Managing Executive Expectations

Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

Working across the organization is a critical element of the success of you and your team. Engaging with and gaining the support of executives is a requirement for success. In this chapter, we will delve into the details of capturing the imagination, attention, and support of executives across the organization. We will examine the relevant factors that will guide and shape your communication and engagement with your direct reporting line executives and those executives that own and manage related corporate functions.

Executives and senior managers are important to the ongoing success of any company and they have a significant role to play in the early and ongoing success of advanced analytics and AI teams and your personal success as well.

Working with executives to support their needs in order for them to support your needs is a fact of life...

You are not the only game in town

Executives have many teams reporting up through organizational structures and those teams have numerous initiatives underway and those initiatives contain a diverse set of projects. Just because you are living and breathing the portfolio of analytics projects, doesn't mean that your senior management team and sponsoring executive have more than a cursory understanding of the projects and initiatives that you and your team are engaged in.

This organizational separation is part of the reason why we have been discussing the need for the analytics team to be connected to a larger overall process of organizational improvement and transformation. Executives can only keep a certain amount of complexity and breadth of activity in mind at any one time. When they see that your efforts, and the efforts of your team, are supporting strategic initiatives, then you are aligned with their thinking and you will have their support.

It took me years to...

Know what to say

Executive communications are easy to understand but can be challenging to successfully navigate. For the most part, executives want simple, fast, easy-to-understand answers that convey that the work you are undertaking has a significant positive impact that will be realized in the corporate or financial reporting period that they have on their mind at the time of your discussion, but what does that mean?

Your answers should be short and convey the strategic area in which you and your team are working in and that the quantified positive impact will be above the financial or operational threshold they care about in the next reporting period, which is typically a calendar quarter or possibly in time for the next board meeting, or both.

I was in a meeting recently where an executive told a team leader that he was not interested in the project if it did not deliver a positive $20 million impact in the next quarter. In the following month, the project was sidelined...

Know how to say it

People ask me, with fair regularity, why analytics teams, analytics projects, and all things related to analytics are unique. As we have described along the way in our discussion, analytics initiatives rely on a mind-boggling array of moving and interrelated parts: technologies, corporate strategy, functional tactics, data, external suppliers, executives, senior managers, and the analytics team.

This constantly moving collection of elements is complex to understand, manage, and drive in a coherent direction.

It is even more complex for people who have little to no understanding of any of the component parts, let alone the whole of the ecosystem. You need to assume that the executives you are engaging with have little to no knowledge of any part of this environment, and at the same time, they have very little interest in the topic. They may have a strong interest in the possible outcome(s) and changes that can be driven through analytics, but it may be dangerous...

Shaping and directing the narrative

Early in my career, I was attending an annual sales meeting for Metaphor Computer Systems, at the Silverado resort in Northern California. There was a senior manager, Jay McGrath, leading the discussion. He was addressing a group of system engineers, and I was one of them. I was approximately 2 years into my consulting career. I had just completed my MBA and I thought that I knew it all, forward and backward. Jay ended a section of the discussion with the statement, "Telling is not selling." I was perplexed by this statement. I assumed that most of the people that we were talking with were smart, informed, reasonable people and all we had to do was tell them of the benefits and value of our proposition and they could make the best decision possible.

All of that is true, but it certainly leaves much unsaid or undone in the process of arriving at the destination you desire.

When you are presenting to executives, you need to show...

Know before you go

Cultivating, assessing, and obtaining executive support starts even before you join the organization. When interviewing for a new role and when new executives subsequently join the organization who have a direct or indirect impact on your team size, funding, and future plans, you need to evaluate the executives and senior managers to understand their history, perspective, and experience with analytics teams.

I have heard executives express the following views:

• We need to see significant changes resulting from the analytics teams in the primary operating functions in a matter of weeks.
• The analytics team should be staffed and running efficiently by next quarter.
• Our company has never been good at continual improvement; the analytics team will fix it.
• Our company has never been good at innovation; the analytics team will change that.
• We will have the advanced analytics and AI team build dashboards and reports in their "spare...

How many of us are out there?

One of the realities of advanced analytics and AI is that, at the current time, conversations in the business press, popular press, in governments at the cabinet and ministerial levels, in universities, in think tanks, in venture capital firms, in private equity firms, and in the minds of nearly everyone that is interested are focused on the changes that advanced analytics will bring to our businesses and societies.

The interest in advanced analytics and AI has never been higher and has never been discussed on such a wide platform with so many diverse sets of people.

The number of people who truly understand the multiple factors that need to come together in a specific way to deliver positive operational improvements from analytics is a very small number.

I have been part of several large and small companies. In one of the larger firms, with over 26,000 employees, there was approximately a third of 1% of the entire staff around the world...

