Want to create a more data-driven culture? Junior employees can be your advocates (but they need your support)
Junior employees are less invested in an organization’s status quo and have stronger incentives to adopt new data-driven practices than more established employees. However, this can make them a target for colleagues who oppose culture change. In this post, I discuss strategies leaders can use to bolster junior employees and foster a more data-driven culture.
I was a year into my first “real” corporate research job the first time I had to reject a feature idea.
Before then, I hadn’t recognized that I was on the front lines of a culture battle at my organization. My managers were trying to introduce more data-driven decision-making into a culture where old-school PM and Engineering leaders had long called the shots and success was defined by how many features you shipped.
So when a PM I’d never worked with before–we’ll call him Bob–asked me to concept test his new social feature idea, I thought nothing of it. Despite being junior, I had tested a lot of social feature ideas by that point. So I designed a solid study, got Bob’s approval, and set about running it.
Unfortunately, Bob’s idea did not fare well. No matter what type of users I recruited or how I probed, the answer was always the same: the idea just didn’t work. It was fundamentally misaligned with users’ mental models and actively conflicted with their habits and values.
As an inexperienced, eager-to-please researcher, I hated saying no to people. But I bit the bullet and reported the results back to Bob.
The feature did not move forward, but a few months later, I had one piece of scathing feedback in my 360 review. It was from Bob, who accused me of not trying hard enough to make his idea work.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my response to Bob’s feedback was an important moment not just for my career, but also for my managers who were trying to drive change in the organization.
If you are attempting to create a more data-driven culture, you should recognize that your junior employees are especially vulnerable to manipulation–and retaliation–by agents who favor the status quo. If you don’t your employees them to become a casualty, you must be prepared to support and protect them. This pays off in more satisfied employees, as well as advancing the culture you’re trying to foster.
In this post, I’ll discuss the role junior employees play in promoting data-driven culture initiatives, and what you can do to support them in the face of opposition.
How junior employees help drive more data-driven cultures
Junior employees may lack political clout, but they are often more open to new processes than more established employees. Their lower level of experience means they probably don’t yet have deeply ingrained preferences for how things should be done, and they’re less invested in the status quo.
Junior employees’ lower status also makes research fundamentally more valuable to them.
Maybe you’ve heard of the tyranny of the HiPPO. “HiPPO” stands for “Highest-Paid Person’s Opinion,” which often gets final say in business decisions, whether or not there’s any evidence to support it.
In other words, the more authority you have, the less you require data for political purposes: namely, getting others onboard with your recommendations. (Although great data-driven leaders still value evidence because it makes their decisions better.)
Junior employees are in the opposite position. On its own, their opinion holds very little weight. But by incorporating research into their work, they can make stronger arguments and recruit more allies because they have the weight of evidence behind them.
““Think about the early parts of your career. Whatever decision you were going to be making, you had to provide a lot of justification for it. The more up you get, you don’t.” ”
Ideally, by making research a part of their process as junior employees, that habit will remain with them as they assume positions of greater authority later on. But regardless of whether that happens in the future, the need for evidence makes junior employees natural advocates for a data-driven culture today.
The other reason junior employees are important is because, as in my experience with Bob, they’re often the ones on the front lines of culture change. Because their work leans more heavily toward execution, they’re more likely to be the ones who will encounter resistance from partners who don’t want things to change. And this can put them in the line of fire.
When I received my criticism from Bob, it really stung. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t about me, but about misaligned incentives in a shifting culture. From my perspective, I’d done everything I was supposed to do, with Bob’s approval, and I was being punished for it. This threw me into a tailspin as I agonized whether it was more important to perceived as a “good team player” than to do good work.
If I had not received support from my team and manager; if I had been a little more fragile; if I had had less personal conviction about the value of research–that pressure might have been enough to shake my faith in my managers’ data-driven approach, or even to drive me out of the organization.
Fortunately, I did have those things. I stayed the course, learned how to better navigate conflicts of interest, and my managers’ data-driven culture initiative did eventually win out.
But I’ve had peers who weren’t so fortunate. Some have had teams request to stop working with them–or were even laid off–and suspected it was because they honestly reported research results that didn’t align with the already-made plans of more powerful decision-makers.
This destroyed people’s careers, as well as whatever culture change had been underway.
What you can do to support data-driven junior employees
So what can you do as a leader to support your junior employees who are in the trenches of the organization’s culture change battle?
There is a vast literature on people management and change management, and if you’re doing this kind of work, it’s worth delving into.
But for the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on the strategies I’ve seen leaders use to support their employees in this specific scenario, where the goal is to drive the culture toward data-driven practices.
As you consider your approach, you’ll need to think about ways to protect your employees’ individual careers, as well as how to drive progress toward larger cultural change.
There are four levers I’ve seen successful leaders use to accomplish these two goals:
Mandates (changing official requirements)
Influence (changing minds and recruiting allies)
Authorizing your employees to invest less
Validating your employees’ efforts
1. Mandates (changing official requirements)
If you have enough political capital, the most immediately impactful thing you can do to support your employees in culture change is to take the top-down approach–namely, to mandate data-driven processes and policies.
In the organizations I’ve worked with, this usually comes in the form of some sort of gate review, where data is required for any project to move forward.
This seems obvious, but it’s easy for mandates like this to backfire.
