Be a friend to yourself.

In the last issue, one of your tasks was to book a session with an accountability partner. If you didn’t do it, stop now and reach out to them.

This is an outline for how that meeting can run.

Accountability Meeting Agenda

1. What’s your intention for this meeting? What does a valuable use of your time look like?
2. What did you intend to accomplish?
3. Is what you intended to accomplish measurable?
4. Did you accomplish what you intended?
5. If yes, how do you feel about it? What went well? What could be improved?
6. If not, what barriers did you run into? Who can help remove those barriers? Can they be overcome or do you need to refine your intentions?

Intrinsic Motivation and Hard Work

Which activities, at work or in your personal life, make time fly by? These are typically the ones you’re naturally driven to do. They spark joy for a variety of reasons. Some are from expertise and skill, some are from familiarity.

To grow as a data leader, you will have to push outside of your intrinsic motivations. You’ll need to do the hard work to grow.

Hard work is often just that. Hard. There are ways to motivate yourself to do the work, but it’s important to recognize that some of the most important things in life are unavoidably difficult.

Motivating Yourself to Do The Work

1. Break hard work down into small, achievable chunks.
2. Do the hard work before activities you’re motivated to do.
3. Set time limits. You can do almost anything for five minutes. Sometimes, this is all you can do to get started. And that’s okay. Don’t despise small beginnings. Consistent effort applied over a long period of time can lead to massive results.
4. Reward yourself. Celebrate your accomplishments. If you had the goal to work on your personal brand for 30 minutes a day for a week and you do it, buy yourself something nice. Mentally attach that purchase to the work you completed.
5. Track your progress. Using data (of course 😀) to track your progress is the evidence of your progress (or lack thereof). View these metrics objectively. Give yourself grace and celebrate your wins personally and publicly.

Putting It All Together

With accountability and leveraging your intrinsic motivation, you can grow into (or grow as) a data leader. People are able to climb mountains, or become doctors, by putting in dedicated work over long periods of time. You can absolutely do the same.

Now, let’s get to it!

— Shaun

Shaun Davis, your personal data therapist, understands your unique challenges and helps you navigate through the data maze. With keen insight, he discerns the signal from the noise, tenaciously finding the right solutions to guide you through the ever-growing data landscape. Shaun has partnered for 10 years with top data teams to turn their data into profitable and efficiency hunting action. Learn more about Shaun.