Why your data culture is burning you out
And how to shape a better data culture for you, your team, and your stakeholders
Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the UC Berkeley MIDS program's Immersion: A regular fixture of the Data Science program where students come together for a weekend for networking and dedicated programming. The theme this time around was Data Culture and Data Transformation, and I was invited to give a closing keynote presentation. And honestly, say less: You had me at data culture. I was all in.
So today, I thought I’d give a quick fly-by of my keynote: Crafting a Data-Driven Culture. Let’s go!
The building blocks of culture
When I rebranded this substack around Deliberate Data Culture, I did it to pull forward my belief that our corporate culture — and more specifically, our corporate data culture — is not something that just happens to us, or something we have to exist in passively. Rather, it is malleable. It can change and evolve with deliberate effort.
To understand how to shape your corporate culture, you first need to define what it is that you're trying to shape. There are countless books, articles, and think pieces around corporate culture, each with related but varying definitions of the building blocks that make it up. Looking across them, there tends to be agreement around three key components:
The values, or shared principles, that the organization considers to be important and desirable in how the organization, and its people, show up.
The shared beliefs that people in the organization hold to be true. Often connected to an underlying value in some way.
The day-to-day behaviors that manifest connected to those values and shared beliefs.
So how can we use these building blocks to better understand the data culture we find ourselves in?
I'm on a mission to improve corporate data culture for data professionals of all stripes, in Data Science, UX Research, Analytics, and beyond. If you’d like to join me, you can help by sharing this newsletter with the data culture drivers in your network.
When your data culture causes burnout
During my presentation, I presented a sample (but likely familiar) value related to data culture:
We are a data-driven organization.
I asked the audience how many of them worked for an organization that held that value (or one similar). Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the room raised their hands.
I then asked the audience to keep their hands up if they thought their organization lived up to that value consistently. All but 3 hands went down.
What explains that discrepancy? It's because having the corporate value is necessary, but not sufficient, to actually realize an effective, data-driven organization. It needs to be combined with the right beliefs and behaviors.
The downward directionality was an intentional design decision for that slide. When I hear people talk about data cultures that they're struggling with, they all share one thing in common: They're describing something that's happening out them, outside their control.
Psychology defines a concept called locus of control, which refers to a person's belief about the extent to which they can control events in their life. An internal locus of control suggests that you can control the events in your life, whereas an external locus of control suggests events happen to you — in line with people describing their suboptimal data cultures.
An external locus of control is associated with lower self-esteem, decreased motivation, increased stress, greater likelihood of depression, and poorer coping mechanisms. In the corporate world, we have a more concise name for those symptoms: Burnout.
So if you feel frustrated by your data culture, and you're feeling burned out, there's a good chance those two things are related. And they can both be countered with deliberate action.
Flipping the script to shape your data culture
Understanding that workplace behaviors around data relate to underlying beliefs and values is important, but we need to go a step further. Your data culture — and the underlying values, beliefs and behaviors — are not just something that's happening to you. It's something you can change.
Starting with values: It was telling how many people in the audience recognized the value of being "data-driven" at their own organization. Because it's so broadly applicable, it lacks the specificity needed to structure that change within your specific organization. So, leverage your data expertise to define the data-specific value set for your organization.
With your value set locked in, consider what underlying beliefs about data need to evolve in the organization to best complement your values. What will changing those beliefs help the business to accomplish? Start being vocal about your strong desire to see those business objectives accomplished, and make yourself available as the data partner to bring them about.
Pair that with understanding what data-centric behaviors you want your colleagues and stakeholders to start demonstrating. Once you lock those in, show, don't tell. Strive to show up consistently and authentically in line with your values. Demonstrate how consistency with those behaviors drives the stronger outcomes you're pushing for.
My recommended value pillars
I know what you're thinking: So far this post has been mostly the intro of the talk. Where's the beef?1
While I'm not going to rehash the whole talk today, regular readers will find the my proposed value set familiar. And, if you're new here, fear not (and welcome!): I've listed each of the four pillars below, with links to some prior posts to share a foundation of what I discussed in my presentation.
Pillar 1: Building strong data advisory partnerships...
Pillar 2: ... with a growth mindset at their center.
Pillar 3: Cross-data-discipline collaboration...
Pillar 4: ...rooted in data curiosity.
I'm grateful to the folks behind the scenes that pull together MIDS Immersion content — not only for how it shapes future Data Scientists (as it once did, for me!) but also for giving me the opportunity to give back.
It truly came at the perfect time, as it felt like a culmination of my work on this substack so far. With that foundation now locked in, it's time to look forward: All in the interest of crafting the best data culture for ourselves, our teams, and our organizations.