The challenge is figuring out how to incentivize using the research, rather than making it a box to tick. In Bob’s situation, it was not enough to require him to submit his idea for concept testing. Box-ticking is what put him on a collision course with a junior researcher (me). Bob needed to be invested in applying what was learned from the research, even if it didn’t immediately lead to shipping.
There’s no silver bullet, but by changing the definition of “success,” you can get everyone on the team more united around data-driven objectives.
2. Influence (changing minds and recruiting allies)
Top-down approaches only work for leaders with a certain level of authority. For everyone else, you’ll need to use old-fashioned influence.
For stakeholders in organizations where individual success has not traditionally been tied to business success, research can feel like more of a hindrance than a help.
After all, in the near term, it may appear to slow things down, cost more resources, and, in cases like Bob’s, it can stop stakeholders from shipping entirely.
It can be difficult to help your stakeholders reframe the role of research in their project, but the effort can be highly rewarded.
Here’s an interesting thing about the situation with Bob: in the organization where we both worked, all of us–PMs and researchers alike–were reviewed based upon our impact. There was nothing official that defined what that impact was. Bob had come to define his impact through the traditional metric–by how many features he shipped. By rejecting his feature idea, I’d come between him and his ability to have impact, as he understood it.
“75% of business ideas fail.4 This means that all of the manpower and resources spent on building and launching those initiatives are effectively wasted.”
If you’re a leader in your organization, you can help facilitate this shift in mindset by socializing new ways of articulating value among other leaders and executives. And you can provide sponsorship for data-driven employees by highlighting their efforts.
You can also train junior and mid-level employees to communicate their impact using this same business logic and language. (If you’re not able to train employees to do this yourself, I can recommend people to help.)
And if you have a say in how work is assigned and evaluated, you can play a critical role in ensuring that data-driven employees are fairly considered for high-profile projects, and that their business impact is fully recognized in reviews (even if–especially if–it means defending the value of not shipping the wrong thing).
3. Authorizing your employees to invest less
Even if you do all of the above, there are still going to be stakeholders whose minds can’t be changed, some of whom will be in positions of greater authority than you. There will always be bad-faith research projects where there is no way to win.
In these situations, just like in War Games, the only winning move is not to play.
You may not be able to entirely prevent your junior employees from getting assigned to bad-faith projects, but you can help them learn to recognize them and to invest minimally. (One leader I know had his team use these projects to practice new techniques, knowing that the practice would provide value for them personally even if the results were never used.)
An approach I like for product/feature validation work is using a Business Concept Validation Request Form. This form is completed by the researcher and their stakeholder at the start of any project. (By “researcher,” I mean whoever is conducting the research–this doesn’t have to be a full-time professional researcher.)
Before doing any work, the researcher walks through all possible outcomes (including failure) with their stakeholder. They also ask them what action they will take in the event of that outcome, and document that plan together.
Having the plan in writing can help researchers recognize no-win projects, as well as setting expectations upfront and reducing the likelihood that a stakeholder will be blindsided by an unwanted result.
This makes bad outcomes for the researcher less likely, and investing less in no-win projects frees up your employees to spend more time on more impactful work.
4. Validate their efforts
The last and arguably most important thing you can do to bolster your junior employees is simply to support them as people. Culture change is hard. It’s important to let your employees know their work is meaningful and valued.
When I eventually became a more senior employee in a different organization facing this type of culture challenge, I created a council of research champions. It was composed of people who were all trying promote a more data-driven culture, and who held a variety of roles across different product teams.
We met regularly to discuss the issues and problems each of us was facing and to share solutions. While it was originally intended to be a short-term task force, the members found it so valuable that they continued to meet for the entire lifetime of that organization.
Every member of the group was remarkably busy, and no one was required to attend. But everyone continued to make time for it. Why?
I believe it was because of the validation it provided. Having a group of like-minded professionals gave everyone a place where their efforts were recognized, where they received and offered encouragement in the face of common challenges, and where they could celebrate their successes.
We all need this, but junior employees especially do. They don’t have a support network of past colleagues to rely upon, or a work history of past successes to reassure them they know what they’re doing. If you want them to have the social support they need to weather the challenges of culture change, you as a leader need to help them create that.
Do your junior employees have enough support?
If you are trying to change your organization’s culture, chances are your junior employees will eventually encounter someone like Bob, who will oppose or even attempt to sabotage their efforts.
Will they have the resources to push back, or will they buckle under the pressure?
And what will the consequences be for their nascent careers?
As a leader, it’s especially important to support your most vulnerable employees, both for their own well-being, and for the success of your data-driven culture initiatives.
Whether you work through mandates, influence, or other approaches, the essential thing is to recognize the human side of culture change work. Above all else, junior employees need to know that their work is meaningful and that you have their back.
👋 I’m Dr. Llewyn Paine, and I’ve helped business leaders create inclusive, data-driven cultures at organizations from mid-sized start-ups to Fortune 500 enterprises. I advocate for focusing on your people and meeting them where they are. If you’re looking an ally in driving your own research-oriented culture change, I’d love to chat. You can schedule 30 minutes here.
Footnotes:
The concept of learning milestones comes from Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup.
This is a very rough estimate based on the average reported cost of building an API, as reported by DreamFactory, and the general project scope and team make-up.
Of course, it’s disingenuous to pretend that Bob’s own management chain would have immediately embraced a different definition of impact, but by expanding Bob’s own definition, it opens a new avenue for negotiation and dialogue.
Holland, C., & Cochran, D. (2005). Breakthrough Business Results with MVT. Wiley.