Retention is key in making analytics a more diverse community. 🔑 📈

We rightfully focus a lot on acquisition to make our community more diverse, but how do we build frameworks for analysts to address the many components of retention as team members grow?

Diversity in the analytics community: we have an opportunity to do better. 

Some folks still need to @ on Twitter to remind folks of the diverse perspectives and identities of those leading data thought leadership on the platform (y’all, a list of all male data practitioners is just wrong and makes your credibility score nonexistent 🤦.) Folks like Mary MacCarthy are also writing about it from the hiring/team-building perspective (..surprise: building diverse teams is the right thing to do on all fronts, y’all!) 

I find myself constantly thinking about how so many diversity initiatives exist, but how they almost always rely on pre-existing analytics expert pipelines; many organizations do not prioritize hiring entry-level/low experience roles. Further, initiatives can focus on acquisition of diverse talent and then seem to crumble when it comes to discipline-specific retention strategies (i.e., what does a future in analytics look like? What will I learn and how will I grow?)

Note: I will not speak to company and organizational-level drivers of retention (equitable compensation, diverse leadership, cultural competence in the organization, etc.); these are crucial and fundamental when it comes to retention, but I want to focus on where I have the most direct responsibility today: through 1:1 coaching. I am not the person to write about or read when it comes to the broader org-level frameworks and shifts.

Building and growing diverse teams is a value I hold strongly. (perhaps is even the most important thing to me?) I’m currently personally grappling with ensuring I live out this value with integrity as I continue to plan and think about building a team from scratch. When will my organization and future team be ready to cultivate folks with less “on-the-job” experience? How should I set myself up to drive retention of my future team — beyond organization-led motions — as folks on my team grow their skills and impact? How do I retain folks not only on my team or within my organization, but within the analytics community more broadly?

I need to start having answers to work off of (and continue developing) for these questions to ensure I do my best when it comes to ownership of making our community a better and more equitable place. Otherwise, any effort put into acquiring and building a diverse team — in every sense of the word — is likely to fall apart.

If enabling hiring across the prior experience spectrum is one of the many methods of building a more diverse data team, then we as managers/leads need to proactively ensure our coaching methods shift to account for that spectrum. We need to build confident, curious, and inspired analysts who want to grow in our community; it’s not enough to acquire folks with diverse perspectives, identities, and experiences - we need to retain them to see a shift in who is represented within our community.

To do this, I want to start with a framework. Frameworks really help me ensure I continue learning and making things better.

One place to start is to ask myself a question: how have I retained as a data practitioner? What self or manager-led practices helped me push through the moments I felt like I just couldn’t do it or wasn’t sure what my future would look like on this analytics journey?

The goal? Take this starting framework and apply it to learn, grow, and formulate my own approach for folks I hire in the future.

Below I’ll explore the 3 key moments I’ve experienced thus far to see what stands out as my personal retention drivers:

1. Learning the job.

2. Becoming an expert.

3. Growing as an expert.

Learning the job: vulnerability and validation.

The primary retention driver when I first transitioned into data insights work was to get to a place where I felt that “I could do the job” (from feeling confident on how to use Stack Overflow to going back to my stats textbooks to relearn a core concept.) The moment I felt like I could do it, I could envision myself in it.

When I left an advertising agency analytics position and was just starting out at The New York Times, I left work with anxiety daily. Some nights I cried out of fear that I was failing at my job. I had no idea why they hired me or how I was going to “catch-up” and make an impact; why and how did they make the mistake of hiring me when I clearly was not skilled enough to do the job? The feeling of being an imposter was paralyzing and was getting in the way of my happiness, health, and work. 

Thankfully, the amazing culture of their data organization and some incredible internal mentors/friends helped me figure out frameworks that empowered me to dig myself out of the “imposter” hole. After a few months, I wrote a piece to reflect on how I got out of “the hole”.

Here are the action items pulled from the piece I wrote years ago. 🔮

• Create a list of your educational and career moves. This could include anything from educational experiences, internships, volunteer work, career moves, professional development or anything else you find meaningful.

• Take that list and spend time journaling about what you liked and did not like at each of those junctures. Look for common themes across your experiences. How did they lead you to what you’re doing today?

• Begin doing your own weekly snippets. On the last day of your workweek, spend some time listing out everything you accomplished that week — no matter how big or small — and everything you are currently working on. After you finish filling in the details for the current week, spend time reflecting on your week and the prior weeks. Reward yourself for the work you did.

• Talk to colleagues. Set up time to meet one-on-one with people in your workplace you feel comfortable sharing your experience with and ask for their advice.

• Communicate up. If you can, let your manager(s) know you are experiencing impostor syndrome. You may be surprised at how they respond.

• Stay humble. Remember you’re not alone.

This worked for me at the time. The key themes? Vulnerability and validation. I needed to let folks know what I was experiencing early on in order to get help, and I needed to validate that my own perception of my impact was aligned with my manager’s to build confidence (the validation part also meant learning where I was misaligned and how to calibrate based on this new career I had entered.)

Becoming an “expert”: building your compass.

The primary retention drivers became adjusting to living and learning from failures in my work, especially through developing my instincts around balancing the impact versus complexity of my work. Building an internal community at my organization – across disciplines and business units – also was a key focus, as it enabled me to see how analytics can scale as a career and make impact more broadly. 