There is a proven path to success

There is evidence that when firms can and do align these varying groups, employees, and functions, the results are amazing. This is one of the reasons why we see the leading firms that have invested seriously in analytics pulling away so dramatically from the majority of the firms across multiple geographies and industries.

A global study by McKinsey in 2019 illustrated:

that a small share of companies—from a variety of sectors—are attaining outsize business results from AI, potentially widening the gap between AI power users and adoption laggards. Respondents from these high-performing companies (or AI high performers) report that they achieve a greater scale and see both higher revenue increases and greater cost decreases than other companies that use AI. McKinsey defines an AI high performer as a company that, according to respondents, has adopted AI in five or more business activities (is in the top quartile...

What are you hoping to accomplish?

I have spoken with executives who believe that all data and analytics projects and efforts can be outsourced. That is possible, I suppose. I have never seen this type of effort deliver strategic impact and value, but that does not mean that it cannot happen.

One of the problems of outsourcing anything – not only analytics but any project – is that you need to know what you want to have in the end before you start. How can you expect an external vendor to deliver exactly what you want, when you want it, at the expected cost when you don't know what you want or how to achieve it? Sounds straightforward, right? You would be surprised how many executives, firms, and teams have little to no idea of what they want to do.

This is a particularly acute problem in analytics currently. With the land grab mentality that some firms have, it is challenging to define what they want. Remember the statement, "We need some machine learning...

Outsourcing

In general, we are moving away from the "not invented here" model where organizations believe that they need to build everything themselves, but there are still pockets of this view. It is the opposite view of the situation described above where some executives think that everything can be outsourced. As with most things in life, the ends of the continuum are the extreme cases and, as such, are typically found in a smaller number of organizations.

In most cases, you can outsource portions of the analytical process. Let's break it down for clarity:

• Easy to outsource: You can outsource the following activities with the lowest risk: data acquisition, data integration, data profiling, data loading, and data visualization steps are the easiest to outsource and can lower the overall cost of operations.
• More difficult to outsource and success is difficult to achieve: Feature engineering can be executed by an outside vendor if the company you...

Elephants and squirrels

Executives are just like other people in many respects; in other respects, not so much, but we must remember that executives are people too.

One characteristic of people that inhabit the executive ranks that I find interesting is that they are typically split into two groups on the ability to retain and remember facts over time. Perhaps it is my selective memory at play here but it seems to me, from my decades of experience, that executives either are like elephants, in that they remember everything (they remember where the conversation was had, what was said, who was there, the weather outside, the stains on the carpet – all in great detail), or they are like squirrels in that they can't remember much at all. They say the same things repeatedly and repetitively. They ask people to do the same or similar projects within days or weeks of each request. They seem to be surprised when most of the people in the room understand immediately or seem...

Daily operations

Managing the daily operations of the analytics team can be done in a manner that increases your probability of success. In the next four subsections, we will examine how to set up the focus and cadence of the analytical team's daily work to ensure that they are engaged in the right type of work and are delivering in a manner that optimizes their productivity and the visibility of the work to the relevant executives, senior managers, and subject matter experts across the organization.

Quick wins

Everyone agrees that quick wins are good. Everyone wants to get off to a fast start and to deliver value and positive results as soon as possible, right? Not a trick question, the answer is yes. Yes, in all cases.

But you need to ensure that you and the executives you are conferring with are on the same page and have the same expectations. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to live in the UK early in my career. I lived in London and worked in the London...

Summary

This chapter has been about engaging with the broader organization in a constructive and productive manner with a focus on gaining attention, understanding, and support from the executive team.

The executive team is critical to the success of you and your team. The executive level in every organization is accountable and responsible for the overall strategic direction, operational health, and long-term viability of the organization. Working with the executive-level team is unique and requires that you adopt and exhibit a certain attitude, style, stance, tone, and tenor in your actions and in your written and verbal communications and presentations.

In outlining how you and your team can and should engage with the executive team, this chapter has provided a guide to productive engagement with executives as a group and as individuals. As with any skill, you will improve with time and practice. You will be more comfortable in this mode of operating the more you engage...

Chapter 5 footnotes

1. The House of Medici [English: /mɛdɪtʃi/ MED-i-chee or British English (UK): /məˈdiːtʃi/ mə-DEE-chee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English), Italian: [ˈmɛːditʃi] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Italian)] was an Italian banking family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_families) and political dynasty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasty#Political_families_in_Republics) that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosimo_de%27_Medici) in the Republic of Florence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Florence) during the first half of the 15th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici
2. Global AI Survey: AI proves its worth, but few scale impact, November 2019, McKinsey, The survey content and analysis were developed by Arif Cam, a consultant in McKinsey's Silicon Valley office...