You can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need

It has been really exciting for me to watch the blossoming of People Analytics over the past decade or so. More and more organizations and professionals are recognizing the huge impact that analytics can provide to help organizations operate more fairly and effectively and to help support employees. 

I had a wonderful conversation recently where someone talked about the big changes she’d noticed in our organization over the past few years. It made my heart really happy to hear others talk about the impact that an excellent People Analytics team can make on their organization and on the careers of the professionals within the team.

One of the big challenges for our field overall is shifting from a service provider role to more of a strategic partnership role. I realize that those are easy words to say, but pretty abstract, and also pretty hard to get right. I’ve had about a half a dozen conversations about that transition in the last week or so, so I thought it might be useful to share some of the thoughts more broadly.

The essence of this is really captured in the immortal words of Keith Richards: “You can’t always get what you want...but you get what you need.” In that spirit, here are a few key things to keep in mind as you engage with your clients and partners. Please add your insights, observations, best discovery questions and stakeholder jedi mind tricks in the comments!

 A question or request is the start of a conversation. Early in my career, I thought my job was to answer questions. Specifically, I thought success was answering exactly what I was asked. At first, I thought follow up questions were success - “Hey! They are interested! They know who I am and I’m valuable to them!” Later, I came to view follow up questions as failure - “Crud, I haven’t actually helped them make this important decision they are struggling with.” Over time, I learned that a question or request is often just someone’s poking around a problem. I also learned that you don’t actually have to answer every question - part of our job is making sure that we are focused on those questions that will drive decisions and impact and it can be as important to say no as to say yes. A lot of questions are just pondering out loud rather than a real request!

 I also did a lot of Organization Development work early in my career, and spent a lot of time getting good at discovery - starting with framing the problem and then getting good at finding the actual root cause so we could make lasting change rather than doing the sort of “throw spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks” exercises I’d been doing up till then. Some of the best discovery questions are really simple:

1. What’s the decision you are trying to make?
2. What have you tried in the past?
3. What are you worried about?
4. What would the ideal state look like?

Often, the initial question or request is a gateway to a much more interesting conversation. Clients and partners are generally trying to get at something that’s not quite perfectly defined, and they typically aren’t experts in the firm’s HR data or in the research and analytical methods that People Analytics professionals can use to get to answers. I once had a head of HR ask me how many employees had a particular type of visa - he wasn’t really interested in visas in and of themselves, but was trying to get at a specific talent question and together we figured out a better way to gauge the strategic risk and opportunity he was trying to frame. Analysts and researchers often bemoan the “bring me a rock” problem - you keep bringing answers to their direct questions, and the client keeps asking for slightly different takes. If you’ve spent hours extracting and cleaning data to answer question 1, and now have to repeat that whole exercise to answer question 1a, that gets frustrating for everyone pretty quickly and is a poor use of time. Investing the extra the time up front to understand the business problem and then bring your own data, analysis and strategic acumen to the problem can, ironically, make the whole process much shorter. Some clients will get testy (“why can’t you just do what I asked??”), so sometimes, especially early in a relationship, it might still be useful to answer that original question, but that should be the start of the story, not the end of it.

 Aspire to add unique value.  All of us in People Analytics should aspire to add unique value to our engagements. Typically, adding the most value requires us to actively partner with our stakeholders and others across the analytics team, as well as others in the relevant people data ecosystem such as your partners in IT or key vendors. Sometimes success is about opening the door when opportunity knocks; in other situations, it’s more about figuring out where there should be a door and kicking a hole in the wall!

One of my favorite stories about adding that unique value was several years ago. We were asked a question about attrition for a particular talent segment that was not traditionally part of our business, but was gaining importance. Since it was new, we didn’t even have job codes for that talent segment, so we had to hack together something based on project assignments and so forth - and we were able to answer the question. But we didn’t stop there - we analyzed where these critical and scarce folks were going when they left us, what strategic risks those other organizations posed to us (were they competitors or customers of ours?), the extent to which top performers from that cohort were leaving and where those top performers were going, and how some of our own strategies - like how we were paying these talents vs. how the rest of the market was - were getting in our way. In the end, we created new job codes to let us track and appropriately compensate these folks, plus a variety of other changes that we would not have thought to make from an attrition rate alone. The point is that our data savvy, market insight, and business acumen helped support several strategic decisions at a critical time - and all of that impact stemmed from taking a theoretically straightforward request and considering what else would be necessary to know if we wanted to make decisions and have impact.

 Of course, you won’t always have time to add a bunch of extra analyses or insights or automation or whatever would elevate the question - but People Analytics professionals have frequent opportunities to bring our expertise to bear in a way that’s much larger than the asks originally presented to us, and often once the data are cleaned, the time required to do the incremental analysis isn’t that much. 

It’s also important to recognize that not every request needs to be answered. Peter Block, in his classic book Flawless Consulting also highlights this in his chapter on resistance - often requests for more data are resistance in disguise - people keep asking questions hoping for a different answer (Mom said no, so I’ll go ask Dad!), or to at least delay the inevitable. Finding the sweet spot between being a helpful partner and being a guardian of your time and an effective steward of resources is hard and the balance can be different depending on the complexity and strategic impact of the topic, nature of the relationship and sophistication of the client… But finding and maintaining that balance is a critical part of making sure we are delivering on unique value as an analytics team and doing so sustainably for our team.

 Don’t lose track of why you’re here. An overdone strength can become a weakness. That’s true here as well. I’ve seen people fail when they fell too much in love with their idea and lost the thread of value to the client or partner - where they were looking to the client or partner to serve them instead of the other way around. Sometimes people get excited looking for that “ta-da!” mike-drop moment… and instead find themselves staring at a client who says, “That doesn’t help me at all.” Maybe the analyst or researcher is even right - maybe it IS a terrific idea or insight - but if you haven’t brought the client or partner along, if you haven’t clearly painted a real value to them, or better yet created a spirit of co-discovery with them… Then it’s not going to be used and it’s just a clever party game instead of delivering impact.

When People Analytics does this really well - when we are really good about bringing our stakeholders and clients along – we tend to say things in meetings like:

• “I want to walk you through how I’m thinking about this problem to see if it resonates””
• “What will your stakeholders and leaders be most interested in? What parts of this story will we really need to emphasize for them?”
• “What else do you need to know to make XYZ decision?”
• “What do you make of these results?”

 You won’t always win.  And you’re not supposed to. The very highest batting average in the Baseball Hall of Fame is .366 (yes, I did have to look that up). But the process of research is necessarily one of testing, and curiosity, and sometimes having an hypothesis disproven is really important too - it helps you avoid a mistake! Nelson Mandela once said, “I never lose. I either win or I learn.”  

 Part of the exercise is also teaching our clients and partners how to engage with us as a relatively newer field (yes, I know I/O psychology has been around for a centure, but People Analytics teams in their current form are only about a decade old), and teaching us what works best with them. Presenting prototypes and alternatives isn’t wasted effort, it’s part of a thorough and effective process. Sometimes the most efficient way to figure out what you need is to work around some prototypes and see which work. Rejected ideas are part of a learning process. 

 The next decade will be a critically important one for the field of People Analytics as we better define our space and our operating models as a profession. Upleveling as a field into strategic partners and trusted advisors is a critical step in that journey!