Once I started to get into the groove of things and realized “hey, I can do this” another question came up: do I want to? what does growth even look like now that I feel like I can write the queries on execute the analyses I need to? 👀

These questions really started to come up when I felt like the technical skills (SQL, Python, stats fundamentals, etc.) were no longer as challenging as they once were. If I didn’t know the answer, I knew who to go to or how to find it through research and practice. Right about when I began to hit this moment and think about “what’s next for me in this?” I had the opportunity to work with a very astute manager.

My new manager could tell I was starting to question this and quickly realized I was still in the habit of relying on their validation to build confidence/know I was doing a good job. One of my biggest blockers to deepening my expertise was my fear of failure and manager-reliance. So, this same manager threw a big task at me: “lead X large project for the next quarter, but I we will not talk about how its going the entire quarter; we’ll only meet at the end of the project where you’ll get 360 feedback. If you fail and mess it up, it’s okay and I’ll be there to support you.”

Now, 0 manager support for a quarter-long project was an extreme approach and there are pros/cons to doing it. But, for me, this pushed me to take ownership of my work and to lean on my peers outside of data in our organization to build a compass of whether I was leading the work in the right direction. I no longer could look to my manager for answers on “is taking 2 weeks do to get data ready for a decision tree the right move?” and I instead head to look to my partners to understand it from a different lens: “is the outcome of a decision tree analysis necessary for the potential impact of the decision at hand?” 🧭

Through this project and at this level, I learned 3 key things 🔑 🔑 🔑 :

1. Failure might happen, but what’s most important is how you action on what you learn from that failure.

   1. An idea from the coach’s perspective: create safety for your direct report to fail and help them see ways to learn from it when they’ve reached a mid+ experience level. 💡

2. The folks I did the work for were more important in defining what the work needed to look like than the person who managed me.

   1. An idea from the coach’s perspective: ask your direct report to think critically about their key stakeholder’s perspectives on what is most important; what decisions does X insight need to support — when does X insight become not accurate enough to support the stakeholder’s decision? 💡

3. The ability to have my work meet the “intercept” of the business impact vs methodological complexity “slopes” was where I would unlock the most influence and feel what doing data’s potential could feel like over time.

   1. An idea from the coach’s perspective: ask your direct report’s stakeholders to map your direct report’s most important projects on a value vs complexity grid, have your report map the same projects, and discuss where they’re aligned and not aligned. 💡

These 3 learnings made me realize just how exciting being an insights professional in data can be. The ownership my manager gave me to explore this complexity is what made me realize the breadth of learning opportunities that exist in our work. It made me realize the only way to get better was to keep actioning on learnings and failures, and that the only way to do that was to keep doing data. Growing in data wasn’t just about learning how to do a new type of analysis or a new programming language, it was “softer” and more complex than I had realized. This excited me. I was retained.

While not every person should or needs to be put through what I was going through that quarter, in my experience, unlocking those 3 keys 🔑 through a project (or projects) is what helped me stay in analytics at this level. The journey of building that internal compass 🧭 is never-ending.

Growing as an “expert”: frameworks to scale.

Here I am! This is where I feel I sit today. The primary retention drivers for me currently in data work are building frameworks and templates for tackling hairy and complex problems that empower “the work” to scale. I’ve now also started to heavily lean into the importance of building a data and product community outside of my organization; this has empowered me to feel less alone (the more experienced you are in your organization in your specialty, the less likely you might be to have peers you can learn with) and learn frameworks and iterate my own frameworks more effectively. 

So, I’m living this now! This means that I’m writing more about what keeps me doing what I’m doing today. I feel I have had enough lived experience (this takes literal time) as an analyst to have a solid compass on my own individual work; I’m at a place of tuning and adjusting versus building it. A list of keys for this stage doesn’t feel right for me, especially since I’m still living through it. So, here I’ll share more of what it feels like today.

I started to feel like I reached this stage when I went from feeling like “I’m building a sense of what type of method to use to drive impact here and how to influence through relationships and insights” to “I feel like I’m seeing problem patterns I’ve helped solve more than once before.”

At this stage, I began to realize that the way I could make the most impact was not by stopping the patterns, but by taking the time and space to think through common resolutions paths (i.e., frameworks.) This ranges from relationship management (this stakeholder only wants to use data if it supports their narrative) to analytical problems (how do I select a north star?)

What keeps me going is the opportunity to witness these patterns and build a bank of solutions that I iterate on. I want to go from recreating the wheel every time I encounter a hairy complex problem to using a past wheel or combination of them to get to resolution faster and more effectively. This very practice is also, I believe, what enables me to help become a better coach for anyone I mentor, coach, or manage (formally or informally.) My job is to guide folks through the framework without ever explicitly saying “here it is” so that they may also come to build their own.

At this stage, I’m finding that my relationships through Twitter, Slack, and Meet-up communities are increasingly important. By leaning into a network of folks who love what we do, I’m able to multiply the experience that informs my decisions and frameworks. I’m able to sometimes even feel like I’m giving back to the community that helped me get to where I am today, and that makes me want to stay.

Are you at this stage? What keeps you doing what you do? What stage do you feel is next? Share in the comments, please!

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